He was welcomed with a military salute by the commissionaire at the gate; snapshotted thrice--when paying the cabman, eating a lozenge, and handing his card to a youth in the enquiry office. When inside the editorial sanctum, he was induced to pose for two flash-light photographs--one showing him engaged in earnest talk with the great man, the other with his hand resting on the tousled head of a printer's devil.
These pictures were to illustrate an "interview"--dictated to a shorthand writer--which explained the Archdeacon's ideas and intentions in connection with his and the Lord Mayor's new determinings, and so gave the Editor an excuse for a volte-face.
The Archdeacon was in a rapture of enthusiasm white hot. This prominent usefulness, or useful prominence, was gratifying. He promised to send his menu, that the inscribed resolutions might be reproduced in facsimile for the morrow's issue; and ended by asking the Editor to tea.
He went home more conscious than ever of being a man of influence and work.
So even the paper which you and I, O reader, habitually dislike and ignore, came over to the side of light.
The great organs of the Press, with amazing unanimity, rolled their machines, blew trumpets, and beat drums, in the interests of Fairy Reform. It was no sudden affair, that splendid combination; but a gradual all-round awakening to the benefit, delight, and need of preaching the causes of Elfdom.
The sober weeklies followed with such assumption of authority that they seemed to think they were leading. They had no hesitancy. The monthlies and quarterlies also, in due time, continued the chorus. It took about four months to bring this trend of influence to perfection, but then the cause went on like a tidal wave.
Oberon and Titania, strangely unconscious of the new-won rage for fairy goodness, became social factors; they left the select preserve of the Folklorists to become magazine favourites, the darlings of Fashion, high and low.
But this is very like anticipation, that bugbear of the sober historian, so we return to the present, as it was.
Emmanuel Oldstein found the keeping of his ideals a hard business. His midnight enthusiasm had strangely waned by the time of the milkman's chant.