Didactic fiction; Political fiction; Social problems -- Fiction
"Oh! you won't even have to go to their offices; you can send for them.
I worked on a newspaper once, and I know. You won't have to go to them.
They'll come. The editors will eat out of your hand--do anything for you
on the chance that you might invite their wives to dinner. Have your
secretary call up the papers, and you'll have a hundred special writers
camped on your doorstep."
"Well, well! What an idea!" Mrs. Van Cleave snorted.
All the women, with various degrees of obsequiousness, begged her to do
it. But it was not the kind of newspaper notoriety she liked.
"No," she repeated a dozen times. "I could not do that. Preposterous!
Preposterous!"
But she hardly heard the urgings. She was looking away beyond the room
at the vision of a little girl who had died many years ago--the only
thing which had not been worldly in all her life. And this little
daughter of hers had had eyes very much like Yetta's. Yes. Very much
like. In fact they were almost exactly the same. And just when the women
were giving up hope she suddenly spoke decisively.
"Yes. I'll do it. My secretary is outside in the motor. Call her in."
"Jane," she said when that very businesslike and faded young woman
appeared, "two things. One, a list of all the women who met that little
working-girl at my house. Two, telephone all the city editors. I want to
give out a statement, a personal statement. My house, to-night. Morning
papers. You can use the telephone in the front office. That will do."
Yetta and Mrs. Van Cleave divided the first column the next morning. In
the two and three cent papers Yetta got most of the space, in the one
cent papers the proportions were reversed. But Yetta's story, more or
less diluted with descriptions of Mrs. Van Cleave's drawing-room and
gown and diamond tiara--she had given the newspaper men a few minutes as
she was leaving for the Opera--was read by almost everybody in Greater
New York. Yetta was invariably described as little, in several cases as
only thirteen. Pick-Axe was ordinarily spoken of as an
ex-prize-fighter--a libel on the profession, which can at least boast of
physical courage.
Among others who read the story was the Commissioner of Correction. He
called up the warden of the workhouse.
"That jackass, Cornett, has stirred up hell down at Essex Market. Seen
the papers? Well, there'll be fifteen hundred reporters bothering you
this morning, trying to interview this Rayefsky girl. Don't let them.
But they'll get at her when she comes out; she'll be telling her
impressions of prison life to everybody. Give her some snap. Feed her.
Damn her soul, don't give her no chance to kick. See?"
It was about nine o'clock when this message crossed the wire. A few
minutes later the warden entered the women's wing of the workhouse.
There were about fifty prisoners on their knees, scrubbing the stone
floor.
"Yetta Rayefsky."
She got up in surprise and came towards him, wondering what new thing
they were going to do to her.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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