"Yes—I want your decision."

"I have not changed."

"You still love that—that newspaper fellow?"

"No, I don't mean that." Marian felt her irritation against Danvers suddenly vanish and in its place a Sense of relief and of calmness. "I mean toward you. It won't do, Teddy. We shall get on well as friends. But I can't think of you in—in that way."

Mrs. Fortescue had so swollen his vanity that he was astounded at Marian's decision. He rapidly went over in his mind all the advantages he offered as a husband, and then looked at her as if he thought her beside herself.

"Look here, Marian," he protested. "You can't mean it. Why, it's all settled that we are to marry. It would be madness for you to break it off. I can give you everything—everything. And he can't give you anything." Then with fatal tactlessness: "He won't even give you the little that he can, according to your own story."

"Yes, it's madness, isn't it, Teddy, to refuse you—fascinating you, who can give everything. But that's just it. You have too much. You overwhelm me. I should feel like a cheat, taking so much and giving so little."

"Don't," he begged, his self-complacence and superiority all gone. "Don't mind my blundering, please, dear. I want you. I can't say it. I haven't any gift of words. But you've known me all my life and you know that I love you. I've set my heart on it, Mary Ann,"—it was the name he used to tease her with when they were children playing together—"You won't go back on me now, will you?"

"I wish I could do as you wish, Teddy." Marian was forgetful of everything but the unhappiness she was causing this friend of so many, many years and of so many, many memories. "But I can't—I can't."

"Marry me, dear, anyhow. You will care afterward." Marian was silent and Danvers hoped. "You know all about me. I'll not give you any surprises. I shan't bother you. And I'll make you happy."

"No," she said firmly. "You mustn't ask it. I'll tell you why. I have thought of marrying you regardless of this. Only last night I thought of it—finally, went over the whole thing. Listen, Teddy—if I were married to you—and if he should come—and he would come sooner or later—if he should come and say 'Come with me,'—I'd go—yes, I'm sure I'd go. I can't explain why. But I know that nothing would stand in the way—nothing."

"You ought to be ashamed of yourself." Marian shrank from him. She was horrified by the malignant fury that sparkled in his eyes and raged in his voice. "That damned scoundrel is worthy of you and you of him. But I'll get you yet. I never was crossed in anything in my life and I'll not be beaten here."

"And I thought you were my friend!" Marian was looking at him, pale, her eyes wide with amazement. "Is it really you?"

He laughed insolently. "Yes—you'll see. And he'll see. I'll crush him as if he were an egg shell. And as for you—you perjurer—you liar!"

He looked at her with coarse contempt, rose and stalked away. Marian sat rigid. She was conscious of the insult. But even that humiliation was not so strong in her mind as the astounding revelation of Danvers. She remembered that even as his eyes blazed hatred at her, he looked at her, at her neck, her bare arms, with the baffled desire of brute passion. She did not fully understand the look, but she felt that it was a degradation far greater than his insulting words.

She slipped, almost skulked to her room, her eyes down, her face in a burning flush, her scarf drawn tightly about her neck. As her door closed behind her, she fell upon her bed and began to sob hysterically. She started up with a scream to find her cousin standing beside her.

"I'm so sorry. Forgive me." Mrs. Carnarvon's voice had lost its wonted levity. "I saw that you were in trouble and followed. I knocked and I thought I heard you answer. What is it, Marie? May I ask? Can I do anything?"

Marian drew her down to the bed and buried her face in her lap. "Oh, I feel so unclean," she said. "It was—Teddy. Would you believe it, Jessie, Teddy! I looked on him as a brother. And he showed me that he was not my friend—that he didn't even love me—that he—oh, I shall never forget the look in his eyes. He made me feel like a—like a thing."

Mrs. Carnarvon smothered a smile. "Of course Teddy's a brute," she said. "I thought you knew. He's a domesticated brute, like most of the men and some of the women. You'll have to get used to that."

By refusing to fall in with her mood, Mrs. Carnarvon had gone far toward curing it. Marian stopped sobbing and presently said:

"Oh, I know all that. But I didn't expect it from Teddy—and toward me. And—" she shuddered—"I was thinking, actually thinking of marrying him. I wish never to see him again. And he pretended to be my friend!"

"And he was, no doubt, until he got you on the brain in another way, in the way he calls love. There isn't any love that has friendship in it."

"We must go away at once."

"Unless Teddy saves us the trouble by going first, as I suspect he will."

"Jessie, he hates me and—and—Mr. Howard."

"So you talked to him about Howard again, did you?" Mrs. Carnarvon was indignant. "You are old enough to know better, Marian. You carry frankness entirely too far. There is such a thing as truth running amuck."

"He said he would crush Howard. And I believe he really meant it."

"Teddy is a man who believes in revenges—or thinks he does. His father taught him to keep accounts in grievances, and no doubt he has opened an account with Howard. But don't be disturbed about it. His father would have insisted on balancing the account. Teddy will just keep on hating, but won't do anything. He's not underhanded."

"He's everything that is vile and low."

"You're quite mistaken, my dear. He's what they call a manly fellow—a little too masculine perhaps, but——"

A knock interrupted and Mrs. Carnarvon, answering it, took from the bell-boy a note for Marian who read it, then handed it to her. Mrs. Carnarvon read: "I apologise for the way I said what I did this evening, not for what I said. Because you had forgotten yourself, had played the traitor and the cheat was, perhaps, no excuse for my rudeness. You have fallen under an evil influence. I hope no harm will come to you, for I can't get over my feeling for you. But I have done my best and have not been able to save you. I am going away early in the morning.

"E. D."

"Melodramatic, isn't it?" laughed Mrs. Carnarvon. "So he's off. How furious Martha Fortescue and Ellen will be. But they'll go in pursuit, and they'll get him. A man is never so susceptible as when he's broken-hearted. Well, I must go. Good-night, dear. Don't mope and whine. Take your punishment sensibly. You've learned something—if it's only not to tell one man how much you love another."

"I think I'll go abroad with Aunt Retta next month."

"A good idea—you'll forget both these men. Good-night."

"Good-night," answered Marian dolefully, expecting to resume her thoughts of Danvers. But, instead, he straightway disappeared from her mind and she could think only of Howard. She was free now. The one barrier between him and her of which she had been really conscious was gone. And her heart began to ache with longing for him. Why had he not written? What was he doing? Did he really love her or was his passion for her only a flash of a strong and swift imagination?

No, he loved her—she could not doubt that. But she could not understand his conduct. She felt that she ought to be very unhappy, yet she was not. The longer she thought of him and the more she weighed his words and looks, the stronger became her trust in him. "He loves me," she said. "He will come when he can. It may be even harder for him than for me."

And so, explanation failing—for she rejected every explanation that reflected upon him—she hid and excused him behind that familiar refuge of the doubting, mystery.



XIV.

THE NEWS-RECORD GETS A NEW EDITOR.

A few minutes after leaving Marian that last night at Mrs. Carnarvon's, Howard was deep in a mood of self-contempt. He felt that he had faced the crisis like a coward. He despised the weakness which enfeebled him for effort to win her and at the same time made it impossible for him to thrust her from his mind.

In the working hours his will conquered with the aid of fixed habit and he was able to concentrate upon his editorials. But in his rooms, and especially after the lights were out, his imagination became master, deprived him of sleep and occasionally lifted him to a height of hope in order that it might dash him down the more cruelly upon the rocks of fact.

At last he was forced to face the situation—in his own evasive fashion. It was impossible to go back. That loneliness which often threatened him after Alice's death had become the permanent condition of his life. "I will work for her," he said. "Until I have made a place for her I dare not claim her. So much I will concede to my weakness. But when I have won a position which reasonably assures the future, I shall claim her—no matter what has happened in the meanwhile."

He would have smiled at this wild resolution had he been in a less distracted state of mind or had he been dealing with any other than a matter of love. But in the circumstances it gave him heart and set him to work with an energy and effectiveness which still further increased Mr. Malcolm's esteem for him.

"Will you dine with me at the Union Club on Wednesday?" Mr. Malcolm asked one morning in mid-February. "Mr. Coulter and Mr. Stokely are coming. I want you to know them better."

