I answered: “Sometimes I do. When I write, I choose my own words and say what I mean, and then I am willing to stand by it.”
“Well,” said the young lady, “will you write an article on ‘free love’ for the ‘Record’?”
“Certainly I will,” said I—“if the ‘Record’ will pay my price.”
“What is your price?”
“Ten cents a word.”
The young lady looked troubled. “I don’t know if the ‘Record’ could pay that,” said she, “but this is my position—I will explain frankly, and hope you won’t mind. I’ve just started to be a newspaper woman, and I’m very anxious to make good. I don’t have to earn my living, because my parents have money. What I want to do is to have a career. If I go back to the ‘Record’ and report that I failed to get an interview, I won’t keep this job. So won’t you please write an article for me, and let me pay for it at the rate of ten cents a word?”
You may share a smile over this queer situation. I pleaded embarrassment, I argued with the young lady that I couldn’t possibly take her money. But she argued back, very charmingly; she would be heart-broken if I did not consent. So at last I said: “All right, I will write you an article. How many words do you want?”
The young lady meditated; she figured for a while on the back of her note-book; and finally she said: “I think I’d like fifty words, please.”
Really, I explained, I couldn’t express my views on such a complicated subject in the limits of a night letter; so the young lady raised her bid to a hundred words. In the end we had to break off negotiations, and she went away disappointed. I was told afterwards by friends that she published an article in the “Record,” describing this interview, and having an amusing time with me; so presumably her job was saved. I didn’t see her article, for the “Record” is an evening paper, and publishes half a dozen editions, no two alike, and the only way you can find out what it says about you is to stand on the street-corner for six or eight hours, and catch each fleeting edition as it fleets.
I have come to the end of my own experiences. I read the manuscript and the proofs, over and over, as I have to do, and a guilty feeling haunts me. Will the radical movement consider that I have forced upon it a ventilation of my own egotisms, in the guise of a work on Journalism? I cannot be sure; but at least I can say this: Have patience, and read the second part of the book, in which you will find little about myself, and a great deal about other people, to whom you owe your trust and affection; also a mass of facts about your Journalism, without reference to anybody’s personality.