As a rule, you are none the worse and the world is none the better; we know all about you already—all, at least, that we want to know; we have heard it all before, over and over again. But a poor fellow‑creature has earned his crust, and goes home the happier for having talked to you about yourself and been treated like a man and a brother.
But sometimes the reviewer is very terrible indeed in his jaunty vulgarization of your distinguished personality, and you have to wince and redden, and rue the day you let him inside your house, and live down those light familiar paragraphs in which he describes you and the way you dress and how you look and what jolly things you say; and on what free and easy terms he is with you, of all people in the world!
But the most terrible of all is the pleasant gentleman from America, who has yearned to know you for so many years, and comes perhaps with a letter of introduction—or even without!—not to interview you or write about you (good heavens! he hates and scorns that modern pest, the interviewer), but to sit at your feet and worship at your shrine, and tell you of all the good you have done him and his, all the happiness you have given them all—"the debt of a lifetime!"
And you let yourself go before him, and so do your family, and so do your old friends; is he not also a friend, though not an old one? You part with him almost in sorrow, he's so nice! And in three weeks some kind person sends you from the other side such a printed account of you and yours—so abominably true, so abominably false—that the remembrance of it makes you wake up in the dead of night, and most unjustly loathe an entire continent for breeding and harboring such a shameless type of press reptile!
I feel hard‑hearted towards the interviewer, I own. I wish him, and those who employ him, a better trade; and a better taste to whoever reads what he writes. But Barty could be hard‑hearted to nobody, and always regretted having granted the interview when he saw the published outcome of it.
Fortunately, M. Paroly was decently discreet.
"I've got a Frenchman coming this afternoon—a tremendous swell," said Barty, at lunch.
Leah. "Who is he?"
Barty. "M. Paroly, of the Débats."