QUERY FIVE.
Do you find editing such a great journal as the Woman’s House Journal hard work? It must be, for I find it very hard to edit properly my own little country weekly.
This question it is almost impossible to answer; to you my work would seem Herculean, unceasing, impossible; but to me it is so different that I feel that I cannot answer this question to make myself intelligible. This question is doubly difficult to answer, for I have systematized my work by establishing a drag net for getting material. I will explain my method. I take up the latest magazine; I see a story by some new great writer, a society leader in the metropolis. Presto! I order a series of articles on “How Women Should Behave at Teas” from her pen. I hear that a great English novelist is coming over to seek the American dollar; again, as with lightning, I order an article “How Your Women Impress Me.” It is immaterial to me what they actually do write, or how far they wander from their text, so long as they use my ready made titles. They look so nice in the index.
In this way, I use the small talk of the writers as a soft food for my readers. Just as you attempt, in your feeble way, to serve up the gossip of your little hamlet in your weekly paper, so I do; for I tell you in confidence what women want is not literature, not art, not science, but gossip. So I make all the great writers of the day write gossip for them. This is the secret of my success. You should feel very happy now, for, although my thoughts and pen fly with lightninglike rapidity, I have spent five hundred dollars’ worth of time in answering your inquiry.
I will answer the rest of my anxious readers as soon as I can systematize other incidents in my very short but successward career. In the meantime, young men by following the lines laid down in this paper cannot fail of success, real, pure, noble success.
J. Howe Adams.
