All this had been of little moment until her father's reform attack
became acute. Passionately independent, never yet having met the man
to whom she could gladly submit, and bored by those who had aspired,
she resented her father's interference with her way of life and put the
climax on all her social misdeeds by leaving home and going to work on
the "Courier-Journal." Beginning at twenty dollars a week, her salary
had swiftly risen to fifty. Her work was principally musical, dramatic,
and art criticism, though she was not above mere journalistic stunts if
they promised to be sufficiently interesting. Thus she scooped the big
interview with Morgan at a time when he was being futilely trailed by a
dozen New York star journalists, went down to the bottom of the Golden
Gate in a diver's suit, and flew with Rood, the bird man, when he
broke all records of continuous flight by reaching as far as Riverside.
Now it must not be imagined that Maud Sangster was a hard-bitten
Amazon. On the contrary, she was a gray-eyed, slender young woman,
of three or four and twenty, of medium stature, and possessing
uncommonly small hands and feet for an outdoor woman or any other
kind of a woman. Also, far in excess of most outdoor women, she knew
how to be daintily feminine.
It was on her own suggestion that she received the editor's commission
to interview Pat Glendon. With the exception of having caught a
glimpse, once, of Bob Fitzsimmons in evening dress at the Palace
Grill, she had never seen a prizefighter in her life. Nor was she
curious to see one--at least she had not been curious until Young
Pat Glendon came to San Francisco to train for his fight with Nat
Powers. Then his newspaper reputation had aroused her. The Abysmal
Brute!--it certainly must be worth seeing. From what she read of him
she gleaned that he was a man-monster, profoundly stupid and with
the sullenness and ferocity of a jungle beast. True, his published
photographs did not show all that, but they did show the hugeness of
brawn that might be expected to go with it. And so, accompanied by
a staff photographer, she went out to the training quarters at the
Cliff House at the hour appointed by Stubener.
That real estate owner was having trouble. Pat was rebellious. He sat,
one big leg dangling over the side of the arm chair and Shakespeare's
Sonnets face downward on his knee, orating against the new woman.
"What do they want to come butting into the game for?" he
demanded. "It's not their place. What do they know about it anyway? The
men are bad enough as it is. I'm not a holy show. This woman's coming
here to make me one. I never have stood for women around the training
quarters, and I don't care if she is a reporter."
"But she's not an ordinary reporter," Stubener interposed. "You've
heard of the Sangsters?--the millionaires?"
Pat nodded.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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