With this singular weakness the man is yet a strong one. His capacity to judge and manage men or facts is truly marvelous. He rules his paper as he rules everything, with the firmest hand, and not a man in his employ but knows who is master. Within a year he turned the journal into a great earner of money, and in the business office they have to confess that it is all his work, ignorant though he is to this day of the details. He knows by instinct where money should be spent, and where it should be scrimped. Yet with all this business shrewdness he cares not half so much that his investment is paying him twenty per cent as that people are talking about his ability as an editor, and my only influence over him even now is the praise my editorials have won him. Perhaps the most singular quality of his nature is his heedlessness of individual opinion, and his dread of it in mass. He is so absolutely self-centred—every thought directed inward—that he never tries to make the individual like him, yet he craves intensely the world’s esteem. He longs for notoriety, and even stoops to an almost daily mention of himself in his paper, taking endless pains to get his name into other journals as well. Even his philanthropy, for which the world admires him, is used for this purpose. Ridiculous as it may seem, the most grating task I have to do is the writing of the fulsome press dispatches which he invariably sends out whenever he makes one of his gifts. He writes, too, to his fellow editors, asking them to comment on the largess; and since he makes it a point to cultivate the pleasantest relations with his confrères, they give him good measure, though with many a smile and wink among themselves when they get together. “Mr. White-Lie” is his sobriquet in the fraternity. How curiously diverse the same man is to different people! To the world Mr. Whitely is a man of great business ability, of wide knowledge, of great benevolence, and of fine manners. I do not wonder, Maizie, that he imposes on you; for though you have discernment, yet you are not of a suspicious nature, and his acting is so wonderful and his manner so frank, through his own unconsciousness of his self-deceit, that not a dozen people dream the man is other than he seems. You might, perhaps, in spite of his taciturnity, have discovered his charlatan pretense of learning if you had been born inquisitive, but you take his writings for the measure of his intellect, and have no more reason to suspect that his skillful reservations are the refuge of a sciolist than that my silence covers such little erudition as I have.