“My dear sir, one would think you had a crime on your conscience.”
Cipriani de Lloseta smiled--such a smile as John Craik had never seen before.
“I have many,” he answered. “Who has not?”
“Yes; they accumulate as life goes on, do they not?”
“What I fear,” went on De Lloseta, “is the idle gossip which obtains in England under the pleasant title of ‘Society Notes,’ ‘Boudoir Chat,’ and other new-fangled vulgarities. In Spain we have not that.”
“Then Spain is the Promised Land.”
“Your Society journalists may talk of the English nobility, though the aristocracy that fills the ‘Society Notes’ is almost invariably the aristocracy of yesterday. But I want to keep the Spanish families out of it if possible--the names that were there before printing was invented.”
“Printing and education are too cheap nowadays,” said John Craik. “They are both dangerous instruments in the hands of fools, and it is the fool who goes to the cheap market. But you need not be afraid of the Society papers. It is only those who wish to be advertised who find themselves there.”
De Lloseta’s thoughts had gone back to the Commentator. He picked up the magazine and was looking over the pages of the Spanish article.
“It is clever,” he said. “It is very clever.”