“Well, very nice,” he said. “I won’t take time to read this other one now, but this first one’s very nice. ’Course, naturally, as you said, this is a very different kind of material you got here, so it’s a little hard for me to—you know—” and he dismissed the rest of this difficult sentence with a wave of the hand. “I’ll tell you what, though, Bob. Instead of just reading here, let me ask you a couple of questions about writing. For example.” He closed his eyes and delicately touched their lids with his fingers, thinking, or more likely pretending to think, in order to give added weight to his next words. “For example, let me ask you this. Supposing somebody writes you a letter and says, ‘Bob, I didn’t have time to write you a short letter today, so I had to write you a long one instead.’ Would you know what they meant by that?”

Don’t worry, I played this part of the evening pretty cool. I wasn’t going to let twenty-five bucks get away from me without some kind of struggle; and my answer, whatever sober-sided nonsense it was, could have left no doubt in his mind that this particular writing candidate knew something of the difficulty and the value of compression in prose. He seemed gratified by it, anyway.