“Lucky there are three others,” she said. “I wouldn’t care for that gentleman—nor yet his Miss Eliot. But I suppose you can’t choose. The Buzz-saw next.”
The Buzz-saw was not subscribed to by the Grants. It was a murderous little political journal, full of gossip, and it exposed scandals rather than printed news. Its circulation was heavy and stray copies of it, brought home by Uncle George, had made Horatia wonder a good deal about it. She knew everyone read it, more or less under cover, and its unorthodoxy troubled her not at all. If it were rotten it would be fun to uncover its methods. So she toiled up another flight of stairs into a much smaller office where the editor, a typist and two lean, pipe-smoking reporters looked furtively amused at her appearance. She took the scrutiny well. Quite unembarrassed in her own glances, she had a way of putting herself in her own class immediately. It was impossible to look at her, at her dress and her unaffected hat, and not know that she meant to be quite impersonal. The reporters took their pipes to the other corner and the editor straightened up a little to offer her a chair and ask her business. When she told him he seemed to ruminate.
“What is your name?”
She told him and he seemed to connect it with Uncle George by a swift mental gesture.
“George Grant—dry-goods?”
“His niece. I live with him.”
“Well.” He thought again and then leaned forward with a confidential air that Horatia imagined him using habitually as he unearthed his scandals.
“We don’t take on girls. But I don’t say you couldn’t be useful to us. If you could run a column of good gossipy stuff about the swells—particularly the women, of course. Nothing that would let us in for libel—well, I’d edit it anyway, of course. But the preliminary stuff to these scandals—the first rumors of divorces and elopements—particularly concerning women more or less in the public eye. We don’t want stories about everyone. I could give you a list of people to watch. You know—the Town Topics sort of thing. Get us a lot more women readers.”
Horatia was enjoying herself.
“But how would I unearth these stories about people I don’t know?”