_Night letter:_ Two factions in company I can buy from enemies
president bare majority stock at average seventy-six but hundred of these
shares held at ninety-two I could probably get hundred quietly from
friends president about seventy-seven but president might detect move and
buy majority stock himself wire instructions. (Fifty words.)
_Telegram_: Wire whether buy safe or risk control saving fifteen
hundred. (Ten words.)
A final device for escaping wordiness you will have discovered for
yourself while composing telegrams and telegraphic night letters. It is to
pass over details not vital to your purpose. Of course you must have due
regard for circumstances; details needed for one purpose may be
superfluous for another. But all of us are familiar with the person who
loses her ideas in a rigmarole of prosaic and irrelevant facts. Such a
person is Shakespeare's scatter-brained Dame Quickly. On one occasion this
voluble woman is shrilly reproaching Sir John Falstaff for his
indebtedness to her. "What is the gross sum that I owe thee?" he inquires.
She might answer simply: "If thou wert an honest man, thyself and the
money too. Thou didst promise to marry me.
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