Page:The Brass Check (Sinclair 1919).djvu/69

 servants, in the sense of a separate class of inferior animals whom we put off by themselves in the basement of the building. We tried to treat our workers as human beings. Once a week we had a dance, and everybody took part, and the professor of philosophy danced with the two pretty Irish girls who waited on the table. The fact that his wife was present ought to have made a difference, even to a Dean, but the stories in the "Sun" did not mention the wife.

So before long we began to notice dark hints in the newspapers; such esoteric phrases as "Sinclair's love-nest." I have since talked with newspaper men and learned that it was generally taken for granted by the newspaper-world that Helicon Hall was a place which I had formed for the purpose of having many beautiful women about me. Either that, or else a diseased craving for notoriety! I remember Ridgway of "Everybody's" asking the question: "Couldn't you find some less troublesome way of advertising yourself?"

Now, I was still naïve about many things in the world, but I assure the reader that I had by this time learned enough to have kept myself securely on the front pages of the newspapers, if that had been my aim in life. A group of capitalists had come to me with a proposition to found a model meat-*packing establishment; they had offered me three hundred thousand dollars worth of stock for the use of my name, and if I had accepted that offer and become the head of one of the city's commercial show-places, lavishing full-page advertisements upon the newspapers, I might have had the choicest and most dignified kind of publicity, I might have been another Nicholas Murray Butler or George Harvey; I might have been invited to be the chief orator at banquets of the Chamber of Commerce and the National Civic Federation, and my eloquence would have been printed to the extent of columns; I might have joined the Union League Club and the Century Club, and my name would have gone upon the list of people about whom no uncomplimentary news may be published under any circumstances. At the same time I might have kept one or more apartments on Riverside Drive, with just as many beautiful women in them as I wished, and no one would have criticized me, no newspaper would have dropped hints about "love-nests." I have known many men, prominent capitalists and even prominent publishers and editors, who have done this, and you have never known about