ch I gave you of my ideals? But I want it in the
right way and of the right brand. If I can't get it in the shape I like
it I don't want it at all; first-rate first-hand information, straight
from the tap, is what I'm after. I don't want to hear what some one
or other thinks that some one or other was told that some one or other
believed or said; and above all I don't want to print it. There's plenty
of that flowing in, and the best part of the job's to keep it out.
People just yearn to come in; they make love to me for it all over the
place; there's the biggest crowd at the door. But I say to them: 'You've
got to do something first, then I'll see; or at any rate you've got to
BE something!'"

"We sometimes see the Reverberator. You've some fine pieces," Francie
humanely replied.

"Sometimes only? Don't they send it to the old gentleman--the weekly
edition? I thought I had fixed that," said George Flack.

"I don't know; it's usually lying round. But Delia reads it more than I;
she reads pieces aloud. I like to read books; I read as many as I can."

"Well, it's all literature," said Mr. Flack; "it's all the press, the
great institution of our time. Some of the finest books have come out
first in the papers. It's the history of the age."

"I see you've got the same aspirations," Francie remarked kindly.

"The same aspirations?"

"Those you told me about that day at Saint-Germain."

"Oh I keep forgetting that I ever broke out to you that way.
Everything's so changed."

"Are you the proprietor of the paper now?" the girl went on, determined
not to catch this sentimental echo.

"What do you care? It wouldn't even be delicate in me to tell you; for
I DO remember the way you said you'd try and get your father to help me.
Don't say you've forgotten it, because you almost made me cry. Anyway,
that isn't the sort of help I want now and it wasn't the sort of help I
meant to ask you for then. I want sympathy and interest; I want some one
to say to me once in a while 'Keep up your old heart, Mr. Flack; you'll
come out all right.' You see I'm a working-man and I don't pretend to
be anything else," Francie's companion went on. "I don't live on the
accumulations of my ancestors. What I have I earn--what I am I've fought
for: I'm a real old travailleur, as they say here. I rejoice in it, but
there's one dark spot in it all the same."

"And what's that?" Francie decided not quite at once to ask.

"That it makes you ashamed