After an unfortunate week of shattered plans for spending an evening together, she sighed impatiently. "I wish you would give up Fleet Street," she said. "You could do better work."
"Oh!" he said, light-heartedly, "one day I will. I'll sit down and write my book. But it's too soon yet."
She looked at him with doubt in her eyes. She seemed to be feeling her way through the dark corridors of his mind.
"But surely you don't like the work," she said.
He laughed. "Some days I don't, and some days I do. Some days I think it loathsome, and some days I think it glorious.... We're all like that."
A day came when he thought it glorious, when Fleet Street gave him of its best, a swift reward for his allegiance.
He was in the reporters' room one evening, talking the latest office gossip with Jamieson and Willoughby, which concerned the marriage of The Day's Miss Minger, with young Hartopp of The Gazette. It was an event in Fleet Street, marking, in its way, the end of the epoch of the woman reporter.
"I don't think a reporters' room is a fit place for a woman," Willoughby said. "They're all right for their special work—cooking and dress and weddings, and all that—but hard, right-down chasing after stories is man's work."
"I didn't mind Miss Minger," remarked Humphrey. "She was a jolly good sport, but women have us at a disadvantage. Remember that time when we all fell down on the gun-running story at Harwich, and Miss Minger sailed in, smiled her prettiest, and squeezed a scoop out of them."