“Well, old man,” Billy, said laughingly, “I see they got to you for a home-run this morning with all the bases full.”
E. Cartwright had bristled at this and had expressed himself as not comprehending the esoteric significance of the allusion. Billy had then become more specific.
“They put it over on you,” he replied. “That press agent fellow with Olga Stephano, I mean.”
“Put it over on me?” the dramatic editor had returned. “I don’t exactly understand what you mean.”
“Say, old dear,” Billy had sarcastically responded, “it’s a worse case than I thought it was at first. You’d ought to see a doctor.”
E. Cartwright, who abhorred slang and those who used it, had become quite indignant at this and had insisted upon a clear explanation of what Billy Parsons meant. The latter gentleman obliged him with one. He pointed out, with great clarity, the trick that Jimmy Martin had played on the astute and dignified dramatic editor. He dwelt upon the number of times the name of Madame Stephano had been cunningly inserted into the correspondence and proved that the whole affair was a carefully calculated scheme for the exploitation of that lady.
The blinders of self-esteem having thus been torn from the eyes of the dramatic editor, that gentleman developed a decided distaste for further discussion of the subject and immured himself in his cramped office where he devoted himself to bitter rumination. Throughout the day his fellow laborers in the field of journalism seemed to take a malicious delight in playfully taunting him. On the way home for dinner he had met the dramatic editor of the rival Inquirer and that worthy had added to his fury by remarking, with a twinkle in his eye:
“That was a mighty interesting symposium on Stephano you ran this morning, Jenkins.”
At dinner he startled his sedate and shrinking wife by launching into a profane and pungent diatribe on the subject of press agents and announced his determination to start a nation-wide movement for their suppression and final extermination. He declared, in loud and ringing tones, that nothing but total annihilation of the entire tribe would at all satisfy his wishes in the matter.
The sting of the affair still rankled in his breast when he came down to the office on the following morning. When Nathan, the managing editor, looked in on him he was viciously assailing the dramatic page of a New York Sunday newspaper with a large pair of shears and wishing for a moment, as he clipped out items of theatrical information, that it was one Jimmy Martin instead of an innocent sheet of paper that he was attacking.