The editor has put his paper to bed; he leans back exhausted in his chair. “Thank God, that’s over,” he says; “and thank God,” he adds, “that I haven’t got to read it.” That is the problem for an editor. If he prints what he would himself like to read at such a time, his choice will, as likely as not, fail to satisfy the man who has spent his day beside the telephone and whose ears are weary with listening to applications for an overdraft; while, if he prints what he feels his public would like to read, if he substitutes a standard of decision other than “I like” or “I don’t like it,” his paper will cease to be an expression of his own personality, and will be insincere. The ideal editor shares the tastes of the public that he is addressing. And it was, I think, on that same evening that Clifford Bax asked me how the paper that I should myself most eagerly welcome would be constituted; and I answered that the paper would have to take the place of a friend, and that I should wish for such a paper as would reproduce the essence of the evening that we had spent together. “We have talked,” I said, “much of cricket, of the great matches that we have seen and read of. We have wondered how we could persuade the M.C.C. to arrange a single-wicket match between Hearne and Woolley. We have fought old battles again, and have drawn weapons that have long lain rusty on the shelf. And we have spoken of our own achievements as may with complete propriety two such indifferent performers as ourselves. We need make no display of modesty. Our figures prove conclusively enough our quality. We do not apply to our cricket the standards that we apply to Hendren’s. We deal kindlily with one another, as reviewers do with those friendly, worthless little volumes of verse that do no one any harm and may quite conceivably cause innocent entertainment to their authors and their friends. So in my paper there could be some such talk of cricket. “And as we have spoken of the technique of writing, and of the literary market, on these subjects should I commission articles. We have repeated a number of anecdotes, slightly scandalous ones for the most part, and the short story in my paper would not be sophisticated or obscure or modern: a piece of straightforward, concrete narrative that would aim less at vigour than at charm. I would have it a pretty, sentimental thing, with here and there a suggestion of wantonness, of riot. There would be personalities; for the peeping Tom that is in all of us clamours for satisfaction. And we pass a great deal of our time discussing the peculiarities of our acquaintances.