"A well-nurtured body is an incentive to poetic thought," he insisted. "There is a richness of imagery which comes with after-dinner composing; a sort of mental starvation, an anæmic scantiness of similes, which follows the fruit luncheon and cold water of necessity. Adventurers, gentlemen, are you? That is to say you are people with wits. Tell me, then--bring me an idea from the practical world--how shall I make ten thousand people buy a copy of my poems?" "Come, that's an interesting problem," Harvey Grimm declared. "Of course, if one were to answer you in a single word, that one would be advertisement." "If I could write my name across the heavens, or flash it from a million lights through the clouds," the young man remarked, "I would do so, but these things call for either miraculous powers or money. I have neither." "Your case," Harvey Grimm promised, "shall have our attention, my friend's and mine. In the meantime, the moment seems opportune, pending the arrival of our chops, for a glance at your work. Permit me." The poetaster crossed his legs, leaned back in his chair, thrust an eyeglass into his eye, and turned over the pages of the paper volume which he had been carrying. Aaron Rodd followed his example. The poet, entirely unembarrassed, eyed hungrily each covered dish which passed. At the arrival of the meal, Harvey Grimm solemnly pocketed his book and replaced his eyeglass. Aaron Rodd went on reading for a moment. Then he glanced surreptitiously at their guest and laid his volume face downwards upon the table. "Your poems, I perceive," Harvey Grimm observed, as he helped himself to a potato, "are not written for the man in the street." "They are written," the poet declared, falling hungrily upon his chop, "for any one who will pay eightpence for them." Conversation faded away. It was not until the service of coffee and cigars that anything more than disjointed words were spoken. The young man's face was still colourless but his eyes were less hard. He took out his pencil and toyed for a moment with the menu. "Some little trifle," he suggested, "commemorative of the occasion?" "I would rather," Harvey Grimm confessed, "think out some scheme for advertising your work. There's a little thing here about a lame 'busman----" "Any scheme you suggest," the young man assented dreamily. "I frankly admit that the dispersal of my productions is a matter in which I have failed. The appreciative few may have purchased but the man of the day passes on, ignorant of the great need he really has of poetry. Ten thousand copies of my poems, sold in London, would produce at once a more gracious spirit. You would observe a difference in the deportment, the speech, the greater altruism of the multitude. How shall I force my works into their hands and their eightpences into my pocket?" "Fourpence only," Aaron Rodd reminded him. "The publishers get half."