Howard accepted and wondered that he took so little interest. For Stokely and Coulter were the principal stockholders of the News-Record, and with Malcolm formed the triumvirate which directed it in all its departments. Mr. Malcolm held only a few shares of stock, but received what was in the newspaper-world an immense salary—thirty thousand a year. He was at once an able editor and an able diplomatist. He knew how to make the plans of his two associates conform to conditions of news and policy—when to let them use the paper, or, rather, when to use the paper himself for their personal interests; when and how to induce them to let the paper alone. Through a quarter of a century of changing ownerships Malcolm had persisted, chiefly because he had but one conviction—that the post of editor of the News-Record exactly suited him and must remain his at any sacrifice of personal character.

Howard had met Stokely and Coulter. He liked Stokely who was owner of a few shares more than one-third; he disliked Coulter who owned just under one-half.

Stokely was a frank, coarse, dollar-hunter, cheerfully unscrupulous in a large way, acute, caring not at all for principles of any kind, letting the paper alone most of the time because he was astute enough to know that in his ignorance of journalism he would surely injure it as a property.

Coulter was a hypocrite and a snob. Also he fancied he knew how to conduct a newspaper. He was as unscrupulous as Stokely but tried to mask it.

When Stokely wished the _News-Record to advocate a "job," or steal, or the election of some disreputable who would work in his interest, he told Malcolm precisely what he wanted and left the details of the stultification to his experienced adroitness. When Coulter wished to "poison the fountain of publicity," as Malcolm called the paper's departures from honesty and right, he approached the subject by stealth, trying to convince Malcolm that the wrong was not really wrong, but was right unfortunately disguised.

He would take Malcolm into his confidence by slow and roundabout steps, thus multiplying his difficulties in discharging his "duty." If Coulter's son had not been married to Malcolm's daughter, it is probable that not even his complete subserviency would have enabled him to keep his place.

"If you had told me frankly what you wanted in the first place, Mr. Coulter," he said after an exasperating episode in which Coulter's Pharisaic sensitiveness had resulted in Malcolm's having to "flop" the paper both editorially and in its news columns twice in three days, "we would not have made ourselves ridiculous and contemptible. The public is an ass, but it is an ass with a memory at least three days long. Your stealthiness has made the ass bray at us instead of with and for us. And that is dangerous when you consider that running a newspaper is like running a restaurant—you must please your customers every day afresh."

Coulter was further difficult because of his anxieties about social position for himself and his family. He was disturbed whenever the News-Record published an item that might offend any of the people whose acquaintance he had gained with so much difficulty, and for whose good will he was willing to sacrifice even considerable money. Personally, but very privately, he edited the News-Record's "fashionable intelligence" columns on Sunday and made them an exhibit of his own sycophancy and snobbishness which excited the amused disgust of all who were in the secret.

Malcolm liked Howard, admired him, in a way envied his fearlessness, his earnestness for principles. For years he had had it in mind to retire and write a history of the Civil War period which had been his own period of greatest activity and most intimate acquaintance with the behind-the-scenes of statecraft. Howard's energy, steady application, enthusiasm for journalism and intelligence both as to editorials and as to news made Malcolm look upon him as his natural successor.

"I think Howard is the man we want," he said to his two associates when he was arranging the dinner. "He has new ideas—just what the paper needs. He is in touch with these recent developments. And above all he has judgment. He knows what not to print, where and how to print what ought to be printed. He is still young and is over-enthusiastic. He has limitations, but he knows them and he is eager and capable to learn."

It was a "shop" dinner, Howard doing most of the talking, led on by Malcolm. The main point was the "new journalism," as it was called, and how to adapt it to the News-Record and the News-Record to it.

Malcolm kept the conversation closely to news and news-ideas, fearing that, if editorial policies were brought in, Howard would make "breaks." He soon saw that his associates were much impressed with Howard, with his judgment, with his knowledge of the details of every important newspaper in the city, with his analysis of the good and bad points in each.

"I'll drop you at your corner," said he to Howard at the end of the dinner. As they drove up the Avenue he began: "How would you like to be the editor of the News-Record? My place, I mean."

"I don't understand," Howard answered, bewildered.

"I am going to retire at once," Malcolm went on. "I've been at it nearly fifty years—ever since I was a boy of eighteen and I've been in charge there almost a quarter of a century. I think I've earned a few years of leisure to work for my own amusement. I'm pretty sure they'll want you to take my place. Would you like it?"

"I'm not fit for it," Howard said, and he meant it. "I'm only an apprentice. I'm always making blunders—but I needn't tell you about that."

"You can't say that you are not fit until you have tried. Besides, the question is not, are you fit? but, is there any one more fit than you? I confess I don't see any one so well equipped, so certain to give the paper all of the best that there is in him."

"Of course I'd like to try. I can only fail."

"Oh, you won't fail. But you may quarrel with Stokely and Coulter—especially Coulter. In fact, I'm sure you'll quarrel with them. But if you make yourself valuable enough, you'll probably win out. Only——"

Malcolm hesitated, then went on:

"I stopped giving advice years ago. But I'll venture a suggestion. Whenever your principles run counter to the policy of the paper, it would be wise to think the matter over carefully before making an issue. Usually there is truth on both sides, much that can be said fairly and honestly for either side. Often devotion to principle is a mere prejudice. Often the crowd, the mob, can be better controlled to right ends by conceding or seeming to concede a principle for the time. Don't strike a mortal blow at your own usefulness to good causes by making yourself a hasty martyr to some fancied vital principle that will seem of no consequence the next morning but one after the election."

"I know, Mr. Malcolm, judgment is all but impossible. And I have been trying to learn what you have been teaching me with your blue pencil, what you now put into words. But there is something in me—an instinct, perhaps—that forces me on in spite of myself. I've learned to curb and guide it to a certain extent, but as long as I am I, I shall never learn to control it. Every man must work out his own salvation along his own lines. And with my limitations of judgment, it would be fatal to me, I feel, to study the art of compromise. Where another, broader, stronger, more master of himself and of others, would succeed by compromising, I should fail miserably. I should be lost, compassless, rudderless. I have often envied you your calmness, your ability to see not only to-morrow but the day after. But, if I ever try to imitate you, I shall make a sad mess of my career."

As he ended Howard looked uneasily at the old editor, expecting to see that caustic smile with which he preceded and accompanied his sarcasms at "sentimental bosh." But instead, Malcolm's face was melancholy; and his voice was sad and weary as he answered the young man who was just starting where he had started so many years ago:

"No doubt you are right. I'm not intending to try to dissuade you from—from the best there is in you. All I mean is that caution, self-examination, self-doubt, calm consideration of the other side—these are as necessary to success as energy and resolute action. All I suggest is that its splendour does not redeem a splendid folly. Its folly remains its essential characteristic."

Three weeks later Howard became editor-in-chief of the News-Record. His salary was fifteen thousand a year; and Stokely and Coulter, acting upon Malcolm's advice, gave him a "free hand" for one year. They agreed not to interfere during that time unless the circulation or the profits showed a decrease at the end of a quarter.

The next morning Howard, in the Madison Avenue car on his way to the office, read among the "Incidents in Society:"

Mrs. George Alexander Provost and her niece, Miss Marion Trevor, sailed in the Campania yesterday. They will return in July for the Newport season.



XV.

YELLOW JOURNALISM.

While several of the New York dailies were circulating from two to three hundred thousand copies, the News-Record—the best-written, the most complete, and, where the interests of the owners did not interfere, the most accurate—circulated less than one hundred thousand. The Sunday edition had a circulation of one hundred and fifty thousand where two other newspapers had almost half a million.

The theory of the News-Record staff was that their journal was too "respectable," too intelligent, to be widely read; that the "yellow journals" grovelled, "appealed to the mob," drew their vast crowds by the methods of the fakir and the freak. They professed pride in the News-Record's smaller circulation as proof of its freedom from vulgarity and debasement. They looked down upon the journalists of the popular newspapers and posed as the aristocracy of the profession.

Howard did not assent to these self-complacent excuses. He was democratic and modern, and the aristocratic pose appealed only to his sense of humour and his suspicions. He believed that the success of the "yellow journals" with the most intelligent, alert and progressive public in the world must be based upon solid reasons of desert, must be in spite of, not because of, their follies and exhibitions of bad taste. He resolved upon a radical departure, a revolution from the policy of satisfying petty vanity and tradition within the office to a policy of satisfying the demands of the public.

He gave Segur temporary charge of the editorial page, and, taking a desk in the news-room, centred his attention upon news and the news-staff. But he was careful not to agitate and antagonise those whose cooperation was necessary to success. He made only one change in the management; he retired old Bowring on a pension and appointed to the city editorship one of the young reporters—Frank Cumnock.

