Howard, riding in the Park one morning late in the spring, came upon Mrs. Carnarvon. She gave him no chance to evade her, but joined him and accommodated her horse’s pace to his.
“And are you still on the News-Record?” she said. “I hope not.”
“Why?” Howard was smiling, glad to get an outside view of what he had been doing.
“Because it’s become so sensational. It used to be such a nice paper. And now—gracious, what headlines! What attacks on the very best people in the town!”
“Dreadful, isn’t it?” laughed Howard. “We’ve become so depraved that we are actually telling the truth about somebodies instead of only about nobodies.”
“I might have known that you would sympathise with that sort of thing.” Mrs. Carnarvon was teasing, yet reproachful. “You always were an anarchist.”
“Is it anarchistic to be no respecter of persons and to put big headlines over big items and little headlines over little items?”
“Oh, you know what I mean. You are encouraging the unruly classes.”
“Dear me! And we thought we were fighting the unruly class. We thought that it was our friends—or rather, your friends—the franchise grabbers and legislature-buyers who won’t obey the laws unless the laws happen to suit their convenience. They’re the only unruly class I know anything about. I’ve heard of another kind but I’ve never been able to find it. And I never hear much about it except when a lot of big rascals are making off weighted down with plunder. They always shout back over their shoulders: ‘Don’t raise a disturbance or you’ll arouse the unruly classes.’”
Mrs. Carnarvon was laughing. “You put it well,” she said, “and I’m not clever enough to answer you. But they all tell me the News-Record has become a dangerous paper, that it’s attacking everybody who has anything.”