"Since two months!"
"But how do you manage?"
She told her story. She had come from San Francisco, where she had done some clever work on the papers. She had a few letters of introduction, and she knew a few men of the journalist emigration. She had gone to the Free Press office with an article in hand, Impressions of a Western Girl.
"What, it was you?" said Doré, suddenly enlightened.
"Don't wonder you didn't recognize the photo. Belonged to some one on the coast. Wrote my article in Chicago—fake, of course, but highly seasoned. I handed it over as if I owned a Middle West chain of papers; told them I'd go out and work up the names. But the feeling was all right, so it was! The stuff went big; I was fixed!"
Doré was on the point of divulging her own experience, and how she had been outstripped; but she held her tongue with a new caution, asking:
"But the society game, Estelle—how do you know about that?"
"I don't!" she answered frankly. "It started as a joke; it made good! The real Ferdie Amsterdam—that's to say, the last of the line, an old maid called Benticker—got a pain somewhere and was carted off to the hospital. I was put on the column and told to fill it up somehow. I sent in a hurry call to a couple of my friends, Ben Brown and Will Cutter—you know them, big magazine specialists—and we sat down with a couple of weeklies, and doped out a cracker-jack story. It amused them. They used to laugh themselves sick over being Ferdie Amsterdam. Since then we lunch at Lazare's every day and dope it out. And say, the boss is so tickled, he's raised my rates! What do you think of that? 'Course, now I'm getting the jargon, going out and meeting people—"
"Going out?" said Doré, opening her eyes.
"Some! Ferdie Amsterdam gets a bid to any big affair that's pulled off. Say, the way these leaders of society currycomb your back would paralyze you! Trouble to get information? Why, they're dying to crowd into print!"