There appeared to be two ways of getting Mr. Pulitzer interested in a novel or play.  One, and this, I believe, was the most successful, was to draw a striking picture of the scene where the climax is reached—­the wife crouching in the corner, the husband revolver in hand, the Tertium Quid calmly offering to read the documents which prove that he and not the gentleman with the revolver is really the husband of the lady—­and then to go back to the beginning and explain how it all came about.

The other method was to set forth the appearance and disposition of each of the characters in the story, so that they assumed reality in Mr. Pulitzer’s mind, then to condense the narrative up to about page two hundred and sixty, and then begin to read from the book.  If in the course of the next three minutes you were not asked in a tone of utter weariness, “My God!  Is there much more of this?” there was a reasonable chance that you might be allowed to read from the print a fifth or possibly a fourth of what you had not summarized.

Dinner on the yacht passed in much the same way as lunch, except that serious subjects and especially politics were taboo.

The meal hours were really the most trying experiences of the day.  Each of us went to the table with several topics of conversation carefully prepared, with our pockets full of newspaper cuttings, notes and even small reference books for dates and biographies.

But there was seldom any conversation in the proper sense; that is to say, we were hardly ever able to start a subject going and pass it from one to the other with a running comment or amplification, partly because any expression of opinion, except when he, J. P., asked for it, usually bored him to extinction, and partly because the first statement of any striking fact generally inspired Mr. Pulitzer to undertake a searching cross-examination of the speaker into every detail of the matter brought forward, and in regard to every ramification of the subject.

I may relate an amusing instance of this:  A gentleman who had been on the staff, but had been absent through illness, joined us at Mentone for a cruise in the Eastern Mediterranean.  At dinner the first night out he incautiously mentioned that during the two months of his convalescence he had taken the opportunity of reading the whole of Shakespeare’s plays.

Too late he realized his mistake.  Mr. Pulitzer took the matter up, and for the next hour and a half we listened to the unfortunate ex-invalid while he gave a list of the principal characters in each of the historical plays, in each of the tragedies, and in each of the comedies, followed by an outline of each plot, a description of a scene here and there, and an occasional quotation from the text.

At the end of this heroic exploit, which was helped out now and then by a note from one of the rest of us, scribbled hastily on a card and handed silently to the victim, Mr. Pulitzer merely said, “Well, go on, go on, didn’t you read the sonnets?” But this was too much for our gravity, and in a ripple of laughter the sitting was brought to a close.