"If Katrina can do that with that man," I murmured, reflectively, as we entered the house, "I really believe you could work wonders with Adams. He would probably do the cooking and marketing—"
"If you're so impressed," remarked Jessica, in incisive tones, "I wonder you don't yield to the prayers and tears of your editor man."
My reply made Jessica sink into a hall chair which was fortunately at hand.
"I am going to," I said, placidly. And I did.
Jessica's nature being less womanly and yielding than mine, her surrender was a matter of longer time. In the interval I quite forgot her unimportant affairs, being wholly absorbed in the really extraordinary values of my own. Two weeks before the reopening of college, my reformed yellow journalist, who had come West to spend his brief vacation with me, was seated by my side one evening studying the admirable effect of a ring he had just placed on my finger. It is singular how fraught with human interest such moments can be, and Edward and I failed to hear Jessica as she opened the door. She looked over our heads as she spoke to me, Her face was rather red, but her voice and manner expressed a degree of indifference which I am convinced no human being has ever really felt on any subject.
"Did you say that you could give me Mollie Adams's address?" asked
Jessica.
XI
BART HARRINGTON, GENIUS
The assistant Sunday editor of the New York "Searchlight" was busy. This was not an unusual condition, but it frequently included unusually irritating features. His superior, Wilson, the Sunday editor, was a gentleman with a high brow and a large salary, who, having won a reputation as "a Napoleon of Journalism," had successfully cultivated a distaste for what he called "details." His specialty was the making of suggestions in editorial council, in cheery expectation that they would be carried out by his associates—an expectation so rarely realized that Mr. Wilson's visage had almost a habit of hurt wonder. "Details" continued to absorb the activity of the Sunday "Searchlight" office, and Maxwell, the assistant editor, attended to them all, murmuring bitterly against his chief as he labored.
On this special morning, moreover, he was receiving telephoned bulletins of the gradual disintegration of his biggest "special," scheduled for the coming Sunday edition, which was to tell with sympathetic amplitude of a beautiful French maiden who had drowned herself because some young man no longer loved her. The active reporter assigned to the case had telephoned first his discovery that the girl never had a lover, but cheerily suggested that this explained her suicide as well as the earlier theory, and wasn't so hackneyed, sagely adding that he would get the story anyhow. Subsequently he had rung up the office to report, with no slight disgust, that there was no suicide to explain, as the girl was not dead. She had merely gone to visit friends in the country, and the people in the house, missing her, had decided that the peaceful waters of the Hudson—