At this point I would advise my young friend from Park Row to put cotton in his ears or turn the conversation into some other channel, because if the sweet young girl prattles on much longer he will find that her literary standards of good and bad are very different from those of his editor-in-chief, whom he has been trying so hard to please, and of the clever, hard-working and hard-thinking young men with whom he is associated in both work and play. If she can inspire him with a desire to please her, he will have cause to bitterly regret the day that he first sought her society in obedience to the suggestion of Dr. Stuffe; for to accomplish this he must put away the teachings of his editor-in-chief, who has learned four languages in order that he may understand his own, and whose later years have been devoted to the task of instilling in the minds of his subordinates a fitting reverence for the purity and splendor of the Anglo-Saxon tongue. It is precious little that the pure, refined young girl cares about good English, and she would be a rare one of her kind if she did not prefer it splattered with hybrid French because it “sounds better.” She has a far higher regard for the author who signs his name to “The Paper-hanger’s Bride” in the _Century_, or “The Dish-washer’s Farewell” in the _Ladies’ Home Journal_, than she has for the reporter who, by sheer force of humor, pathos, and imagination, has raised some trivial city happening to the dignity of a column “story” which becomes a three days’ talk along Park Row. That there are women who habitually judge literary matter strictly on its merits, and without regard to the quality of the paper on which it is printed, I will not deny--I am even willing to admit that there are women who will lead trumps at whist--but I most solemnly affirm that the average well-educated, clever reading woman of to-day believes in her secret heart that a magazine story possesses a higher degree of merit than a newspaper sketch _because_ it appears in a magazine, and that the “literary man” who has succeeded in selling enough short stories to the monthlies to enable him to republish them in book form has won for himself a more imposing niche in the temple of fame than should be accorded to the late Mr. J. A. MacGahan, who was nothing but a newspaper reporter to the time of his death. A few cases of Swelled Head resulting from the flattery of women may be mentioned here for the benefit of my imaginary young friend from Park Row, to whom they should serve as so many awful examples of what may happen to one who deserts the narrow and rugged path of honest literary endeavor for the easy-going drawing-rooms in which “faking” and even literary and artistic theft are looked upon with complacency and tolerance.