parting, and he pulled her over and took her on his knee; whereupon she boxed his ears and walked out of the office, and never did any writing for the great metropolitan paper.
The above anecdote is, of course, hearsay so far as I am concerned. I was not in the publisher's office, and I did not see him take the lady-novelist on his knee; but my wife and I knew this lady-novelist well, and she had no possible motive for telling us a falsehood. The story came up casually in the course of conversation, and was told spontaneously, and with humor; for the lady takes life cheerfully, and had got over being angry with the publisher—satisfied, I suppose, with having boxed his ears so thoroughly. I wrote to her, to make sure I had got matters straight, and in reply she asked me not to use the story, even without her name. I quote:
You know, of course, that I should be glad to do, at once and
freely, anything I could to be helpful in your affairs. I have thought
it over and it stands about like this in my mind. I am living a life
that has its own aims—a thing apart from public attack and defense.
If I had determined to make public—after all these years—any
offense was guilty of toward me, my own feeling is clear that
I should do it myself, openly and for reasons that seemed to me
compelling. . . . So leave me out of this matter, my dear Upton.
And so I confront a problem of conscience, or at any rate
of etiquette. Have I the right to tell this story, even without
giving names? I owe a certain loyalty to this friend; but
then, I think of the great publisher, and the manifold falsehoods
I have known him to feed to the public. I think of
the prestige of such men, their solemn hypocrisy, their ponderous
respectability. After weighing the matter, I am risking
a friendship and telling the story. I hope that in the course
of time the lady will realize my point of view, and forgive me.
A different kind of problem confronts me with another story, which I heard three or four years ago, just after it happened. I had this book in mind at the time, and I said to myself: "I'll name that man, and take the consequences." But meantime, alas, the man has died; and now I ask myself: "Can I tell this story about a dead man, a man who cannot face me and compel me to take the consequences?" I think of the man's life-long prostitution of truth, his infinite betrayal of the public interest, and I harden my heart, and write the story, naming him. But then I weaken, and ask
