Page:JM Barrie--My lady nicotine.djvu/193

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ARCADIANS AT BAY.
187

of the Jubilee celebrations. When all the rest of London (including William John) was in the streets, the Arcadians met as usual, and Scrymgeour, at my request, put on the shutters to keep out the din. It so happened that Jimmy and Gilray were that night in wicked moods, for Jimmy, who was so anxious to be a journalist, had just had his seventeenth article returned from the St. John's Gazette, and Gilray had been "slated" for his acting of a new part, in all the leading papers. They were now disgracing the tobacco they smoked by quarreling about whether critics or editors were the more disreputable class, when in walked Pettigrew, who had not visited us for months. Pettigrew is as successful a journalist as Jimmy is unfortunate, and the pallor of his face showed how many Jubilee articles he had written during the past two months. Pettigrew offered each of us a Splendidad (his wife's new brand), which we dropped into the fire-place. Then he filled my little Remus with Arcadia, and sinking weariedly into a chair, said:

"My dear Jimmy, the curse of journalism is not that editors won't accept our articles, but that they want too many from us."

This seemed such monstrous nonsense to Jimmy that he turned his back on Pettigrew, and Gilray broke in with a diatribe against critics.