“Hello!” said the doctor; “a strike of editors, eh?”
“It’s hateful!” repeated Phyl.
“No one has been rough to you, have they?” said the mother quickly.
“I’d rather they had,” Dolly said. “It’s really horrid mother. I’m sure they don’t think the advertising will do them any good—they all just give them out of kindness. We hate kindness.”
“There’s an ungrateful pair for you,” the doctor said, but he patted Phyl’s shoulders so sympathetically that both girls burst out at last with an excited, [246] ]almost tearful account of the hatefulness of the work. They had bottled it up between them until now, for one of their mother’s earliest teachings had been to make the best of things and not to whine.
That was almost the end of the little paper. The girls maintained their resolution; rather than bring out one more issue under the existing circumstances they would go and be governesses on some bush station, or send Mary away and do all the work of the house themselves; earn money in some way they must, for they could not bear the thought of being a burden on the doctor.
Then the printer, seeing the advertisements were well started, offered to take the paper for his property, and pay the editors a joint salary of five pounds a month.
They accepted thankfully and fell to work again with fresh spirits to fill the twenty-eight pages of letterpress that was required monthly.
Sometimes they received outside contributions to help them in the task; the undergraduates whom Ted brought home for tennis on the chip court he and Clif had made, sometimes dropped into poetry or prose for them; once or twice when columns gaped hungrily the girls had begged from them various prize essays, and then the classic pages had held, side by side with an article on “How to Renovate a Drawing-room for Five Pounds,” or “Cookery Chats for Young Housewives,” “The Effect of the [247] ]Renaissance on the Theology of the Period,” or “The Architecture of Cheops and Cephrenes.”
But there were many months when they had no help at all, and then they had fourteen pages each of assorted matter, signed by a number of different names, to furnish.