“To hell with that stuff. You just root around and show how the old writers were really Cavites at heart and then you come to him and put down what he says. Why we’ll be half-there even before he’s on TV!” Paul lapsed for a moment into a reverie of promotion. I had another drink and felt quite good myself although I had serious doubts about my competence to compose philosophy in the popular key. But Paul’s faith was infectious and I felt that, all in all, with a bit of judicious hedging and recourse to various explicit summaries and definitions, I might put together a respectable ancestry for Cave whose message, essentially, ignored _all_ philosophy, empiric and orphic, moving with hypnotic effectiveness to the main proposition: death and man’s acceptance of it. The problems of life were always quite secondary to Cave, if not to the rest of us. “When will you want this piece done?” “The sooner the better. Here,” he scribbled an address on a pad of paper. “This is Cave’s address. He’s on a farm outside Spokane. It belongs to one of his undertaker friends.” “Iris is with him?” “Yes. Now you ...” “I wonder if that’s wise, Iris seeing so much of him. You know he’s going to have a good many enemies before very long and they’ll dig around for any scandal they can find.” “Oh, it’s perfectly innocent, I’m sure. Even if it isn’t, I can’t see how it can do much harm.” “For a public relations man you don’t seem to grasp the possibilities for bad publicity in this situation.” “All pub ...” “Is good. But Cave, it appears is a genuine ascetic.” And the word “genuine” as I spoke it was like a knife-blade in my heart. “And, since he is, you have a tremendous advantage in building him up. There’s no use in allowing him, quite innocently, to appear to philander.” Paul looked at me curiously. “You wouldn’t by chance be interested in Iris yourself?” And of course that was it. I had become attached to Iris in precisely the same sort of way a complete man might have been but of course for me there was no hope, nothing. The enormity of that nothing shook me, despite the alcohol we had drunk. I was sufficiently collected, though, not to make the mistake of vehemence. “I like her very much but I’m more attached to the idea of Cave than I am to her. I don’t want to see the business get out of hand. That’s all. I’m surprised you, of all people involved, aren’t more concerned.” “You may have a point. I suppose I’ve got to adjust my views to this thing ... it’s different from my usual work building up crooners and movie stars. In that line the romance angle is swell, just as long as there’re no bigamies or abortions involved. I see your point, though. With Cave we have to think in sort of Legion of Decency terms. No rough stuff. No nightclub pictures or posing with blondes. You’re absolutely right. Put that in your piece: doesn’t drink, doesn’t go out with dames....”