Pap is, I think, a soft innocuous food, slightly sugary in flavour, suitable for infants. I should never have dreamed of describing the articles in The Belfast Newsletter as pap. An infant nourished on them would either suffer badly from the form of indigestion called flatulence or would grow up to be an exceedingly ferocious man. I felt, however, that if McNeice had anything to do with the editing of The Loyalist its articles would be of such a kind that those of the Newsletter would seem, by comparison, papescent.
“We’re running it as a weekly,” said McNeice, “and what we want is to get it into the home of every Protestant farmer, and every working-man in Belfast. We are circulating the first six numbers free. After that we shall charge a penny.”
I looked at The Loyalist. It was very well printed, on good paper. It looked something like The Spectator, but had none of the pleasant advertisements of schools and books, and much fewer pages of correspondence than the English weekly has.
“Surely,” I said, “you can’t expect it to pay at that price.”
“We don’t,” said McNeice. “We’ve plenty of money behind us. Conroy—you know Conroy, don’t you?”
“Oh,” I said, “then Lady Moyne got a subscription out of him after all. I knew she intended to.”
“Lady Moyne isn’t in this at all,” said McNeice. “We’re out for business with The Loyalist. Lady Moyne’s—well, I don’t quite see Lady Moyne running The Loyalist.”
“She’s a tremendously keen Unionist,” I said. “She gave an address to the working-women of Belfast the week before last, one of the most moving—”
“All frills,” said McNeice, “silk frills. Your friend Crossan is acting as one of our agents, distributing the paper for us. That’ll give you an idea of the lines we’re going on.”
Crossan, I admit, is the last man I should suspect of being interested in frills. The mention of his name gave me an idea.