Page:Lynch Williams--The stolen story and other newspaper stories.djvu/124

 a lawsuit with a shoemaker; have a talk with each of them, get both sides of the matter, and write a good story, with facetious, satirical touches in it, for New York to smile over the next morning at breakfast. He knew the woman. She knew him. She would see him there. She would know that he was watching her. She would know that he had written what The Day published about her and her shoes. He felt like resigning.

It had sounded like such a good story the afternoon before when the smiling city editor was talking that he had jumped at it. But the moment he left the hot, exciting atmosphere of the City Room, it all seemed a very different business. This morning he had cooled down still more; and he could not understand how he had agreed to take such an assignment.

He had been at this work long enough now not to mind going up into tenements and talking to people there about their souls or their family quarrels, or their daughters who had killed themselves, or the reason for it. But when it came to making unpleasant publicity for refined people, it seemed a dif-