“Then they’re a fraud on the public.”
“Fraud? Oh, really, Mr. Robson,” deprecated the merchant. “A—a harmless—er—subterfuge.”
“The Guardian cuts them out,” announced The Guardian’s revolutionary proprietor. “No more ‘readers’ except with the a-d-v sign, and paid for at full rates.”
“What are you trying to do—insult us?” growled the saturnine Mr. Ahrens.
“You would have to be mighty thin-skinned to find an insult in that.”
“Well, drive us out of the paper, then?”
“That would be pretty foolish of me, would n’t it?”
“Would be? It is. First you violate an agreement—”
“To which I was not a party.”
“—and then you try to raise rates on us; and now you cut out the best advertising the department store gets.”