Of course, after a time Priscilla became almost reconciled to the position of being the Topic of the holiday season, though earlier she found it very hard to bear. At first she had boldly faced the newspapers; but soon she found that the thought of what she had read during the day was interfering with her rest at night. She quickly became aware of the fact that persecution is hydra-headed, and every heading is in large capitals. She made up her mind that she would never open another newspaper, and it was as well that she adhered to this resolution; for after some days the American organs, as yellow as jaundice and as nasty, began to arrive, and Jack saw that they were quite dreadful. They commented freely upon the “case,” being outside the jurisdiction of the English courts, and they commented largely upon incidents which they themselves had invented to bear out their own very frankly expressed views regarding the shameless profligacy of the landed gentry of England, and the steadily increasing immorality of the English House of Commons. On the showing of these newspapers, Mr. John Wingfield was typical of both; he had succeeded in combining the profligacy of the one with the immorality of the other; and he certainly could not but admit that the stories of his life which they invented and offered to their readers, fully bore out their contention, that, if the public life of the States was a whirlpool, that of England was a cesspool. It was only natural that the accredited representative of so much old-world iniquity should feel rather acutely the responsibilities of the position to which he was assigned; but he had been through the States more than once and he had also been in the Malay Archipelago, and had found how closely assimilated were the offensive elements in the weapons of the two countries. The stinkpot of the Malays had its equivalent in the Yellow Press of the United States; but neither of the two did much actual harm to the person against whom they were directed. If a man has only enough strength of mind to disregard the stinkpot he does not find himself greatly demoralised by his experience of its nastiness, and if he only ignores the “pus” of the Yellow Press no one else will pay any attention to its discharges. He burned the papers, having taken care that Priscilla never had a chance of looking at any one of the batch. He was in no way sensitive; but now and again he felt tempted to rush off with Priscilla to some place where they could escape for ever from this horror of publicity which was besetting them. He did not mind being made the subject of leading articles, if it was his incapacity as an orator or his ignorance of the political standpoint that was being assailed; but this intrusion upon his private life was as distasteful to him as it would be for anyone to see one’s dressing-room operations made the subject of a cinematograph display.