Joan looked at her watch.  She had an article to finish.  Madge stood on tiptoe and kissed her.

“Don’t think me unsympathetic,” she said.  “No one will rejoice more than I shall if God sees fit to call you to good work.  But I can’t help letting fall my little tear of fellowship with the weeping.”

“And mind your p’s and q’s,” she added.  “You’re in a difficult position.  And not all the eyes watching you are friendly.”

Joan bore the germ of worry in her breast as she crossed the Gray’s Inn Garden.  It was a hard law, that of the world:  knowing only winners and losers.  Of course, the woman was to be pitied.  No one could feel more sorry for her than Joan herself.  But what had Madge exactly meant by those words:  that she could “see her doing something really big,” if she thought it would help him?  There was no doubt about her affection for him.  It was almost dog-like.  And the child, also!  There must be something quite exceptional about him to have won the devotion of two such opposite beings.  Especially Hilda.  It would be hard to imagine any lengths to which Hilda’s blind idolatry would not lead her.

She ran down twice to Folkestone during the following week.  Her visits made her mind easier.  Mrs. Phillips seemed so placid, so contented.  There was no suggestion of suffering, either mental or physical.

She dined with the Greysons the Sunday after, and mooted the question of the coming fight with Carleton.  Greyson thought Phillips would find plenty of journalistic backing.  The concentration of the Press into the hands of a few conscienceless schemers was threatening to reduce the journalist to a mere hireling, and the better-class men were becoming seriously alarmed.  He found in his desk the report of a speech made by a well-known leader writer at a recent dinner of the Press Club.  The man had risen to respond to the toast of his own health and had taken the opportunity to unpack his heart.

“I am paid a thousand a year,” so Greyson read to them, “for keeping my own opinions out of my paper.  Some of you, perhaps, earn more, and others less; but you’re getting it for writing what you’re told.  If I were to be so foolish as to express my honest opinion, I’d be on the street, the next morning, looking for another job.”

“The business of the journalist,” the man had continued, “is to destroy the truth, to lie, to pervert, to vilify, to fawn at the feet of Mammon, to sell his soul for his daily bread.  We are the tools and vassals of rich men behind the scenes.  We are the jumping-jacks.  They pull the strings and we dance.  Our talents, our possibilities, our lives are the property of other men.”

“We tried to pretend it was only one of Jack’s little jokes,” explained Greyson as he folded up the cutting; “but it wouldn’t work.  It was too near the truth.”

“I don’t see what you are going to do,” commented Mary.  “So long as men are not afraid to sell their souls, there will always be a Devil’s market for them.”