"You shouldn't do things like that."
"Suppose I had gone. There wouldn't have been any story anyway."
"You've got to quit supposing. Let the city editor do that. The worst-looking assignment may turn out to be something if you go after it."
"Yes, once in every twenty years those directors of the Museum of Natural History get into an awful row about whether to put the ichthyosaurus on the second floor or in the basement and if anything like that happened they'd turn over the whole front page to me."
Peter shook his head gloomily. "You've got the wrong spirit. Even if your assignments are no good keep your eyes and your ears open when you go round the city and something will turn up. That's the way to show them. Bring in something you pick up yourself. Every day of the year there must be whole pagefuls of stuff just as good and better than the stuff we get in the paper. Only we don't find out about it. Keep scouting for stuff like that. When you say newspaper work's stupid you're practically saying that life's stupid."
"Maybe it is," said Pat, "but I'm not so sure about that as I am about newspapers."
"It's the same thing."
"I don't think so. Here's the sort of thing that makes life amusing and isn't worth anything for a newspaper. I was riding in one of those B.R.T. subway trains the other day and there were two women sitting next me on one of those cross seats. One was fat and middle-aged and the other was younger. I didn't notice her so much. It was the fat one who was doing the talking. She was very much excited and she was explaining something to the younger woman. 'Why, I said to him,' she told her—'I said to him, 'Why, Mr. Babcock, I don't want to be sacrilegious but that girl she's so sweet and so pretty I don't even believe our Lord himself could be mean to her.' That made me satisfied with the whole day, but imagine coming in and trying to put it over on Warren or Deering for a story."
"A story's got to begin some place and end some place," objected Peter.
"The kind I get don't begin any place and so I don't have to wait around for them to end."