“I hadn’t looked at it in that light,” Edna conceded. “After all, where’s the difference between interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for some paper, or interviewing Mr. Max Irwin for myself? It will be practice, too. I’ll go and look him up in the directory.”
“Letty, I know I can write if I get the chance,” she announced decisively a moment later. “I just FEEL that I have the feel of it, if you know what I mean.”
And Letty knew and nodded. “I wonder what he is like?” she asked softly.
“I’ll make it my business to find out,” Edna assured her; “and I’ll let you know inside forty-eight hours.”
Letty clapped her hands. “Good! That’s the newspaper spirit! Make it twenty-four hours and you are perfect!”
* * *
“—and I am very sorry to trouble you,” she concluded the statement of her case to Max Irwin, famous war correspondent and veteran journalist.
“Not at all,” he answered, with a deprecatory wave of the hand. “If you don’t do your own talking, who’s to do it for you? Now I understand your predicament precisely. You want to get on the Intelligencer, you want to get in at once, and you have had no previous experience. In the first place, then, have you any pull? There are a dozen men in the city, a line from whom would be an open-sesame. After that you would stand or fall by your own ability. There’s Senator Longbridge, for instance, and Claus Inskeep the street-car magnate, and Lane, and McChesney—” He paused, with voice suspended.
“I am sure I know none of them,” she answered despondently.
“It’s not necessary. Do you know any one that knows them? or any one that knows any one else that knows them?”