end; especially if the
reviewer were a Frenchman or an American.

The interviewer is an insidious and wily person, and often presents
himself to the soft-hearted celebrity in such humble and pathetic
guise that one really hasn't the courage to snub him. He has come
such a long way for such a little thing! it is such a lowly function
he plies at the foot of that tall tree whose top you reached at a
single bound! And he is supposed to be a "gentleman," and has no
other means of keeping body and soul together! Then he is so
prostrate in admiration before your Immensity....

So you give way, and out comes the little note-book, and out comes
the little cross-examination.

As a rule, you are none the worse and the world is none the better;
we know all about you already--all, at least, that we want to know;
we have heard it all before, over and over again. But a poor
fellow-creature has earned his crust, and goes home the happier for
having talked to you about yourself and been treated like a man and
a brother.

But sometimes the reviewer is very terrible indeed in his jaunty
vulgarization of your distinguished personality, and you have to
wince and redden, and rue the day you let him inside your house, and
live down those light familiar paragraphs in which he describes you
and the way you dress and how you look and what jolly things you
say; and on what free and easy terms _he_ is with you, of all people
in the world!

But the most terrible of all is the pleasant gentleman from America,
who has yearned to know you for _so_ many years, and comes perhaps
with a letter of introduction--or even without!--not to interview
you or write about you (good heavens! he hates and scorns that
modern pest, the interviewer), but to sit at your feet and worship
at your shrine, and tell you of all the good you have done him and
his, all the happiness you have given them all--"the debt of a
lifetime!"

And you let yourself go before him, and so do your family, and so do
your old friends; is _he_ not also a friend, though not an old one?
You part with him almost in sorrow, he's so nice! And in three weeks
some kind person sends you from the other side such a printed
account of you and yours--so abominably true, so abominably
false--that the remembrance of it makes you wake up in the dead of
night, and most unjustly loathe an entire continent for breeding and
harboring such a shameless type of press reptile!

I feel hard-hearted toward