“Journalists are always honourable,” said Smithers. “It is their employers who sometimes—however, that’s neither here nor there. You may trust me. Now tell me. Why this objection to interviews? That’s what’s puzzling the public. You’re a business concern, aren’t you?”
“That’s just the reason,” said Carpentaria. “We aren’t a star-actor or a bogus company. We’re above interviews, we are. Do you catch Smith and Son, or Cook’s, or the North-Western Railway, or Mrs. Humphry Ward having themselves interviewed?”
“Not much,” ejaculated Ilam glumly.
“People who refuse to be interviewed have a status that other people can never have. Our business is our business. When we want the public to know anything, we take a page in the Herald, say, and pay two hundred and fifty pounds for it, and inform the public exactly what we do want ’em to know, in our own words. We do not require the assistance of interviewers. There’s the whole secret. What next?”
“That seems pretty straight,” Smithers agreed. “Another thing. Why have you gone and called this concern the City of Pleasure?”
“Because it is the City of Pleasure,” growled Ilam.
“Yes. But it seems rather a fancy name, doesn’t it?—rather too poetical, highfalutin?”
“That’s merely because you journalists never have any imagination,” Carpentaria explained. “You aren’t used to this name yet. It was you journalists who cried out that the Crystal Palace was a too poetical and highfalutin name for that glass wigwam over there”—and he pointed to the twin towers of Sydenham in the distance—“but you’ve got used to it, and you admit now that it is the Crystal Palace and couldn’t be anything else.”
Smithers laughed.
“Good!” said he. “All that’s nothing. Let me come to the core of the apple. Do you expect this thing to pay? Do you really mean it to pay, or is it only a millionaire’s lark? You know all the experts are saying it can’t pay.”