Shelley made a semi-ladylike snort as Jane sat down.

"You ate before we came, didn't you?" Jane asked.

"Just a soda and a few crackers," Shelley responded. "Oh, no."

"What's the 'oh, no' about?"

"Wait till you read through this. Didn't you bring your own copy along?"

"I forgot," Jane admitted as she pushed a suspicious-looking bean to the side of her plate. It looked as if it might have already been chewed. "Is the contract awful?"

"It's probably fixable, and if it isn't…"

Shelley put the papers down and gazed at Jane for the rest of the sentence.

"… we don't really care if we take the job or not. Right?"

"Right."

"So tell me the worst," Jane went on.

"The payment, of course. She's offering us three percent over our cost. That's ridiculous."

"It might not be in this particular business."

"Jane, you've told me before that writers pay agents ten to fifteen percent. And after we took

that botany class I looked up a bunch of stuff on the Internet. Do you know that plant breeders who want someone to promote and sell their flowers and vegetables often pay as much as forty percent the first year? So three percent is peanuts. A downright insult."

"So what do we ask for?"

"Why not twenty-five percent?" Shelley said with a grin. "And be willing to come down to— oh, maybe twenty. Maybe even seventeen and a half?"

"What's this stuff going to cost?" Jane asked.

"Thousands and thousands of dollars. Have you priced wallpaper recently?"

"To my sorrow, yes. My disastrous front hall. Remember? And it was so dark when it went up on the wall that I had to buy a very expensive light fixture that would take a hundred-and-fifty-watt bulb without burning down the house."