He chose Cumnock for this position, in many respects the most important on the staff of a New York daily, because he wrote well, was a judge of good writing, had a minute knowledge of New York and its neighbourhood and, finally and chiefly, because he had a "news-sense," keener than that of any other man on the paper.

For instance, there was the murder of old Thayer, the rich miser in East Sixteenth Street. It was the sensation in all the newspapers for two weeks. Then they dropped it as an unsolvable mystery. Cumnock persuaded Mr. Bowring to let him keep on. After five days' work he heard of a deaf and dumb woman who sat every afternoon at a back window of her flat overlooking the back windows of Thayer's house. He had a trying struggle with her infirmity and stupidity, but finally was rewarded. On the afternoon of the murder, in its very hour (which the police had been able to discover), she had seen a man and woman in the bathroom of the Thayer house. Both were agitated and the man washed his hands again and again, carefully rinsing the bowl afterward. From her description Cumnock got upon the track of Thayer's niece and her husband, found the proof of their guilt, had them watched until the News-Record came out with the "beat," then turned them over to the police.

Also, Cumnock was keen at taking hints of good news-items concealed in obscure paragraphs. The Morris Prison scandal was an example of this. He found in the New England edition of The World a six-line item giving an astonishing death rate for the Morris Prison. He asked the City Editor to assign him to go there; and within a week the press of the entire country was discussing the News-Record's exposure of the barbarities of torture and starvation practised by Warden Johnson and his keepers.

"We are going to print the news, all the news and nothing but the news," Howard said to Cumnock. "They've put you here because, so they tell me, you know news no matter how thoroughly it is concealed or disguised. And I assure you that no one shall interfere with you. No favours to anybody; no use of the news-columns for revenge or exploitation. The only questions a news-item need raise in your mind are: Is it true? Is it interesting? Is it printable in a newspaper that will publish anything which a healthy-minded grown-person wishes to read?"

"Is that 'straight'?" asked Cumnock. "No favourites? No suppressions? No exploitations?"

"'Straight'—'dead straight'! And if I were you I'd make this particularly clear to the Wall Street and political men. If anybody"—with stress upon the anybody—"comes to you about this, send him to me."

Howard was uneasy about the managing editor, Mr. King. But he soon found that his fears were groundless. Mr. King was without petty vanity, and cordially and sincerely welcomed his control.

"We look too dull," King began when Howard asked him if he had any changes to suggest. "We need more and bigger headlines, and we need pictures."

"That is it!" Howard was delighted to find that King and he were in perfect accord. "But we must not have pictures unless we can have the best. Just at present we can't increase expenses by any great amount. What do you say to trying what we can do with all the news, larger headlines and plenty of leads?"

"I'm sure we can do better with our class of readers by livening up the appearance of our headlines than we could with second-rate pictures."

"I hope," Howard said earnestly, "that we won't have to use that phrase—'our class of readers'—much longer. Our paper should interest every man and woman able to read. It seems to me that a newspaper's audience should be like that of a good play—the orchestra chairs full and the last seat in the gallery taken. I suppose you know we're not an 'organ' any longer?"

"No, I didn't." Mr. King looked surprised. "Do you mean to say that we're free to print the news?"

"Free as freedom. In our news columns we're neither Democrat nor Republican nor Mugwump nor Reform. We have no Wall Street or social connections. We are going to print a newspaper—all the news and nothing but the news."

Mr. King drummed on his desk softly with the tips of his outstretched fingers. "Hum—hum," he said. "This is news. Well—the circulation'll go up. And that's all I'm interested in."

Howard went about his plans quietly. He avoided every appearance of exerting authority, disturbed not a wheel in the great machine. He made his changes so subtly that those who received the suggestions often came to him a few days afterward, proposing as their own the very plans he had hinted. He was thus cautious partly because of his experience of the vanity of men, their sensitiveness to criticism, their instinctive opposition to improvement from without; partly from his knowledge of the hysteria which raged in the offices of the "yellow journals." He wished to avoid an epidemic of that hysteria—the mad rush for sensation and novelty; the strife of opposing ambitions; the plotting and counter-plotting of rival heads of departments; the chaos out of which the craziest ideas often emerged triumphant, making the pages of the paper look like a series of disordered dreams.

He was indifferent to the semblance of authority, to the shadows for which small men are forever struggling. What he wanted, all he wanted, was—results.

The first opposition came from the night editor, who for twenty-six years, his weekly "night off" and his two weeks' vacation in summer excepted, had "made up" the paper—that is to say, had defined, with the advice and consent of the managing editor, the position and order of the various news items. This night editor, Mr. Vroom, was a strenuous conservative. He believed that an editor's duty was done when he had intelligently arranged his paper so that the news was placed before the reader in the order of its importance. Big headlines, attempts at effect with varying sizes of large type and varying column-widths he held to be crowd-catching devices, vulgar and debasing. He had no sympathy with Howard's theory that the first object of a newspaper published in a democratic republic is to catch the crowd, to interest it, to compel it to read, and so to lead it to think.

"We're on the way to scuffling in the gutter with the 'yellow journals' for the pennies of the mob," he was saying sarcastically to Mr. King, one afternoon just as Howard joined them.

Howard laughed. "Not on the way to the gutter, Mr. Vroom. Actually in the gutter, actually scuffling."

"Well, I'm frank to say that I don't like it. A newspaper ought to appeal to the intelligent."

"To intelligence, yes; to the intelligent, no. At least in my opinion, that is the right theory. We want people to read us because we're intelligent enough to know how to please them, not because they're intelligent enough to overcome the difficulties we put in their way. But let's go out to dinner this evening and talk it over."

They dined together at Mouquin's every night for a week. At the end of that time Vroom, still sarcastic and grumbling, was a convert. And a great accession Howard found him. He had sound judgment as to the value of news-items—what demanded first page, the "show-window," because it would interest everybody; what was worth a line on an inside page because it would interest only a few thousands. He was the most skillful of the News-Record's many good writers of headlines, a master of that, for the newspaper, art of arts—condensed and interesting statement, alluring the glancing reader to read on. Also he had an eye for effects with type. "You make every page a picture," Howard said to him. "It is wonderful how you balance your headlines, emphasising the important news yet saving the minor items from obscurity. I should like to see the paper you would make if you had the right sort of illustrations to put in."

Vroom was amazed at himself. He who had opposed any "head" which broke the column rule was now so far degenerated into a "yellow journalist" that, when Howard spoke of illustrations, he actually longed to test his skill at distributing them effectively.

* * * * *

Two months of hard work, tedious, because necessarily so indirect, produced a newspaper which was "on the right lines," as Howard understood right lines. And he felt that the time had come to make the necessary radical changes in the editorial page.

The News-Record had long posed as independent because it supported now one political party and now the other, or divided its support. But this superficial independence was in reality subservience to the financial interests of the two principal owners. They made their newspaper assail Republican or Democratic corruption and misgovernment in city, state or nation, according as their personal interests lay. They used the editorial page and, to even better advantage, the news-columns, in revenging themselves for too heavy levies of blackmail upon their corrupt interests or in securing unjust legislation and privileges.

Obedient and cynical Mr. Malcolm had made the editorial page corrupt and brilliant—never so effective as when assailing a good cause. The great misfortune of good causes is that they attract so many fatal friends—the superciliously conscientious; the well-meaning but feeble-minded and blundering; the most offensive because least deceptive kinds of hypocrites. Mr. Malcolm, as acute as he was intellectually unscrupulous, well understood how to weaken or to ruin a just cause through these supporters. Sometimes he stood afar off, showering the poisoned arrows of raillery and satire. Again he was the plain-spoken friend of the cause and warned its honest supporters against these "fool friends" whom he pretended to regard as its leaders. Again he played the part of a blind enthusiast and praised folly as wisdom and urged it on to more damaging activities.

"We abhor humbug here," he used to say; and perhaps he did in a measure excuse himself to his conscience with the phrase. But in fact his editorial page was usually a succession of humbugs, of brilliant hypocrisies and cheats perpetrated under the guise of exposing humbug.

Just as Howard was ready to reverse Malcolm's editorial programme, New York was seized with one of its "periodic spasms of virtue." The city government was, as usual, in the hands of the two bosses who owned the two political machines. One was taking the responsibility and the larger share of the spoils; the other was maintaining him in power and getting the smaller but a satisfactory share. The alliance between the police and criminal vice had become so open and aggressive under this bi-boss patronage that the people were aroused and indignant. But as they had no capable leaders and no way of selecting leaders, there arose a self-constituted leadership of uptown Phariseeism and sentimentality, planning the "purification" of the city.

