Marchmont sat down, blinking. Again there was silence around the table, but this time it was electric, with the sense of flashes to come. The slow drawl of Lindsay, the theater reporter, seemed anti-climatic as he spoke up, slouched deep in his seat. "How much do you know of dramatic criticism in this town, Mr. Surtaine?" "Nothing." "Maybe, then, you'll be pained to learn that we're a set of liars--I might even go further--myself among the number. There hasn't been honest dramatic criticism written in Worthington for years." "That is hard to believe, Mr. Lindsay." "Not if you understand the situation. Suppose I roast a show like 'The Nymph in the Nightie' that played here last week. It's vapid and silly, and rotten with suggestiveness. I wouldn't let my kid sister go within gunshot of it. But I've got to tell everybody else's kid sister, through our columns, that it's a delightful and enlivening _melange_ of high class fun and frolic. To be sure, I can praise a fine performance like 'Kindling' or 'The Servant in the House,' but I've got to give just as clean a bill of health to a gutter-and-brothel farce. Otherwise, the high-minded gentlemen that run our theaters will cut off my tickets." "Buy them at the box-office," said Hal. "No use. They wouldn't let me in. The courts have killed honest criticism by deciding that a manager can keep a critic out on any pretext or without any. Besides, there's the advertising. We'd lose that." "Speaking of advertising,"--now it was Lynch, a young reporter who had risen from being an office boy,--"I guess it spoils some pretty good stories from the down-town district. Look at that accident at Scheffer and Mintz's; worth three columns of anybody's space. Tank on the roof broke, and drowned out a couple of hundred customers. Panic, and broken bones, and all kinds of things. How much did we give it? One stick! And we didn't name the place: just called it 'a Washington Street store.' There were facts behind _that_ news, all right. But I guess Mr. Shearson wouldn't have been pleased if we'd printed 'em." In fact, Shearson, the advertising manager, looked far from pleased at the mention. "If you think a one-day story would pay for the loss of five thousand a year in advertising, you've got another guess, young man," he growled. "He's right, there," said Dr. Surtaine, on one side of Hal; and from the other, McGuire Ellis chirped:-- "Things are beginning to open up, all right, Mr. Editor." Two aspirants were now vying for the floor, the winner being the political reporter for the paper. "Would you like to hear some facts about the news we don't print?" he asked. "Go ahead," replied Hal. "You have the floor." "You recall a big suffrage meeting here recently, at which Mrs. Barkerly from London spoke. Well, the chairman of that meeting didn't get a line of his speech in the papers: didn't even get his name mentioned. Do you know why?" "I can't even imagine," said Hal.