Many of the reporters never came near the house. Instead, lurid stories were concocted in the back rooms of nearby roadhouses. And, failing to find us at home, interviews were faked so badly that they verged on the burlesque ... where not vulgar, they were vicious ... words were slipped in that implied things which, expressed clearly, had furnished ample grounds for libel.
Hildreth and I were pictured as living on frost fish almost entirely; the fish that run along the ocean shore, and, growing numb with the cold of autumn, are tossed up on the sand by the waves....
I was depicted as strident-voiced ... belligerent ... waving my arms wildly. It was said that, full of threats, I had taken a shotgun menacingly from a rack ... that a vicious bull dog lay between my feet, growling ... that I went, sockless, in sandals ... had long, flowing, uncombed hair....
Once a party of three reporters, from a big metropolitan paper,—two men and a woman, after stopping at a nearby road house till they were well lit,—drove about in a livery rig till they finally located us at the house of Mrs. Rond....
All the old nonsense was re-written ... things we had never said or even had in our thought ... vulgarities alien to Hildreth's mouth or mine....
The final insinuation—a sly touching on the fact that the Rond family was on intimate terms with me, and that the young daughters were attractive-looking, and seemed to favour the ideals I expressed with murmurs of approval ... thus the story afterward appeared....
Mrs. Rond, after a peculiarly impertinent question of the woman member of the party, realised by this time that the three reporters were more than a little tipsy, and ordered these guardians of the public morality out of the house....
In the first place, they had wormed admittance through a fraud to Hildreth and me ... the woman falsely pretended that she was a friend of Hildreth's mother ... a great stroke of journalistic enterprise.
Mrs. Rond's rebuke was so sharply worded that it got through even their thick skins....
I must say, though, that the behaviour of these three was not characteristic ... generally the newspaper men and women were most considerate and courteous ... even when they afterward wrote unpleasant articles about us. And often I have had them blue-pencil wild statements I had made, which, on second thought, I wished withdrawn ... and during all the uproar I never had a reporter break his word, once given.