Every man of sense knowing human nature and the conditions of city life knew that this plan was foredoomed to ridiculous failure, and that the event would be a popular revulsion against "reform."

"Why not speak the truth about these vice-hunters?" Howard was discussing the situation with three of his editorial writers—Segur, Huntington and Montgomery.

"It's mighty dangerous," Montgomery objected. "You will be sticking knives into a sacred Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy."

"Yes, we'll have all the good people about our ears," said Segur. "We'll be denounced as a defender of depravity, a foe of purity. They'll thunder away at us from every pulpit. The other newspapers will take it up, especially those that expect to sell millions of papers containing accounts of the 'exposure' of the dives and dens."

"That's good. I hope we shall," said Howard cheerfully. "It will advertise us tremendously."

The three were better pleased than they would have admitted to themselves by the seeming certainty of Howard's impending undoing.

"No, gentlemen," Howard said, as they were about to go to their rooms for the day's work. "There's no danger in attacking any hypocrisy. Don't attack beliefs that are universal or nearly universal—at least not openly. But don't be afraid of a hypocrisy because it is universal. People know that they are hypocrites in respect of it. They may not have the courage publicly to applaud you. But they'll be privately delighted and will admire your courage. We'll try to be discreet and we'll be careful to be truthful. And we'll begin by making these gentlemen show themselves up."

The next morning the News-Record published a double-leaded editorial. It described the importance of improving political and social conditions in New York; it went on to note the distinguished names on the committee for the destruction of vice; it closed with the announcement that on the following day the News-Record would publish the views of these eminent reformers upon conditions and remedies.

The next day he printed the interviews—a collection of curiosities in utopianism, cant, ignorant fanaticism, provincialism, hypocrisy. These appeared strictly as news; for the cardinal principle of Howard's theory of a newspaper was that it had no right to intrude its own views into its news-columns. On the editorial page he riddled the interviews. By adroit quotations, by contrasting one with another, he showed, or rather made the so-called reformers themselves show, that where they were sincere they were in the main silly, and where they were plausible they were in the main insincere; that every man of them had his own pet scheme for the salvation of wicked New York; and that they could not possibly accomplish anything more valuable than leading the people on the familiar, aimless, demoralizing excursion through the slums.

On the following day he frankly laughed at them as a lot of impracticables who either did not know the patent facts of city life or refused to admit those facts. And he turned his attention to the real problem, a respectable administration for the city—a practical end which could easily be accomplished by practical action. From day to day he kept this up, publishing a splendid series of articles, humorous, witty, satirical, eloquent, bold, with a dominant strain of sincerity and plain common sense. As his associates had predicted, a storm gathered and burst in fury about the News-Record. It was denounced by "leading citizens," including many of the clergy. Its "esteemed" contemporaries published and endorsed and amplified the abuse. And its circulation went up at the rate of five thousand a day.

When the storm was at its height, when the whole town seemed to be agreeing with the angry reformers but was quietly laughing at their folly and hypocrisy, Howard threw his bomb. On a Saturday morning he gave half of his first page with big but severely impartial headlines to an analysis of the members of the vice committee—a broadside of facts often hinted but never before verified and published. First came those who owned property and sub-let it for vicious purposes, the property and purpose specified in detail; then those who were directors in corporations which had got corrupt privileges from the local boss, the privileges being carefully specified, and also the amounts of which they had robbed the city. Last came those who were directors in corporations which had bought from the State-boss injustices and licenses to rob, the specifications given in damning detail.

His leading editorial was entitled "Why We Don't Have Decent Government." It was powerful in its simplicity, its merciless raillery and irony; and only at the very end did it contain passion. There, in a few eloquent sentences he arraigned these professed reformers who were growing rich through the boss-system, who were trafficking with the bosses and were now engaged in wrecking the hopes of honesty and decency. On that day the News-Record's circulation went up thirty thousand. The town rang with its "exposure" and the attention of the whole country was arrested. It was one of the historic "beats" of New York journalism. The reputation of the News-Record for fearlessness and truth-telling and news-enterprise was established. At abound it had become the most conspicuous and one of the most powerful journals in New York.



XVI.

MR. STOKELY IS TACTLESS.

Howard, riding in the Park one morning late in the spring, came upon Mrs. Carnarvon. She gave him no chance to evade her, but joined him and accommodated her horse's pace to his.

"And are you still on the News-Record?" she said. "I hope not."

"Why?" Howard was smiling, glad to get an outside view of what he had been doing.

"Because it's become so sensational. It used to be such a nice paper. And now—gracious, what headlines! What attacks on the very best people in the town!"

"Dreadful, isn't it?" laughed Howard. "We've become so depraved that we are actually telling the truth about somebodies instead of only about nobodies."

"I might have known that you would sympathise with that sort of thing." Mrs. Carnarvon was teasing, yet reproachful. "You always were an anarchist."

"Is it anarchistic to be no respecter of persons and to put big headlines over big items and little headlines over little items?"

"Oh, you know what I mean. You are encouraging the unruly classes."

"Dear me! And we thought we were fighting the unruly class. We thought that it was our friends—or rather, your friends—the franchise grabbers and legislature-buyers who won't obey the laws unless the laws happen to suit their convenience. They're the only unruly class I know anything about. I've heard of another kind but I've never been able to find it. And I never hear much about it except when a lot of big rascals are making off weighted down with plunder. They always shout back over their shoulders: 'Don't raise a disturbance or you'll arouse the unruly classes.'"

Mrs. Carnarvon was laughing. "You put it well," she said, "and I'm not clever enough to answer you. But they all tell me the News-Record has become a dangerous paper, that it's attacking everybody who has anything."

"Anything he has stolen, yes. But that's all."

"You can't get me to sympathise with you. I like well-dressed, well-mannered people who speak good English."

"So do I. That's why I'm doing all in my power to improve the conditions for making more and more people of the sort one likes to talk to and dine with."

"Why, I thought you sympathised with the lower classes."

"Not a bit of it. Who has been maligning me to you? I abhor the lower classes—so much so that I wish to see them abolished."

"Well, you'll have to blame Marian for misleading me."

"Miss Trevor? How is she?" Mrs. Carnarvon was looking closely at him, and he was not sure that he succeeded in showing nothing more than friendly interest.

"Haven't you heard from her? She's in England, visiting in Lancashire. You know her cousin married Lord Cranmore."

"I saw in the papers several months ago that she was going abroad. I haven't heard a word since."

Mrs. Carnarvon started to say something, but changed her mind.

"When is she coming home?"

"Not until July. You must come to see us at Newport."

"Nothing could please me better—if I can get away."

"I'll send you an invitation, although you have treated me very badly of late. But I suppose you are busy."

"Busy? Isn't a galley slave always busy?"

"Are you still writing editorials?"

"Yes—and on the fallen News-Record. In fact——"

"Well—what?"

Howard laughed. "Don't faint," he said. "I'll leave you at once if you wish me to, and I'll never give it away that you once knew me. I'm the editor—the responsible devil for the depravity."

"How interesting!" Mrs. Carnarvon was evidently not disturbed. Then the American adoration of success came out. "I'm so glad you're getting on. I always knew you would. Really, you must come to dinner. I'll invite some of the people you've been attacking. They'll like to look at you, and you will be amused by them. And I don't in the least mind your giving it to them if they bait you, as I did this morning. Will you come?"

"If I may leave by ten o'clock. I go down town every night."

"Why, when do you sleep?"

"Not much, these days. Life's too interesting to permit of much sleep. I'll make up when it slackens a bit."

As he was turning his horse, she said: "Marian's address is Claridge's, Brooke Street, Mayfair. If she isn't there, they forward her mail."

Howard was puzzled. "What made her give me that address?" he thought. "I know she didn't like my seeing so much of Marian. And here she is practically inviting me to write to her." He could not understand it. "If I were not a 'yellow' editor and if Marian were not engaged to one of the richest men in New York, I'd say that this lady was encouraging me." He smiled. "Not yet—not just yet." And he cheerfully urged his horse into a canter.

