"Plain Yankee this time," said Fergus.
"Now, Fergus!" exclaimed Anthy severely. "You see," she continued, "we positively had to do something. The paper has been going downhill ever since my father's death. Father knew how to make it pay, even with half the families in town taking the cheap city dailies. But times are changing, and we've got to modernize or perish."
While she spoke with conviction, her words lacked enthusiasm, and they had, moreover, a certain cut-and-dried sound. "Times are changing. Modernize or perish!"
Anthy did not know it, of course, but she was living at the psychological moment in our history when the whole country was turning for salvation to that finished product, that perfect flower, of our institutions, the Practical Business Man. Was a city sick, or a church declining in its membership, or a college suffering from slow starvation, or a newspaper down with neurasthenia, why, call in a Practical Business Man. Let him administer up-to-date remedies; let him hustle, push, advertise.
It was thus, as an example of what the historian loves to call "remote causes," that Mr. Ed Smith came to Hempfield and the Star. He was a graduate of small-town journalism in its most progressive guises, and if any one was ever entitled to the degree of P. B. M. cum laude, it was Ed Smith.
He had come at Anthy's call—after having made certain eminently sound and satisfying financial arrangements. When it came finally to the issue, Anthy had seen that the only alternative to the extinction of the Star was some desperate and drastic remedy. And Ed Smith was that desperate and drastic remedy.
"I felt," she said to me, "that I must do everything I could to keep the Star alive. My father devoted all his life to it, and then, there was Uncle Newt—how could Uncle Newt live without a newspaper?"
I did not know until long afterward what the sacrifice had meant to Anthy. It meant not only a surrender of all her immediate hopes of completing her college work, but she was compelled to risk everything she had. First, she had borrowed all the money she could raise on the old home, and with this she paid off the accumulated debts of the Star. With the remainder, which Ed Smith spoke of as Working Capital, she plunged into the unknown and venturesome seas of modernized journalism.
She had not gone to these lengths, however, without the advice of old Judge Fendall of Hempfield, one of her father's close friends, and a man I have long admired at a distance, a fine, sound old gentleman, with a vast respect for business and business men. Besides this, Anthy had known Ed for several years; he had called on her father, had, indeed, called on her.
It was bitter business for the old Captain to find himself, after so many glorious years, fallen upon such evil days. I have always been amused by the thought of the first meeting between Ed Smith and the Captain, as reported afterward by Fergus (with grim joy).