"Is this a cheap one—at a higher price? or have the best ones come down?"
"It's a cheap one," she told me, "if you mean by that a popular one, and it's cheap enough. They have all of a million subscribers."
"And what's the difference, beyond the paper and print?" I asked.
"The pictures are good."
I looked it through again.
"Yes, very good, much improved. But I don't see anything phenomenal—unless it is the absence of advertisements."
Nellie took it out of my hand and ran it over.
"Just read some of that," she said. "Read this story—and this article—and that."
So I sat reading in the sunny silence, the gulls wheeling and dipping just as they used to, and the wide purple ocean just as changeable—and changeless—as ever.
One of the articles was on an extension of municipal service, and involved so much comment on preceding steps that I found it most enlightening. The other was a recent suggestion in educational psychology, and this too carried a retrospect of recent progress which gave me food for thought. The story was a clever one. I found it really amusing, and only on a second reading did I find what it was that gave the queer flavor to it. It was a story about women—two women who were in business partnership, with their adventures, singly and together.