Mrs. Carnarvon's opinion of the News-Record and its recent performances fairly represented that of the fashionable and the very rich. They read it, as they never did before, because it interested them. They could not deny that what it said was true; that is, they could not deny it to their own minds, although they did vigorously deny it publicly. Those who were attacked directly or indirectly, or expected to be attacked, denounced the paper as an "outrage," a "disgrace to the city," a "specimen of the journalism of the gutter." Many who were not in sympathy with the men or the methods assailed thought that its course was "inexpedient," "tended to increase discontent among the lower classes," "weakened the influence of the better classes." Only a few of the "triumphant classes" saw the real value and benefit of the News-Record's frank attacks upon greed and hypocrisy, saw that these attacks were not dangerous or demagogical because they were just and were combined with a careful avoidance of encouragement to the lazy, the envious, the incompetent and the ignorant.

Fortunately for Howard's peace, that eminent New York "multi," Samuel Jocelyn, for whom Coulter had the highest respect, was of this last class. When Howard began, Coulter was at Aiken where Jocelyn had a cottage. He had never been able to make headway with Jocelyn, and Mrs. Jocelyn deigned to give him and Mrs. Coulter only the coldest of cold nods. Just as Coulter had become so agitated by Howard's radical course that he was preparing to go to New York to remonstrate with him, Jocelyn called.

"I came to thank you for what you are doing with your paper," he said cordially. "It seems to me that all intelligent men who are not blind to their own ultimate interests ought to stand by you. I can't tell you how much I admire your frankness and honesty. And you draw the line just right. You attack plunder, you defend property. Will your wife and you dine with us this evening?"

Coulter postponed his trip to New York.

On the last day of the first three months the circulation of the News-Record was 147,253—an increase of 42,150 over what it was on the day Howard took charge; its advertising had increased twelve per cent; its net profits for the quarter were seventy-five thousand dollars as against fifty-seven thousand for the preceding quarter.

"Very good indeed," was Stokely's comment.

"Another quarter like this," said Howard, "and I'm going to ask you to let me increase expenses a thousand dollars a week to illustrate the paper."

"We'll talk that over with Coulter. Personally I like this 'yellow-journalism'—when it's done intelligently. I always told Coulter we'd have to come to it. It's only common sense to make a paper easy reading. Then, too, we can have a great deal more influence—in fact, we have already. I'm getting what I want up at Albany this winter much cheaper."

Howard winced. "He made me feel like a blackmailer," he said to himself when Stokely had gone. "And I suppose these fellows do look on me as a new Malcolm with up-to-date tricks. Well, they will see, they will see."

He tried to go on with his work, but Stokely's cynical words persistently interrupted him. Why had he not squarely challenged Stokely then and there? Why had he only winced where a year ago he would have demanded an explanation?

He hated to confess it to himself, he made every effort to smother it, but the thought still stared him in the face—"I am not so strong in my ideals of personal character as I was a year ago."

The fact that his present course was profitable gave him, he felt, more pleasure than the fact that it was right. If the alternative of wealth and power with self-abasement or poverty, obscurity with self-respect were put to him now, what would he decide? Would he give up his prospects, his hopes of Marian and of an easy career? He was afraid to answer. He contented himself with one of his habitual evasions—"I will settle that when the time comes. No, Stokely's remark did not make a crisis. If the crisis ever does come, surely I will act like a man. I'll be securer then, more necessary to this pair of plunderers, able to make better terms for myself. In practical life, it is necessary to sacrifice something in order to succeed."

But Stokely's words and his own silence and the real reasons for his changing ideals and for his cowardice continued to annoy him.

Every day he came down town planning for a better newspaper the next morning than they had ever made before. And his vigour, his enthusiasm permeated the entire office. He went from one news department to another, suggesting, asking for suggestions, praising, criticising judiciously and with the greatest consideration for vanity. He talked with the reporters, urging them on by showing keen interest in them and their work, and intimate knowledge of what they were doing. And he dictated every day telegrams to correspondents, thanking them for any conspicuously good stories they had telegraphed in, adding something to the compensation of those who were paid by space and made little.

If his work had not been his amusement the long hours, the constant application, would have broken him down. But he had no interests outside the office and he got his mental recreation by shifting his mind from one department to another.

In June his salary was increased to twenty-five thousand a year and his last lingering feeling of financial insecurity disappeared. For the first time in his life he felt strong enough to undertake a serious responsibility, to give hostages to fortune without fear of being unable to keep faith. He learned from Mrs. Carnarvon that Marian was returning on the Oceanic on the ninth of July, and he accepted a Saturday-to-Monday invitation to Newport for the twelfth of July. It was from Segur that he got the news that Danvers was in Japan and was not returning until the autumn.

On the ninth of July, from the window of his office, he saw the Oceanic steam up the bay and up the river to her pier. He sent down a request that the ship-news reporter be sent up as soon as he returned. "Is it a good story?" he asked when the reporter, Blackwell, entered. "Was there anybody on board?"

"A lot of swell people," the young man answered; "all the women got up in the latest Paris gowns."

"Did you notice whether Mrs. Provost came?"

"Came? Well, rather, with two French maids chattering and chasing after her. And there was a tall girl with her, a stunner, a girl she called 'Marian, my dear.'"

Howard stopped him with "Thank you. Don't write anything about them."

"It was the best thing I saw—the funniest."

"Well—don't use the names."

Young Blackwell turned to go. "Oh, I see—friends of yours," he smiled. "Very well. I'll keep 'em out."

Howard flushed and called him back. "Go ahead," he said. "Write just what you were going to. Of course you wouldn't write anything that was not fair and truthful. We don't 'play favourites' here. Forget what I said."

And so it came to pass that Mrs. Provost, half pleased, half indignant, said to Miss Trevor as they sat in the drawing room of the Pullman on the way to Newport the next day: "Just look at this, Marian dear, in the horrid News-Record. And it used to be such a nice paper with that slimy Coulter bowing and scraping to everybody."

"This" was Mrs. Provost and her dogs and her maids and her asides to "Marian dear," described with accuracy and a keen sense of the ludicrous.

"It's too dreadful," she continued. "There is no such thing as privacy in this country. The newspapers are making us," with a slight accent on the pronoun, "as common and public as tenement-house people."

"Yes," Miss Trevor answered absently. "But why read the newspapers? I never could get interested in them, though I've tried."



XVII.

A WOMAN AND A WARNING.

On the evening of Howard's arrival at Newport, Mrs. Carnarvon was having a few people in to dine. He had just time to dress and so saw no one until he descended to the reception room.

"You are to take in Marian," said his hostess, going with him to where Miss Trevor was sitting, her back to the door and her attention apparently absorbed by the man facing her.

"Here's Mr. Howard, Marian," Mrs. Carnarvon interrupted. "Come with me, Willie. Your lady is over here and we're going in directly."

Marian saw that Howard was looking at her in the straight, frank fashion she remembered and liked so well. "I've come for you," he said.

"Yes, you are to take me in," she evaded, her look even lamer than her words.

"You know what I mean." He was smiling, his heart in his eyes, as if the dozen people were not about them.

"I see you have not changed," she laughed, answering his look in kind.

"Changed? I'm revolutionized. I was blind and now I see. I was paralyzed and behold, I walk. I was weak and lo, I am strong—strong enough for two, if necessary."

"Now, hasn't it occurred to you that I might possibly have something to say about my own fate?"

"You? Why, you had everything to say. I reasoned it all out with you. You simply can't add anything to the case I made you make out for yourself when I talked it over with you. I made you protest very vigorously."

"Well, what did I say—that is, what did you make me say?"

"You said you were engaged—pledged to another—that you could not draw back without dishonour. And I answered that no engagement could bind you to become the wife of a man you did not love; that no moral code could hold you to such a sin; that no code of honour could command you to permit a man to degrade himself and you. Then you pleaded that you were not sure you liked my kind of a life, that you feared you wanted wealth and a great establishment and social leadership and—and all that."

"Did I?" Marian said with exaggerated astonishment.

"You did indeed. You were perfectly open with me. You let me see all that part of you which we try to keep concealed and fancy we are concealing—all that one really feels and wishes and thinks as distinguished from what one fancies he ought to feel and wish and think."

"I wonder that you cared, after a glance behind that curtain."

"Oh, but I like what is behind that curtain best of all. The very human things are there. They make me feel so at home."

Dinner was announced and it was not until the second course that he had a chance to resume. Then he began as if there had been no interval:

"You said—"

Marian laughed and looked at him—a flash of her luminous blue-green eyes—and was looking away again with her usual expression. "You needn't tell me the rest. It doesn't matter what I said. I've had you with me wherever I went. You never doubted my—my caring, did you?"

