Having nothing else to do, Mibs spent long hours on the heavily upholstered couch in the outer office. He studied the ads in the Pollyglow campaign, examining each one over and over again. He scribbled pages of comments in a little black notebook. He came to be accepted and ignored as so much reception-room furniture.

But Pollyglow gave him full attention. Arriving one day to discuss a new campaign with his account executive—a campaign to stress the very special qualities of the Pollyglow Codpiece, for which, under no circumstances, should a substitute ever be accepted—he began a conversation with the strange, ugly, earnest young man. “You can tell that account executive to go to hell,” Pollyglow told the receptionist as they went off to a restaurant. “I’ve found what I’ve been looking for.”

The sword was a good idea, he felt, a damn good idea. Put it in the ad. But he was much more interested in certain of the thoughts developed at such elaborate length in Mibs’s little black notebook.

If one phrase about a masculinist club had made the ad so effective, Mibs asked, why not exploit that phrase? A great and crying need had evidently been touched. “It’s like this. When the old-time saloon disappeared, men had no place to get away from women but the barber shop. Now, with the goddamn Interchangeable Haircut, even that out’s been taken away. All a guy’s got left is the men’s room, and they’re working on that, I’ll bet they’re working on that!”

Pollyglow sipped at his glass of hot milk and nodded. “You think a masculinist club would fill a gap in their lives? An element of exclusiveness, say, like the English private club for gentlemen?”

“Hell, no! They want something exclusive, all right—something that will exclude women—but not like a private club one damn bit. Everything these days is telling them that they’re nobody special, they’re just people. There are men people and women people—and what’s the difference anyway? They want something that does what the codpiece does, that tells them they’re not people, they’re men! Straight down-the-line, two-fisted, let’s-stand-up-and-be-counted men! A place where they can get away from the crap that’s being thrown at them all the time: the women-maybe-are-the-superior-sex crap, the women-outlive-them-and-outown-them crap, the a-real-man-has-no-need-to-act-masculine crap—all that crap.”