Page:Lynch Williams--The stolen story and other newspaper stories.djvu/105

 thought, to be adjusted. He told himself that news was a commodity and that there was just as much dignity in the getting, handling, selling of it as of woollens or professional opinion or any other article of merchandise.

At least it was so on a paper like The Day, which was neither prurient nor prudish, but clean and clever, with a staff of reporters made up of alert, self-respecting young Americans, for the most part of good education and some breeding, who did not find it necessary to lie or get themselves or others drunk in order to obtain news, which they wrote in very good English.

To be sure there were unpleasant features in worming out news, but so also were there in running about in Wall Street for a bank and being patronized by arrogant cashiers, or getting up at four o'clock in the morning and riding on the back of an ambulance, or serving papers for a small firm of toadying young lawyers, as he knew from his class mates. And there was variety in his disagreeableness and some artistic satisfaction. In business relations, he argued, one