"No. I couldn't doubt you. If you were the sort of woman a man could doubt, you wouldn't be the sort of woman I could love. And you know it isn't vanity that makes me sure. I often wonder how you happened to care for such a—but I must not attack any one whom you like so well. No, I knew you cared by the same instinct that makes you know that I care for you."

"But why did you come?"

"Because I have won a position for myself, have enough to enable us to live without eternally fretting over money-matters. I feel that I have the right to come. And then I could not be interested to live on, without you; and I'm willing to face, willing to have you face, whatever may come to us through me. I know that you and I together——"

"Not now—don't—please." Marian was pale and she was obviously under a great strain. "You see, you knew all about this. But I didn't until you looked at me when Jessie brought you. It makes me—happy—I am so happy. But I must—I can't control myself here." She leaned over as if her napkin had slipped to the floor. "I love you," she murmured.

It was Howard's turn to struggle for self-control. "I understand," he said, "why you wished me not to go on. You never said those words to me before—and——"

"Oh, yes I have—many and many a time."

"With your eyes, but not with your voice—at least not so that I could hear. And—well, it is not easy to look calm and only friendly when every nerve in one's body is vibrating like a violin string under the bow. Yes, let us talk of something else. I've never been acutely conscious of the presence of others when I've been with you. To-night I'm in great danger of forgetting them altogether."

"That would be so like you." Marian laughed, then raised her voice a little and went on. "Yes, your little restaurant in the Rue Louis le Grand was gone. There was a dressmaker in its place—Raudinitz. She made this. How do you like it?"

"It has the air of—of belonging to you."

Marian looked amused. Howard shrugged his shoulders. "All roads lead to Rome," he said.

* * * * *

Carnarvon hung about until the women went to bed, so Howard and Marian had no opportunity to be alone. As soon as he saw his last chance vanish, he went to his own room, to the solitude of its balcony in the shadow of the projecting facade with the moonlight flooding the rocks and the sea.

As he sat smoking, the recession came, the reaction from weeks of nervous tension. And with the ebb of the tide entered that Visitor who alone has the privilege of the innermost chamber where lives the man himself, unmasked of all vanity and show and pretense. The visit was not unexpected; for at every such crisis every one is certain of a call from this Visitor, this merciless critic, plain and rude of speech, rare and reluctant in praise, so mocking in our moments of elation, so cruelly frank about our follies and self-excuses when he comes in our moments of depression.

"So you are going to marry?" the Visitor said abruptly. "I thought you had made up your mind on that subject long ago."

"Love changes a man's point of view," Howard replied, timid and apologetic before this quiet, relentless other-self.

"But it doesn't change the facts of life, does it? It doesn't change character, does it?"

"I think so. For instance, it has changed me. It has made a man of me. It has been the inspiration of the past year, strengthening me, making me ambitious, energetic. Have I not thought of her all the time, worked for her?"

"You have been uncommonly persistent—as you always are when you are thwarted." The Visitor wore a satirical smile. "But a spurt of inspiration is one thing. A wife—responsibility—fetters——"

"Not when one loves."

"That depends upon the kind of love—and the kind of woman—and the kind of man."

"Could there be any higher kind of love than ours?"

"Most romantic, most high-minded—quite idyllic." The Visitor's tone was gently mocking. "And I don't deny that you may go on loving each the other. But—how does she fit in with your scheme of life? What does she really know of or care about your ambitions? Why, you had so little confidence in her that you didn't dare to think of marrying her until you had an income which you once would have thought wealth—an income which, by the way, already begins to seem small to you."

"No, it wasn't lack of confidence in her," protested Howard. "It was lack of confidence in myself."

"True, that did have something to do with it, I grant you. And that reminds me—what has become of all your cowardice about responsibility?"

"Oh, I'm changed there."

"Are you sure? Are you not deceived by this sudden and maybe momentary streak of good luck in your affairs? You have fixed your ambition high—very high. You wish to make an honest and a useful and a distinguished career. You know you have weaknesses. I needn't remind you—need I—that you have had to fight those weaknesses? How could you have won thus far if you had been responsible for others instead of being alone, and certain that the consequences would fall upon yourself only? I want to see you continue to win. I don't want to see you dragged down by extravagance, by love for this woman, by ambition of the kind her friends approve. I don't want to see you—You were silent when Stokely insulted you!"

"Love—such love as mine—and for such a woman—and with such love in return—drag down? Impossible!"

"Not so—not exactly so, though I must say you are plausible. But don't forget that you and she are not starting out to make a career. Don't forget that she is already fixed—her tastes, habits, friendships, associations, ideals already formed. Don't forget that your love is the only bond between you—and that it may drag you toward her mode of life instead of drawing her towards yours. Don't forget that your own associations and temptations are becoming more and more difficult. I repeat, you cringed—yes, cringed—when Stokely insulted you. Why?"

Howard was silent.

"And," the Visitor went on relentlessly, "let me remind you that not only did you give her up without a struggle a few months ago but also she gave you up without a word."

"But what could she have said?"

"I don't know, I'm sure. I'm not familiar with ways feminine. But I know—we know—that, if there had not been some reservation in her love, some hesitation about you—unconscious, perhaps, but powerful enough to make her yield—she would not have let you go as she did."

"But she did not realise, as I did not, how much our love meant to us."

"Perhaps—that sounds well. All I ask is, will she help you? Are you really so much stronger than you were only four months ago? Or are you stimulated by success? Suppose that days of disaster, of peril, come? What then?"

"But they will not. I have won a position. I can always command a large salary—perhaps not quite so much but still a large salary."

"Perhaps—if you don't trouble yourself about principles. But how would it be if you would do nothing, write nothing, except what you think is honest? Would you ask her to face it? Tell me, tell yourself honestly, have you the right to assume a responsibility you may not be able to bear, to invite temptations you may not be able to resist?"

There was a long silence. At last Howard stood up and flung his cigar into the sea. His face was drawn and his eyes burned.

"God in heaven!" he cried, "am I not human? May I not have companionship and sympathy and love? Must I be alone and friendless and loveless always? That is not life; that is not just. I will not; I will not. I love her—love her—love her. With the best that there is in me, I love her. Am I such a coward that I cannot face even my own weaknesses?"



XVIII.

HOWARD EXPLAINS HIS MACHINE.

In August Marian and Mrs. Carnarvon came to the Waldorf for two days. Howard had offered to show them how a newspaper is made; and Mrs. Carnarvon, finding herself bored by too many days of the same few people every day, herself proposed the trip. The three dined in the open air on Sherry's piazza and at eleven o'clock drove down the Avenue, to the east at Washington Square, and through the Bowery.

"I never saw it before," said Marian, "and I must say I shall not care if I never see it again. Why do people make so much fuss about slums, I wonder?"

"Oh, they're so queer, so like another world," suggested Mrs. Carnarvon. "It gives you such a delightful sensation of sadness. It's just like a not-too-melancholy play, only better because it's real. Then, too, it makes one feel so much more comfortable and clean and contented in one's own surroundings."

"You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Jessie." Marian spoke in mock indignation. "The next thing we know you'll sink to being a patron of the poor and go about enjoying yourself at making them self-conscious and envious."

"They're not at all sad down this way," said Howard, "except in the usual inescapable human ways. When they're not hit too hard, they bear up wonderfully. You see, living on the verge of ruin and tumbling over every few weeks get one used to it. It ceases to give the sensation of event."

Their automobile had turned into Park Row and so reached the News-Record building in Printing House Square. Howard took the two women to the elevator and they shot upward in a car crowded with telegraph messengers, each carrying one or more envelopes, some of them bearing in bold black type the words: "News!—Rush!"

"I suppose that is the news for the paper?" Mrs. Carnarvon asked.

"A little of it. Our special cable and special news from towns to which we have no direct wire and also the Associated Press reports come this way. But we don't use much Associated Press matter, as it is the same for all the papers."

"What do you do with it?"

"Throw it away. A New York newspaper throws away every night enough to fill two papers and often enough to fill five or six."

"Isn't that very wasteful?"

"Yes, but it's necessary. Every editor has his own idea of what to print and what not to print and how much space each news event calls for. It is there that editors show their judgment or lack of it. To print the things the people wish to read in the quantities the people like and in the form the most people can most easily understand—that is success as an editor."

"No doubt," said Marian, thinking of the low view all her friends took of Howard's newspaper, "if you were making a newspaper to please yourself, you would make a very different one."

