“Now tell me,” he said peremptorily. “What have you heard? You have news in your eye. I see it.”
“I have nothing to tell.”
“Suppose you tell the truth. You have the story, and you won’t give it up. Why not?”
“Well—you see—she confided in me—she said I was the only woman who had given her a decent word in twenty years; and if I told the story she would be in jail to-morrow night. Do you think I’d be so low as to tell it?”
“Sentimentality, my dear young woman, is fatal to a newspaper reporter. Suppose the entire staff should go silly; where would the ‘Day’ be?”
“It might possibly be a good deal more admirable than it is now.”
“We won’t go into a discussion of theory v. practice. I want that story.”
“You won’t get it.”
“Indeed.” He looked at her with cold angry eyes. “The trouble is that you have not been made to feel what the discipline of a newspaper office is—”
Patience leaned forward and smiled up audaciously into his face. “You would do exactly the same thing yourself,” she said; “so don’t scold any more. I admit that you frighten me half to death, but all the same I know that you would never send a poor old woman to prison—not to be made editor-in-chief.”