She had drawn her chair up to the table where he sat.

“Because, I suppose, the woman wants to know.  In case, you don’t see Wayland, do you mind giving me the exact figures about that independent paper?  We are all to go home together to-morrow.  Let us put the figures down.  I can tell him the rest when the others are not about; and do you know, I think I have heard him speak of some one who might back this kind of scheme?”

Oh, crafty woman!  Do you think the kindly eyes behind those strongly focussed glasses did not bore in behind your guarded words?  Just once did she interrupt his quick run of explanations.

“Is your idea to run an altogether staid journal, or a yellow one?” she asked.

He was plainly taken aback.  He laid down his pencil.

“If you were a man, I could explain that easier!”

“Because, I’m done with the kind of goodness that’s pickled and put away in a self-sealer where it won’t spoil like old-fashioned jam for company,” she said.

The news editor’s eyes opened very wide, indeed!  She had said “I’m done” quite as unconsciously as he had let slip words inadmissable in polite converse.

“It isn’t piety done up in homoeopathic pills the world wants,” she went on.

“No, it’s punch,” he broke in; “and what’s the use of dickering with a little two-for-a-cent high-brow, superior, exclusive, self-righteous rag of a daily that will reach only a handful of sissy people?  Democracy is here; and it’s here for keeps, the rule of the many good or bad; and it’s as your old parson said in the court room, it’s going to be the United States of the World.  What’s the use of issuing a rag sheet that will preach to a little parlorful of sissies and high-brows?  You’ve got to get the crowd, and to educate ’em up to self-government, to pelt ’em to a pulp with facts!  You’ve got to get ’em if you take them by the scruff of the neck, Miss MacDonald!  While the churches and the teachers and the preachers sit back self-superior and self-sufficient, Miss MacDonald, where’s the crowd?  They’re out in the street!  You’ve got to get ’em!  You’ve got to get the facts before ’em!  People curse the yellow journals!  All right!  But they reach an audience of a million a day; every one of them; and your self-superior journals don’t touch ten-thousand!  Miss MacDonald, which is having the telling influence, for good or evil?  Which is getting the crowd?  Oh, I know they publish pictures of pugilists’ big toes and base ball pitchers’ thumbs the size of a half page; but if I could ram a moral truth or a hard fact down the fool-public’s throat on the very next page by advertising it with a pugilist’s big toe, I’d do it—­you bet!  I’d take a leaf out of the Devil’s note book and go him one better!  You ask whether I’d publish a yellow journal?  Miss MacDonald, if I could get the facts of exactly what is going on in this country before the public, I wouldn’t publish ’em yellow!  I’d publish truth bloody red!”