“Ours is a poor but honest paper,” said Maddox with his devilish twinkle.

“I don’t see how I can very well be the editor of The Planet so long as it insists on shying a dead cat every week at the editor of Metropolis.”

“We have never mentioned the editor of Metropolis.  Still—­if you can induce Rankin to give up his little jest—­the cat is certainly very dead by this time.”

“He’ll have to give it up if you make me editor.”

“You’d better tell him so.”

“I shall.”

“All right, Rickets; only wait till you are editor.  Then you can put as much side on as you like.”

“Good heavens, did you ever see me put on side?”

“Well, I’ve seen you strike an attitude occasionally.”

“All my attitudes put together hardly amount to side.”

“They do, if they assume that they’re going to affect the attitude of our paper.”

“I didn’t know it had one.”

“It has a very decided attitude with regard to the ethics of reviewing; and whatever else you make it give up, it’s not going to give up that. The Planet, Ricky, doesn’t put on side.  Side would be fatal to any freedom in the handling of dead cats.  I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it makes its moral being its prime care; but there are some abuses which it lives to expose, though the exposure doesn’t help it much to live.”

“Oh, I say, Maddy!  That’s what keeps you going.  My poems would have sunk you long ago, if it hadn’t been for your thrilling personalities.”

“Personalities or no personalities, what I mean to rub into you is that The Planet is impartial; it’s the only impartial review in this country.  It has always reserved to itself an absolutely untrammelled hand in the shying of dead cats; and because a man happens to be a friend of the editor, it’s no guarantee whatever that he won’t have one slung at him the minute he deserves it.  His only security is to perpetrate some crime so atrocious that we can’t publish his name for fear of letting ourselves in for an action for libel.  Your attitude to Mr. Jewdwine is naturally personal.  Ours is not.  I should have thought you’d have been the first to see that.”

“I don’t see what you’ve got against him, to begin with.  I wish you’d tell me plainly what it is.”

“If you will have it, it’s simply this—­he isn’t honest.”

“What the devil do you mean?”

“I mean what you mean when you say a woman isn’t honest.  As you’ve so often remarked, there’s such a thing as intellectual chastity.  Some people have it, and some have not.  You have it, my dear Rickets, in perfection, not to say excess; but most of us manage to lose it more or less as we go on.  It’s a deuced hard thing, I can tell you, for any editor to keep; and Jewdwine, I’m afraid, has latterly been induced to part with it to a considerable, a very considerable extent.  It’s a thousand pities; for Jewdwine had the makings in him of a really fine critic.  He might have been a classic if he’d died soon enough.”