The doings of the afternoon, however, bore a closer resemblance to my notion of journalism. That day happened to be press-day, and I perceived that we gradually became very busy. Messenger-boys waited while I wrote paragraphs to accompany portraits, or while I regularized the syntax of a recipe for sole _à la Normande_, or while I ornamented two naked lines from the "Morning Post" with four lines of embroidery. The editor was enchanted with my social paragraphs; he said I was born to it, and perhaps I was. I innocently asked in what part of the paper they were to shine. "Gwendolen's column," he replied. "Who is Gwendolen?" I demanded. Weeks before, I had admired Gwendolen's breadth of view and worldly grasp of things, qualities rare in a woman. "You are," he said, "and I am. It's only an office signature." Now, that was what I called journalism. I had been taken in, but I was glad to have been taken in. At four o'clock he began frantically to dictate the weekly London Letter which he contributed to an Indian newspaper; the copy caught the Indian mail at six. And this too was what I called journalism. I felt myself to be in my element; I lived. At an hour which I forget we departed together to the printers, and finished off. It was late when the paper "went down." The next morning the lady-secretary handed to me the first rough folded "pull" of the issue, and I gazed at it as a mother might gaze at her firstborn. "But is this all?" ran my thoughts. The fact was, I had expected some process of initiation. I had looked on "journalism" as a sort of temple of mysteries into which, duly impressed, I should be ceremoniously guided. I was called assistant-editor for the sake of grandiloquence, but of course I knew I was chiefly a mere sub-editor, and I had anticipated that the sub-editorial craft would be a complex technical business requiring long study and practice. On the contrary, there seemed to me to be almost nothing in its technique. The tricks of making-up, making-ready, measuring blocks, running-round, cutting, saving a line, and so on: my chief assumed in the main that I understood all these, and I certainly did grasp them instinctively; they appeared childishly simple. Years afterwards, a contributor confided to me that the editor had told her that he taught me nothing after the first day, and that I was a born journalist. I do not seriously think that I was a born journalist, and I mention this detail, not from any vain-glory over a trifle, but to show that the _arcana_ of journalism partake of the nature of an imposture. The same may be said of all professional _arcana_, even those of politics or of the swell-mob. In a word, I was a journalist--but I felt just the same as before. I vaguely indicated my feelings on this point to the chief. "Ah!" he said. "But you know you'd been through the mill before you came here."