“I don’t suppose there’s a chance of its appealing to you?” he asked, looking me full in the face; and went on before I could open my mouth to answer: “It would net you three thousand, and as you don’t know me I’m perfectly willing to pay for each quarter of the work in advance.” By this time I’d recovered speech, and after expressing appreciation of his liberal offer, told him it would be impossible for me to accept as I had a regular staff job and didn’t want to lose it. “Why lose it?” he asked, seating himself again as he spoke. “Your work with me would scarcely take ten days, for you’d have the idea in your notebooks as fast as I could talk it off. You can take your time writing it out—not the least hurry about that. And if your managing editor doesn’t want to give you the time off, I can follow you round and manage it evenings or whenever you had an hour or so to spare.” I was in a most peculiar mental condition, with this glittering chance to reach up and pull down three thousand dollars, and with Mr. Barnes’s impelling personality seeming almost to force me into the arrangement without any consideration whatever. I tried to pull myself together and shake off something that seemed like a “spell,” and in doing so caught sight of Dudley, whose chair was near but slightly back of mine. All through this talk about my doing the work I’d felt a consciousness of his sitting there quietly smoking, and wasn’t surprised, as I glanced about, to hear him say: “Why rush this?” Mr. Barnes instantly disclaimed any idea of wishing to do so, explaining that as I’d appeared to show some slight interest in the matter, he’d been tremendously anxious to get before me whatever advantages it might possess. “Let’s have a look at the disadvantages,” countered Dudley. “Suppose Mr. McClintock, on taking up the work (if he does that) finds, for one reason or another, that he’d rather not go on with it.” “He’ll be at perfect liberty to discontinue,” was Barnes’s quick rejoinder. “I’ll say,” he added, “that at any time before the first quarter of the work is finished he may abandon it without even troubling to give a reason.” Shortly after this we adjourned the conference to Dudley’s apartment—not far distant; and it was finally left that I’d have a night to think it over and that Barnes was to meet us at the Subtreasury the next day at four in the afternoon. * * * * * “Think he’s straight?” I asked Duds, after we’d heard the elevator door clang to with Barnes going down in the car. “Put a question mark to that,” grunted Dudley as he lit his pipe. “But I’ll say this,” he added a minute later, “if he isn’t, there’s nothing he’d stop at.” He reflected awhile and then went on: “Uncommon specimen I must say.... Strange sort of influence, too.... If he’d had you there alone you’d be writing his book for him now.”