"Oh, no," laughed Howard, "I print what I myself like; that is, what I like to find in a newspaper. We print human news made by human beings and interesting to human beings. And we don't pretend to be anything more than human. We try never to think of our own idea of what the people ought to read, but always to get at what the people themselves think they ought to read. We are journalists, not news-censors."

"I must say newspapers do not interest me." Marian confessed it a little diffidently.

"You are probably not interested," Howard answered, "because you don't care for news. It is a queer passion—the passion for news. The public has it in a way. But to see it in its delirium you must come here."

"This seems quiet enough." Marian looked about Howard's upstairs office. It was silent, and from the windows one could see New York and its rivers and harbour, vast, vague, mysterious, animated yet quiet.

"Oh, I rarely come here—a few hours a week," Howard replied. "On this floor the editorial writers work." He opened a door leading to a private hall. There were five small rooms. In each sat a coatless man, smoking and writing. One was Segur, and Howard called to him.

"Are you too busy to look after Mrs. Carnarvon and Miss Trevor for a few minutes? I must go downstairs."

Segur gave some "copy" to a boy who handed him a bundle of proofs and rushed away down a narrow staircase. Howard descended in the elevator, and Segur, who had put on his coat, sat talking to the two women as he looked through the proofs, glancing at each narrow strip, then letting it drop to the floor.

"You don't mind my working?" he asked. "I have to look at these things to see if there is any news that calls for editional attention. If I find anything and can think an editorial thought about it, I write it; and if Howard is in the humour, perhaps the public is permitted to read it."

"Is he severe?" asked Mrs. Carnarvon.

"The 'worst ever,'" laughed Segur. "He is very positive and likes only a certain style and won't have anything that doesn't exactly fit his ideas. He's easy to get along with but difficult to work for."

"I imagine his positiveness is the secret of his success." Marian knew that Segur was half in jest and was fond of Howard. But she couldn't endure hearing him criticised.

"No. I think he succeeds because he works, pushes straight on, never stops to repair blunders but never makes the same kind of a blunder the second time."

Segur's eye caught an item that suggested an editorial paragraph. He sat at Howard's desk, thought a moment, scrawled half a dozen lines in a large ragged hand on a sheet of ruled yellow paper, and pressed an electric button. The boy came, handed him another thick bundle of proofs, took the "copy" and withdrew. Just then Howard returned.

"We'll go down to the news-room," he said.

The windows of the great news-room were thrown wide. Scores of electric lights made it bright. At the various desks or in the aisles were perhaps fifty men, most of them young, none of them beyond middle age. They were in every kind of clothing from the most fashionable summer attire to an old pair of cheap and stained duck trousers, collarless negligee shirt open all the way down the front and suspenders hanging about the hips.

Some were writing long-hand; others were pounding away at the typewriter; others were talking in undertones to "typists" taking dictation to the machine; others were reading "copy" and altering it with huge blue pencils which made apparently unreadable smears wherever they touched the paper. In and out skurried a dozen office-boys, responding to calls from various desks, bringing bundles of proofs, thrusting copy into boxes which instantly and noisily shot up through the ceiling.

It was a scene of confusion and furious activity. The face of each individual was calm and his motions by themselves were not excited. But taking all together and adding the tense, strained expression underneath the calm—the expression of the professional gambler—there was a total of active energy that was oppressive.

"We had a fire below us one night," said Howard. "We are two hundred feet from the street and there were no fire escapes. We all thought it was good-bye. It was nearly half an hour before we found out that the smoke booming up the stairways and into this room had no danger behind it."

"Gracious!" Mrs. Carnarvon shuddered and looked uneasily about.

"It's perfectly safe," Howard reassured her. "We've arranged things better since then. Besides, that fire demonstrated that the building was fireproof."

"And what happened?" asked Miss Trevor.

"Why, just what you see now. The Managing Editor, Mr. King over there—I'll introduce him to you presently—went up to a group of men standing at one of the windows. They were pretending indifference as they looked down at the crowd which was shouting and tossing its arms in a way that more than suggested pity for us poor devils up here. Well, King said: 'Boys, boys, this isn't getting out a paper.' Every one went back to his work and—and that was all."

They went on to the room behind the newsroom. As Howard opened its heavy door a sound, almost a roar, of clicking instruments and typewriters burst out. Here again were scores of desks with men seated at them, every man with a typewriter and a telegraph instrument before him.

"These are our direct wires," Howard explained. "Our correspondents in all the big cities, east, west, north and south and in London, are at the other end of these wires. Let me show you."

Howard spoke to the operator nearest them. "Whom have you got?"

"I'm taking three thousand words from Kansas City," he replied. "Washington is on the next wire."

"Ask Mr. Simpson how the President is to-night," Howard said to the Washington operator.

His instrument clicked a few times and was silent. Almost immediately the receiver began to click and, as the operator dashed the message off on his typewriter the two women read over his shoulder: "Just came from White House. He is no better, probably a little worse because weaker. Simpson."

"And can you hear just as quickly from London?" Marian asked.

"Almost. I'll try. There is always a little delay in transmission from the land systems to the cable system; and messages have to be telephoned between our office in Trafalgar Square and the cable office down in the city. Let's see, it's five o'clock in the morning in London now. They've been having it hot there. I'll ask about the weather."

Howard dictated to the man at the London wire: "Roberts, London. How is the weather? Howard."

In less than ten minutes the cable-man handed Howard a typewritten slip reading: "News-Record, New York, Howard: Thermometer 97 our office now. Promises hottest day yet. Roberts."

"I never before realised how we have destroyed distance," said Mrs. Carnarvon.

"I don't think any one but a newspaper editor completely realises it," Howard answered. "As one sits here night after night, sending messages far and wide and receiving immediate answers, he loses all sense of space. The whole world seems to be in his anteroom."

"I begin to see fascination in this life of yours." Marian's face showed interest to enthusiasm. "This atmosphere tightens one's nerves. It seems to me that in the next moment I shall hear of some thrilling happening."

"It's listening for the first rumour of the 'about to happen' that makes newspaper-men so old and yet so young, so worn and yet so eager. Every night, every moment of every night, we are expecting it, hoping for some astounding news which it will test our resources to the utmost to present adequately."

From the news-room they went up to the composing room—a vast hall of confusion, filled with strange-looking machines and half-dressed men and boys. Some were hurrying about with galleys of type, with large metal frames; some were wheeling tables here and there; scores of men and a few women were seated at the machines. These responded to touches upon their key-boards by going through uncanny internal agitations. Then out from a mysterious somewhere would come a small thin strip of almost hot metal, the width of a newspaper column and marked along one edge with letters printed backwards.

Up through the floor of this room burst boxes filled with "copy." Boys snatched the scrawled, ragged-looking sheets and tossed them upon a desk. A man seated there cut them into little strips, hanging each strip upon a hook. A line of men filed rapidly past these hooks, snatching each man a single strip and darting away to a machine.

"It is getting late," said Howard. "The final rush for the first edition is on. They are setting the last 'copy.'"

"But," Mrs. Carnarvon asked, "how do they ever get the different parts of the different news-items together straight?"

"The man who is cutting copy there—don't you see him make little marks on each piece? Those marks tell them just where their 'take,' as they call it, belongs."

They went over to the part of the great room where there were many tables, on each a metal frame about the size of a page of the newspaper. Some of the frames were filled with type, others were partly empty. And men were lifting into them the galleys of type under the direction of the Night Editor and his staff. As soon as a frame was filled two men began to even the ends of the columns and then to screw up an inside framework which held the type firmly in place. Then a man laid a great sheet of what looked like blotting-paper upon the page of type and pounded it down with a mallet and scraped it with a stiff brush.

"That is the matrix," said Howard. "See him putting it on the elevator." They looked down the shaft. "It has dropped to the sub-basement," said Howard, "two hundred and fifty feet below us. They are already bending it into a casting-box of the shape of the cylinders on the presses; metal will be poured in and when it is cool, you will have the metal form, the metal impression of the page. It will be fastened upon the press to print from."

They walked back through the room which was now in almost lunatic confusion—forms being locked; galleys being lifted in; editors, compositors, boys, rushing to and fro in a fury of activity. Again the phenomenon of the news-room, the individual faces calm but their tense expressions and their swift motions making an impression of almost irrational excitement.

"Why such haste?" asked Marian.

"Because the paper must be put to press. It must contain the very latest news and it must also catch the mails; and the mail-trains do not wait."

