On the staff of a great New York newspaper! That it was anti-British and pro-Tammany did not bother me. A reporter! A starting salary of £3 a week that might grow! I wrote the news to my father that very afternoon, and that night Kay, Boyde and I had almost a festive dinner at Krisch’s restaurant--that is, we ended with sweets and coffee. The following day I spent practising my rusty shorthand, about 90 words a minute being my best speed consistent with legibility. Would it be fast enough? I might have spared myself the trouble for all the use shorthand was to me on the _Evening Sun_ during the two years I remained with it. Only once--much later, when I was with the _New York Times_, did it prove of value, securing for me on that occasion an increase of salary.... The slogan of the _Sun_, printed on each copy was, “If you See it in the _Sun_ it is so!” accuracy the strong point. The _Times_ preferred a moral tinge: “All the News that’s Fit to Print.” Both mottoes were faithfully observed and rigidly practised. CHAPTER XII If any young man learning values wants to know the quickest way to study the seamy side of life, to understand the darkest aspects of human nature, and incidentally, to risk the loss of every illusion he ever had, let him become a reporter on an up-to-date New York newspaper. Within six months he will be apt to believe that every man has his price; he will become acquainted with vice, crime, horror, terror, and every kind of human degradation; theft, murder, arson will seem commonplaces, forgery a very ordinary affair; men and women, it may even seem to him, “go straight,” not because of any inherent principle of goodness in them, but because that degree of temptation which constitutes their particular “price” has not yet offered itself. Passion of every type, abnormal, often incredible, will be his daily study; if he reflects a little he will probably reach the conclusion that either jealousy in some form, or greed for money, lie at the root of every crime that is ever committed. The overwhelming power of these two passions will startle him, at any rate, and his constant association with only one aspect of life, and that the worst and lowest, will probably produce the conviction that, given only the opportunity, everybody is bad. His conception of women may suffer in particular. The experience, contrariwise, may widen his tolerance and deepen his charity; also, it may leave him as it left me, with an ineradicable contempt for those who, born in ease, protected from the temptations due to poverty and misery, so carelessly condemn the weak, the criminal and the outcast.