“Anything that can be done with a pen and ink,” she told him.

“Interviewing?” he suggested.

“I’ve always been considered good at asking awkward questions,” she assured him.

He glanced at the clock.  “I’ll give you five minutes,” he said.  “Interview me.”

She moved to a chair beside the desk, and, opening her bag, took out a writing-block.

“What are your principles?” she asked him.  “Have you got any?”

He looked at her sharply across the corner of the desk.

“I mean,” she continued, “to what fundamental rule of conduct do you attribute your success?”

She leant forward, fixing her eyes on him.  “Don’t tell me,” she persisted, “that you had none.  That life is all just mere blind chance.  Think of the young men who are hanging on your answer.  Won’t you send them a message?”

“Yes,” he answered musingly.  “It’s your baby face that does the trick.  In the ordinary way I should have known you were pulling my leg, and have shown you the door.  As it was, I felt half inclined for the moment to reply with some damned silly platitude that would have set all Fleet Street laughing at me.  Why do my ‘principles’ interest you?”

“As a matter of fact they don’t,” she explained.  “But it’s what people talk about whenever they discuss you.”

“What do they say?” he demanded.

“Your friends, that you never had any.  And your enemies, that they are always the latest,” she informed him.

“You’ll do,” he answered with a laugh.  “With nine men out of ten that speech would have ended your chances.  You sized me up at a glance, and knew it would only interest me.  And your instinct is right,” he added.  “What people are saying:  always go straight for that.”

He gave her a commission then and there for a heart to heart talk with a gentleman whom the editor of the Home News Department of the Daily Dispatch would have referred to as a “Leading Literary Luminary,” and who had just invented a new world in two volumes.  She had asked him childish questions and had listened with wide-open eyes while he, sitting over against her, and smiling benevolently, had laid bare to her all the seeming intricacies of creation, and had explained to her in simple language the necessary alterations and improvements he was hoping to bring about in human nature.  He had the sensation that his hair must be standing on end the next morning after having read in cold print what he had said.  Expanding oneself before the admiring gaze of innocent simplicity and addressing the easily amused ear of an unsympathetic public are not the same thing.  He ought to have thought of that.

It consoled him, later, that he was not the only victim.  The Daily Dispatch became famous for its piquant interviews; especially with elderly celebrities of the masculine gender.

“It’s dirty work,” Flossie confided one day to Madge Singleton.  “I trade on my silly face.  Don’t see that I’m much different to any of these poor devils.”  They were walking home in the evening from a theatre.  “If I hadn’t been stony broke I’d never have taken it up.  I shall get out of it as soon as I can afford to.”