"That won't do for me," he said.
"Then you won't do for me," I said, and turned upon my heel.
However, I rather liked the look of the man, and didn't like to disappoint him altogether, being a journalist myself.
"I am waiting for a gentleman," I said. "I expect him every minute, and then I must be off."
"You may wait, but I guess that gentleman won't arrive," said the journalist, "and I want a column out of you for our evening paper."
A frightful thought flashed across my mind.
"Have I been sold?"
I had, and I thought more of the gentleman of the Press (all the Pressmen were very kind to me in Washington, and, indeed, all over America) than I did of my newly-made erratic acquaintance.
When I paid my second and professional visit to Washington years afterwards, of course it was a different matter. My representative had for business reasons to invite the Press to "boom" me. I was rated a good subject for interviewers, being only too pleased to do my best for our mutual benefit. One day a representative of the important Washington family paper called. We lunched and chatted, and subsequently over a cigar he informed me that he knew nothing about art or artists or politics, nor had he any object in common with me—in fact, he was the sporting editor. The interview appeared—two long columns on prize fighting! I was the innocent "peg" upon which the sporting writer hung his own ideas. He discussed "a rendezvous in the Rockies," remote from the centre of civilisation, as surely an appropriate locale for a train-scuttling speciality or a fight to a death finish between Roaring Gore and Wild Whiskers. A pair of athletes, scienced to the tips of their vibrating digits, compelled to appeal to the courtesy of a wild and well-whiskered Legislature, would doubtless appear inconsistent to gentlemen of the National Sporting Club of London, who were anxious to have the big fight settled within earshot of Bow Bells, in the luxurious rooms of the London National Sporting Club. One combatant, I declared, "swallowed the gruel rammed at him as if it were mother's milk," the lads "had enough blood on tap to run a sizeable slaughterhouse"; then a British fighter "swallowing a lobster salad on top of a whiskey sour, with a dose of prussic acid by way of dessert"; and references to my knowledge of the "Freds," "Toms," or "Dicks" of the Sporting Press of London, and to my familiarity with "Charlies," "Fitzs," and "Jims" of the "Magic Circle," were astounding.
My manager rushed into my rooms with the paper in question. "This will ruin your prospects here! We depend on the women folk; they will never come to hear you after reading this!" And so it was. In spite of other interviewers at Washington writing of me as "an English good fellow, rich and juicy, and genial in flavour, like other hot stuffs of that remarkable country"; and another,