"You don't understand," he explained. "That is to be the headline of the discussion. At least, that was what I'd thought myself. But some of the other fellows have suggested, 'Are we _more_ nervous?' or 'Where are our National Nerves?' or 'National Neurosis; are we suffering from it?'" I nodded. "Yours is the shortest," I said. "Just so," he replied, "and, I think, the most arresting." "And who's going to write the first letter?" I asked. "Well," he stammered, "I rather expect it will be me." "And you'll call yourself 'A London Physician,' I suppose?" "Something like that," he confessed. "You see, a newspaper discussion like this is all right when once it's started--that is, if it's a live one, as Mr. Pole calls it. The other letters simply pour in." "From Balham and Holloway and Tottenham and Ilford----" "Oh yes," he smiled, "and from Kensington and Mayfair as well." "You think that a good many of your readers will like to tell the public all about their nerves?" "Thousands of 'em," he said confidently. "And you'll select a certain number of letters from each district, and fill up a couple of your daily columns for nothing?" "That's the idea. And we shall give a lot of pleasure too." "And the writers and the writers' friends will rush to buy copies, I suppose, and cut out their letters, and stick them in albums." He laughed. "I shouldn't wonder," he said. "Making personal friends for the paper--that's what Mr. Pole calls it. He says that nothing pays better." "And presently, perhaps, you'll collect all the letters, and put them in a little booklet of which you'll sell large numbers for sixpence in a comfortable dressing-gown of advertisements." "Possibly," he said, "if it goes really well." I looked at him for a moment, upon the threshold of his life-work. He was a nice boy, though the shades of Franciscan House were fast closing about him. "D'you think it's worth it?" I asked him. "Why rather," he said. "Pays like anything." "Forty per cent, perhaps?" "Very likely." "The Franciscan heaven," I admitted, and he winced a little. By which I knew, of course, that he was as yet no true Franciscan--who never winces, and whose conscience, to use a borrowed phrase, is merely his accomplice. "Do you object to forty per cent?" he asked. "_Per se?_" I answered, "not at all." "But to the correspondence perhaps?" "I'm not enamoured of the idea," I confessed. "Are you?" He reached for the ash-tray, and knocked out his pipe. "We must give 'em what they want, you know," he said. I bowed. "The Franciscan creed," I told him. "But perhaps they don't know yet that they do want it." "Then we must show 'em," he replied. "The Franciscan gospel," I sighed, for, as I have said, he was a nice boy, still trailing a wisp or two of glory. "And besides," he went on, "people always like to talk about their weak nerves, don't they?" He was getting in under my guard now to bleed me of copy, so I stepped aside.