The more I worked my follow-up system of bonbons and flowers, the less chance I seemed to have with Kate; and the reason was that she was a poetry fiend. You know the sort of girl. First thing she does when she meets you is to smile and say: “So glad to meet you. Who's your favorite poet?”
She pretty nearly stumped me when she got that off on me. I don't know a poem from a hymn-tune. I'm not a literary character. If you hand me anything with all the lines jagged on one end and headed with capital letters on the other end, I'll take it for as good as anything in the verse line that Longfellow ever wrote. So when she asked me the countersign, “Who's your favorite poet?” I gasped, and then, by a lucky chance, I got my senses back in time to say “Biggs” before she dropped me.
When I said Biggs, she looked dazed. I had run in a poet she had never heard of, and she thought I was the real thing in poetry lore. I never told her that Biggs was the young man we had at the office doing poems about the Codliver Capsules, but I couldn't live up to my start; and, whenever she started on the poetry topic, I side-stepped to advertising talk. I was at home there, but you can't get in as much soulful gaze when you are talking about how good the ads. in the “Home Weekly” are as when you are reciting sonnets; so the poet walked away from me. 'I got Kate to the point where, when I handed her a new magazine, she would look through the advertising pages first; but she did not seem to enthuse over the Codliver Capsule pages any more than over the Ivory Soap pages, and I knew her heart was not mine.
When I began to get thin, Perkins noticed it,--he always noticed everything,--and I laid the whole case before him. He smiled disdainfully. He laid his hand on my arm and spoke.
“Why mourn?” he asked. “Why mope? Why fear a poet? Fight fire with fire; fight poetry with poetry! Why knuckle down to a little amateur poet when Perkins & Co. have a professional poet working six days a week? Use Biggs.”
He said “Use Biggs” just as he would have said “Use Codliver Capsules.” It was Perkins's way to go right to the heart of things without wasting words. He talked in telegrams. He talked in caps, double leaded. I grasped his hand, for I saw his meaning. I was saved--or at least Kate was nailed. The expression is Perkins's.