They descended in the main elevator to the ground floor and then went down a dark and winding staircase until they faced an iron door. Howard pushed it open and they entered the press-room. Its temperature was blood-heat, its air heavy and nauseating with the odours of ink, moist paper and oil, its lights dim. They were in a gallery and below them on all sides were the huge presses, silent, motionless, waiting.

Suddenly a small army of men leaped upon the mighty machines, scrambled over them, then sprang back. With a tremendous roar that shook the entire building the presses began to revolve, to hurl out great heaps of newspapers.

"Those presses eat six hundred thousand pounds of paper and four tons of ink a week," Howard shouted. "They can throw out two hundred thousand complete papers an hour—papers that are cut, folded, pasted, and ready to send away. Let us go before you are stifled. This air is horrible."

They returned in the elevator to his lofty office. Even there a slight vibration from the press-room could be felt. But it was calm and still, a fit place from which to view the panorama of sleeping city and drowsy harbour tranquil in the moonlight.

"Look." Howard was leaning over the railing just outside his window.

They looked straight down three hundred feet to the street made bright by electric lights. Scores of wagons loaded with newspapers were rushing away from the several newspaper buildings. The shouts, the clash of hoofs and heavy tires on the granite blocks, the whirr of automobiles, were borne faintly upward.

"It is the race to the railway stations to catch the mail-trains," Howard explained. "The first editions go to the country. These wagons are hurrying in order that tens of thousands of people hundreds of miles away, at Boston, Philadelphia, Washington and scores on scores of towns between and beyond, may find the New York newspapers on their breakfast-tables."

The office-boy came with a bundle of papers, warm, moist, the ink brilliant.

"And now for the inquest," said Howard.

"The inquest?" Marian looked at him inquiringly.

"Yes—viewing the corpse. It was to give birth to this that there was all that intensity and fury—that and a thousand times more. For, remember, this paper is the work of perhaps twenty thousand brains, in every part of the world, throughout civilisation and far into the depths of barbarism. Look at these date lines—cities and towns everywhere in our own country, Canada, Mexico, Central America, South America. You'll find most of the capitals of Europe represented; and Africa, north, south and central, east and west coast. Here's India and here the heart of Siberia.

"There is China and there Japan and there Australia. Think of these scores of newspaper correspondents telegraphing news of the doings of their fellow beings—not what they did last month or last year, but what they did a few hours ago—some of it what they were doing while we were dining up at Sherry's. Then think of the thousands on thousands of these newspaper-men, eager, watchful agents of publicity, who were on duty but had nothing to report to-day. And——"

Howard shrugged his shoulders and tossed the paper from him.

"There it lies," he said, "a corpse. Already a corpse, its life ended before it was fairly born. There it is, dead and done for—writ in water, and by anonymous hands. Who knows who did it? Who cares?"

He caught Marian's eyes, looking wonder and reproach.

"I don't like to hear you say that," she said, forgetting Mrs. Carnarvon. "Other men—yes, the little men who work for the cheap rewards. But not you, who work for the sake of work. This night's experience has thrilled me. I understand your profession now. I see what it means to us all, to civilisation, what a splendid force for good, for enlightenment, for uplifting it is. I can see a great flood of light radiating from this building, pouring into the dark places, driving away ignorance. And the thunder of those presses seems to me to fill the world with some mighty command—what is it?—oh, yes—I can hear it distinctly. It is, 'Let there be light!'"

Mrs. Carnarvon's back was toward them and she was looking out at the harbour. Howard put his hands upon Marian's shoulders and they looked each the other straight in the eyes.

"Lovers and comrades," he said, "always. And how strong we are—together!"



XIX.

"I MUST BE RICH."

"While I don't feel dependent upon the owners of the News-Record, still I am not exactly independent of them either. And if I left them it would only be to become dependent in the same way upon somebody else. A man who makes his living by the advocacy of principles should be wholly free. If he isn't, the principles are sure sooner or later to become incidental to the living, instead of the living being incidental to the principles."

"But you see—perhaps I ought to have told you before—that is, there may be"—Marian was stammering and blushing.

"What's the matter? Don't frighten me by looking so—so criminal," Howard laughed.

It was late in August. Marian was visiting Mrs. Brandon at Irvington-on-the-Hudson and she and Howard were driving.

"I never told you. But the fact is"—she hesitated again.

"Is it about your other engagement? You never told me about that—how you broke it off. I don't want you to tell me unless you wish to. You know I never meddle in past matters. I'm simply trying to help you out."

"Instead, you're making it worse. I'd rather not tell you that if——"

"We'll never speak of it again. And now, what is it that is troubling you?"

"I have been trying to tell you—I wish you wouldn't look at me—I've got a small income—it's really very small."

"I'm glad to hear it."

"I was afraid you wouldn't like it. It isn't very big—only about eight thousand a year—some years not so much. But then, if anything happened—we could be—we could live."

Howard smiled as he looked at her—but not with his eyes.

"I'm glad," he said. "It makes me feel safer in several ways. And I'm especially glad that it is not larger than mine. I know it's stupid, as so many of our instincts are; but I should not like to marry a woman who had a larger income than I could earn. I think it is the only remnant I have of the 'lord and master' idea that makes so many men ridiculous. But we need not let that bother us. Fate has made us about equal in this respect, so unimportant yet so important; and we are each independent of the other. Each will always know that love is the only bond that holds us together."

They decided that they would live at the rate of about fifteen thousand a year and would put by the rest of their income. She was to undertake the entire management of their home, he transferring his share by check each month.

"And so," she said, "we shall never have to discuss money matters."

"We couldn't," laughed Howard. "I don't know anything about them and could not take part in a discussion."

As they were to be married in November, they planned to take an apartment when Marian came back to town—in late September. She was to attend to the furnishing and all was to be in readiness by the time they were married. Howard was to get a six weeks' vacation and, as soon as they returned, they were to go to housekeeping.

Her visit to the News-Record office had made a change in her. Until she met Howard, she had known only the world-that-idles and the world-that-drudges. Howard brought her the first real news of the world-that-works. Of course she knew that there was such a world, but she had confused it with the world-that-drudges. She liked to hear Howard talk about his world, but she thought that his enthusiasm blinded him to the truth of its drudgery; and she often caught herself half regretting that he had to work.

But that vast machine for the swift collecting and distributing of the news of the world had opened her eyes, had made her see her lover and, through him, his life, in a different aspect. She had accepted the supercilious, thoughtless opinion of those about her that the newspaper is a mere purveyor of inaccurate gossip. And while Howard had tried to show her his profession as it was, he had only succeeded in convincing her that he himself had an exalted view of it; a view which she thought creditable to him but wide of the disagreeable truth.

On that trip down-town she had seen "the press" with the flaws reduced and the merits looming. She had looked into those all-seeing eyes that watch the councils of statesmen and the movements of nations and peoples, yet also note the swing of a murderous knife in an alley of the slums. She had heard that stentorian voice of Publicity, arousing the people of the earth to apprehend, to reflect, to progress.

She had been proud of Howard for his appearance, for what he said and the way he said it. Now she was proud of him for the part he was taking in this wonderful world-that-works. And she would not have confessed to him how insignificant she felt, how weak and worthless.

She thought she was impatient for the time to come when she could learn how to help him in his work, could begin to feel that she too had a real share in it. With what seemed to her most creditable energy and self-sacrifice she tried again to interest herself in newspapers. But the trivial parts bored her; the chronicles of crime repelled her; and the politics and most of the other serious articles were beyond the range of her knowledge or of her interest. "I shall wait until we are married," she said, "then he will teach me." And she did not suspect how significant, how ominous her postponement was.

She asked him if he would not teach her and he replied: "Why, certainly, if you are interested. But I don't intend to trouble you with the details of my profession. I want you to lead your own life—to do what interests you."

She did not stop to analyse her feeling of relief at this release, and went on to protest: "But I want your life to be my life. I want there to be only one life—our life."

"And there shall be—each contributing his share, at least I'll try to contribute mine. But you have your own individuality, dear; and a very strong one it is. And I don't want you to change."

At the time he was deep in his plans for illustrating the News-Record. Early in that fall's campaign they had secured the best cartoonist in America. Cartoons are rarely the work of one man but are got up by consultations. Howard spent never less than an hour each day with the cartoonist, Wickham, wrestling with the problem of the next day's picture. For he insisted upon having a striking cartoon each day, and gave it the most conspicuous place in the paper—the top-centre of the first page.