"You mean make a society column report of it?"
"Yes."
"No. I'm a sort of special feature writer on the Herald, and I am to get only this speech of Major Coleman's to put in my Sunday page."
The lecture had commenced in good earnest by this time, and I was scribbling away in shorthand as I talked.
"Not one among us is insensible to the visions of patriotic pride and affection which the very name of 'Old Glory' conjures up within us, but at the same time we may do well to review, quite dispassionately, once in a while the wonderful chain of historical changes which came about in evolving this flag to its present form.... For we all realize that there is no perfect thing in this world which has not been an evolution from some imperfect thing.... When Pope Gregory, the"—Somethingth, I quite failed to catch his number—"granted to Scotland the white cross of St. Andrew, and to England the red cross of St. George, he faintly surmised what a tempest in a teapot he was stirring up!"
He paused, and the man at my side got in a word, edgewise.
"All of it?" he asked, looking aghast at the pages of long-tailed dots and dashes under my hand. I laughed.
"I'm paid to do it," I answered. "I don't disfigure my handwriting this way for nothing."
"But—but—you must be very clever," he commented, so appalled at the thought that he forgot he was talking to a stranger. I like that faculty. I like a man who dares to be awkwardly sincere.
"Not clever—only very needy," I replied, turning over the page as I saw the lecturer replace the white flag of St. Andrew into its stand and take up the thread of his talk. "And I don't know that I need get every word of the discourse. The women who read my page don't care a rap about flags—but they do care to see a picture of Major Coleman and his wife and their dog on the piazza of their winter home, just out from Tampa!—I've got to have enough of this lecture to carry that picture."