“No!” he shouted. “Of course I don’t! And I never told you so, either! It’s something you made up out of your own head five minutes after I met you, and nothing I could say would stop you.—Now you’ve told people all over the town that I’m writing stories about Orléans for The New York Times, and am going to put them in the stories. We’ve accepted favours, got things at reduced prices and been entertained by these people all because you told them I am working for The Times and that they are going to get some free publicity out of it. Don’t you realize what that is?” he said angrily, glaring at her. “That’s fraud. That’s getting something by false pretence. You can be put in jail for that!… Why, the next thing I know you’ll be getting money from them—collecting a commission from them for getting me to write them up. Perhaps you have already, for all I know,” he concluded bitterly.
“But you did tell me that you were a journalist, my boy,” the old woman said gently. “You told me that, you know.”
“Well—yes,” he sullenly admitted. “I did tell you that. I said that because I want to be a writer, and I’ve done nothing yet—and somehow it didn’t seem so big to say I was a journalist…. Besides,” he blundered on uncertainly, “I thought the word had a kind of different meaning here from what it has at home—”
She nodded her head briskly with a satisfied air:
“Exactly…. A journalist is one who contributes articles and sketches on timely subjects to current publications…. And you’ve done that, haven’t you?”
“Well,” he conceded, “I wrote some pieces for the university magazine when I was at college—”
“Ah-h! Exactly!”—this with an air of triumph.
“And I was editor of the college newspaper.”
“But of course! Just as I say!”
“And I suppose I did write news stories about the university once in a while and send them to the paper back home.”
“Of course you did, my boy! Of course!”
“And I did write what they call a feature article one time and sold it to a paper…. And I wrote a one-act play and it was published in a book and I’ve had so far eight dollars royalty on it,” he concluded his recital with a meagre glow of hope, a lame belief that his journalistic pretensions were not wholly fraudulent.
“But—” the Countess lifted astounded eyebrows and looked about her with a fine gesture of the hands expressive of bewilderment—“just as
