"A palpable hit. I'm glad I showed you mercy. Still it does not follow that because I read a newspaper, all newspapers are good Sunday reading. Indeed, there is much in this paper that is not good reading for Monday or any other day."
"Ah!" I exclaimed, looking grave, "then why do you read it?"
"I have not. A newspaper is like the world of which it is a brief record—full of good and evil. In either case, if one does not like the evil, it can be left alone."
"Which do you think predominates in that paper?"
"Oh, the good, in the main. There is an abundance of evil, too, but it is rather in the frank and undisguised record of the evil in the world. It does not seem to have got into the paper's blood and poisoned its whole life. It is easily skipped if one is so inclined. There are some journals in which the evil cannot be skipped. From the leading editorial to the obscurest advertisement, one stumbles on it everywhere. They are like certain regions in the South, in which there is no escape from the snakes and malaria. Now there are low places in this paper, but there is high ground also, where the air is good and wholesome, and where the outlook on the world is wide. That is the reason I take it."
"I was not aware that many young ladies looked, in journals of this character, beyond the record of deaths and marriages."
"We studied ancient history. Is it odd that we should have a faint desire to know what Americans are doing, as well as what the Babylonians did?"
"Oh, I do not decry your course as irrational. It seems rather—rather—"
"Rather too rational for a young lady."
"I did not say that; but here is my excuse," and I took from a table near a periodical entitled "The Young Lady's Own Weekly," addressed to Miss Adah Yocomb.