If I were hypersensitive to the silly things people say, I should have given up selling long before. I pretended not to hear him. We walked into a drugstore and he dropped a nickel into a payphone, hunching the receiver between ear and shoulder. "Fifty your last word?" he asked out of the corner of his mouth. I nodded. "Hello? _'Gencer?_ Gootes. Hya, beautiful? Syphilis all cleared up? Now ... now, baby ... well, if youre going to be formal--gimme W R." He turned to me and leered while he waited. "... Chief? Gootes. Got the Dinkman story. You know--Freak Growth Swallows Hollywood Mansion. Yeah. Yeah. I know. But, Chief--this was what I wanted you for--on the followup; I have the fellow who put the stuff on the grass. Yeah. Sure I did. Yeah. And the sonofabitch wants to hold us up for another thirty. Or else he won't sing. Yeah. Yeah. I know. But I can't, Chief. I havent got a lead. I don't know, Chief, not much of a one, I guess. Wait a minute." He turned to me. "Listen, little man: Mr Le ffacase"--he pronounced it l'fassassy and he pronounced it with awe. I too was properly solemn, for I hadnt realized before to whom he referred when he talked so lightly of "W R." I knew--as what newspaper reader didnt--of William Rufus Le ffacase, "The Last of the Great Editors," but I hadnt connected him with the _Daily Intelligencer_-- "--Mr Le ffacase will shoot you another sawbuck and no more. What's the deal?" Now, the famous editor's reputation was such that you didnt tell him to go to the devil, even through the medium of an agent; it would have been like writing your name on the Lincoln Memorial. It was reluctantly therefore that I shook my head. "I'm sorry, Mr Gootes," I apologized, "I'd certainly like to oblige--" He cut me off with a waving hand and turned cheerfully back to the telephone. "No soap, Chief. O K. O K. All right--put the rewrite man on." And for the next ten minutes he went over the events at the Dinkmans', carefully spelling out all names including the napoleonic firechief's. I began to suspect Gootes wasnt so inefficient a reporter as he appeared. The story given in, he hung up and turned to me. "Well, so long, little man--been nice knowing you." "But--what about meeting the discoverer of the Metamorphizer?" "Oh, that. Well, W R thinks we don't need him anymore. Not enough in that angle." I suspected he was bluffing; still it was possible he wasnt. In such a delicate situation there was nothing I could do but bluff in turn. If you are a good salesman, I always say, you must have psychology at your fingertips. "Very well, Mr Gootes; perhaps I shall see you again sometime." I was immediately confronted by a Frenchman, affable, volatile, affectionate. "Ah cher ami, do not leave me with the abruptness. You desolate mon coeur. Alors--return to me the twenty dollars." "But, Mr Gootes--"