'The people who have to do with newspapers are the serfs and the prostitutes of literature. It was not always so, but I've felt it coming for some time now. It is the growing dominion of the City, of commerce, of their boasted democracy. The People's Will! Disgusting rubbish! How the deuce should these office-bred hucksters know what is best? But, I tell you, my boy, that it is they who are becoming the masters. There is no more room in journalism for a gentleman; certainly not for literary men and people of culture. They think it will pay them better to run their wretched sheets for the proletariat. We shall see. Oh, I am better out of it, of course. I see that clearly; and I am thankful to be clear of their drudgery.' (My listening mind brightened.) 'But yet--there's your education to be thought of. Expenses are--And, of course--H'm!' (Clouds shadowed my outlook once more.) 'This pitiful anxiety to cling to the safety of a salary is humiliating--unworthy of one's manhood. Good heavens! why was I born, not one of them, and yet dependent on the caprices of such people?' It may be filial partiality, but something makes me feel genuinely sorry for my father, as I look back upon that outpouring of his in Richmond Park. And that was in the 'sixties. I wonder how the twentieth-century journalism would have struck him. The later subtleties of unadmitted advertising, the headline, the skittishly impressionistic descriptive masterpieces of 'our special representative,' and the halfpenny newspapers, were all unthought-of boons, then. And as for the advancing democracy of his prophecies, why, there were quite real sumptuary laws of a sort still holding sway in the 'sixties, and well on into the 'eighties, for that matter! We walked home from the Roehampton Gate, and in some respects I was no longer quite a child when I climbed into bed that night. III In my eyes, at all events, there was a kind of a partnership between my father and myself from this time onward. Before, there had been three groups in my scheme of things: upon the one hand, Amelia (or her successor) and myself, with, latterly, some of the people of the Putney Academy for the Sons of Gentlemen; in another and quite separate compartment, my father; and, finally, the rest of the world. Gradually, now, I came to see things rather in this wise: upon the one hand, my father and myself, with, perhaps, a few other folk as satellites; and, on the other hand, the rest of the world.