“Now we’ll talk a moment,” Martin said.  “You can’t get fresh with me.  I want that laundry business finished first of all.  Then you can come back and we’ll talk for old sake’s sake.  I told you I was busy.  Look at that.”

A servant had just come in with the morning mail, a great mass of letters and magazines.

“How can I wade through that and talk with you?  You go and fix up that laundry, and then we’ll get together.”

“All right,” Joe admitted reluctantly.  “I thought you was turnin’ me down, but I guess I was mistaken.  But you can’t lick me, Mart, in a stand-up fight.  I’ve got the reach on you.”

“We’ll put on the gloves sometime and see,” Martin said with a smile.

“Sure; as soon as I get that laundry going.”  Joe extended his arm.  “You see that reach?  It’ll make you go a few.”

Martin heaved a sigh of relief when the door closed behind the laundryman.  He was becoming anti-social.  Daily he found it a severer strain to be decent with people.  Their presence perturbed him, and the effort of conversation irritated him.  They made him restless, and no sooner was he in contact with them than he was casting about for excuses to get rid of them.

He did not proceed to attack his mail, and for a half hour he lolled in his chair, doing nothing, while no more than vague, half-formed thoughts occasionally filtered through his intelligence, or rather, at wide intervals, themselves constituted the flickering of his intelligence.

He roused himself and began glancing through his mail.  There were a dozen requests for autographs—­he knew them at sight; there were professional begging letters; and there were letters from cranks, ranging from the man with a working model of perpetual motion, and the man who demonstrated that the surface of the earth was the inside of a hollow sphere, to the man seeking financial aid to purchase the Peninsula of Lower California for the purpose of communist colonization.  There were letters from women seeking to know him, and over one such he smiled, for enclosed was her receipt for pew-rent, sent as evidence of her good faith and as proof of her respectability.

Editors and publishers contributed to the daily heap of letters, the former on their knees for his manuscripts, the latter on their knees for his books—­his poor disdained manuscripts that had kept all he possessed in pawn for so many dreary months in order to find them in postage.  There were unexpected checks for English serial rights and for advance payments on foreign translations.  His English agent announced the sale of German translation rights in three of his books, and informed him that Swedish editions, from which he could expect nothing because Sweden was not a party to the Berne Convention, were already on the market.  Then there was a nominal request for his permission for a Russian translation, that country being likewise outside the Berne Convention.