"One wise mother tells her children to divide all people into two classes—friends and strangers. Friends we love too well to gossip about; strangers we know too little.
"Another suggests to her children to meet a proposal toward gossip with the quiet remark, 'I like all my friends.' Nothing more can be said."
But it can; the child rebuked by the quiet remark has only to say, "Well, then, let's talk about Gaby Deslys or King Edward VII."
Park Row and Fleet Street
It is difficult for us to tell how accurately Philip Gibbs has pictured Fleet Street in his novel The Street of Adventure; for, externally at least, there is little resemblance to Park Row. We cite, for instance, a description of the city room of The Star as Francis Luttrell found it on his first day:
"It was a large room, with a number of desks divided by glass partitions and with a large table in the center. At the far end of the room was a fire burning brightly in the grate, and in front of it were two men and a girl, the men in swing chairs with their legs stretched out, the girl on the floor in the billows of a black silk skirt, arranging chestnuts on the first bar of the grate."
There isn't any grate in our city room and we have no roasting parties. There have been days in mid-July when it might have been possible to fry eggs on the skylight of our city room, but we don't remember that anybody ever tried it. Nor is our memory stirred to any local reminiscences by the description of The Star office just before press time, when "silence reigned in the room except for the scratching of pens." Probably there are not more than half a dozen pens in all Park Row and four of them are on The Evening Post.
We find the difference in spirit not so great. There is a great deal about the terrific strain of newspaper work and how a brutal city editor will drive a finely tempered reporter until he has had the best of his brains and then toss him aside like a withered violet.
"Fleet Street," says Gibbs, who tells the story partly in the first person, "would kill you in a year—it is very cruel, very callous to the sufferings of men's souls and bodies."