"Of course it's vulgar. You can't sell a sweet-scented, prim old-maidy newspaper to enough people to pay for the z's in one font of type. People are vulgar. Don't forget that. And you've got to make a newspaper to suit them. Lesson Number One."
"It needn't be a muckraking paper, need it, forever smelling out something rotten, and exploiting it in big headlines?"
"Oh, that's all bluff," replied the journalist easily. "We never turn loose on anything but the surface of things. Why, if any one started in really to muckrake this old respectable burg, the smell would drive most of our best citizens to the woods."
"Frankly, Mr. Ellis, I don't like cheap cynicism."
"Prefer to be fed up on pleasant lies?" queried his employee, unmoved.
"Not that either. I can take an unpleasant truth as well as the next man. But it's got to be the truth."
"Do you know the nickname of this paper?"
"Yes. My father told me of it."
"It was his set that pinned it on us. 'The Daily Carrion,' they call us, and they said that our triumphal roosters ought to be vultures. Do you know why?"
"In plain English because of the paper's lies and blackguardism."