se, you don't see
Wayland, do you mind giving me the exact figures about that independent
paper? We are all to go home together to-morrow. Let us put the
figures down. I can tell him the rest when the others are not about;
and do you know, I think I have heard him speak of some one who might
back this kind of scheme?"

Oh, crafty woman! Do you think the kindly eyes behind those strongly
focussed glasses did not bore in behind your guarded words? Just once
did she interrupt his quick run of explanations.

"Is your idea to run an altogether _staid_ journal, or a yellow one?"
she asked.

He was plainly taken aback. He laid down his pencil.

"If you were a man, I could explain that easier!"

"Because, I'm done with the kind of goodness that's pickled and put
away in a self-sealer where it won't spoil like old-fashioned jam for
company," she said.

The news editor's eyes opened very wide, indeed! She had said "_I'm
done_" quite as unconsciously as he had let slip words inadmissable in
polite converse.

"It isn't piety done up in homoeopathic pills the world wants," she
went on.

"No, it's punch," he broke in; "and what's the use of dickering with a
little two-for-a-cent high-brow, superior, exclusive, self-righteous
rag of a daily that will reach only a handful of sissy people?
Democracy is here; and it's here for keeps, the rule of the many good
or bad; and it's as your old parson said in the court room, it's _going
to be the United States of the World_. What's the use of issuing a rag
sheet that will preach to a little parlorful of sissies and high-brows?
You've got to get the crowd, and to educate 'em up to self-government,
to pelt 'em to a pulp with facts! You've got to get 'em if you take
them by the scruff of the neck, Miss MacDonald! While the churches and
the teachers and the preachers sit back self-superior and
self-sufficient, Miss MacDonald, where's the crowd? They're out in the
street! You've got to get 'em! You've got to get the facts before
'em! People curse the yellow journals! All right! But they reach an
audience of a million a day; every one of them; and your self-superior
journals don't touch ten-thousand! Miss MacDonald, which is having the
telling influence, for good or evil? Which is getting the crowd? Oh,
I know they publish pictures of pugilists' big toes and base ball
pitchers' thumbs the size of a half page; but if I could ram a moral
truth or a hard fact down the fool-