[242]CHAPTER XXIIIENTIRELY EDITORIALTheirlittle paper had met with a fair amount of success, but they had both grown thin with the worry of it.The printer of their School Magazine had undertaken to print and publish this new one for twenty-five pounds a month. He was interested in the little venture, and really gave the editors thicker paper, better type, and handsomer headlines than he could afford for the sum. They would easily get advertisements to pay his charge, he told them, and the circulation would pay themselves.The girls engaged canvassers for the very necessary advertisements, and that is the reason they began to grow so thin. The first two men undertook the work on commission, but came back after some time with the sad news that no one seemed to want to advertise, and that it would not pay them to work for commission only. In fear and trembling the editors engaged one of them at the alarming salary of ten shillings a[243]week, and a commission of so much per cent. The man drew his ten shillings a week for a month, and found one pound’s worth of advertisements; that did not answer at all.Then a very energetic man came along who only wanted commission, and said he could get any amount of people to advertise. In a week he filled three pages of the paper, and the two breathed freely again. They sent him out at the end of the month to collect the moneys due, and then came a frightful blow,—he quietly absconded with the full purse.They almost gave in after that; yet how could they allow the expenses of that first issue to fall on the doctor?The printer suggested that they should go and get advertisements for themselves; lots of ladies did, he said. He himself gave them a list of City men likely (he judged by their kind hearts) to advertise.It was the only course left; even the doctor and Mrs. Wise could think of no other way to pay for that first issue, and allow a second one to make its appearance. So there came a summer’s day when two trembling girls in white muslin dresses and sailor hats went forth and assailed the big insurances offices, and the busy agents of various patent cocoas, and soaps and perfumes.When they finally knocked for admittance at the inner glass doors, no manager ever dreamed how long they had been outside the great building, hesitating,[244]trying to screw up their courage, walking up the steps, assailed with fears and descending again, finally biting their lips and forcing themselves to walk in.The clerks did not take them for canvassers, they looked too youthful, and they had no difficulty in gaining the private room.“And what can I do for you?” a manager would say, at a loss to think what two nervous-looking girls could want with them.Then Phyl or Dolly, for they took the speaking strictly inturn—“This is our paper, Mr. Jamieson prints it; the circulation is a thousand; will you advertise in it?—it is a pound for one month, but less for a year.”They were never met with anything but the greatest kindness and courtesy, even when they intruded, as they must sometimes have done, on mail-days, and other busy hours. The manager used to take the little paper and look it through in an interested fashion, asking questions as he turned the leaves. And it was very seldom the advertisement was refused; the biggest office in Sydney had taken one whole page for a year; this example and a kindly feeling for the young editors led nearly every manager to take a certain space and to ask to be put down as a yearly subscriber.[Plate][Plate]“‘This is our paper: the circulation is a thousand; will you advertise in it?’”Three Little Maids][Page244[245]The finances of the paper were for two or three months in a flourishing condition, and after allexpenses were paid there were from six to ten pounds each month to divide between the editors.What keen pleasure then to buy pretty things for the home and pay Weenie’s and Freddie’s school bills, and clothe themselves, and have spare money for books and music, and little presents for the mother!But after a very few months their repugnance for the work became too strong for them.“I can’t do it again,” Phyl said vehemently, when after a long afternoon she and Dolly came home just in time for dinner.“If we never get another penny, if the paper goes altogether, I won’t ask for another advertisement,” Dolly said, and she flung the little paper with its severe classical title and stilted motto right to the other end of the room.“Hello!” said the doctor; “a strike of editors, eh?”“It’s hateful!” repeated Phyl.“No one has been rough to you, have they?” said the mother quickly.“I’d rather they had,” Dolly said. “It’s reallyhorridmother. I’m sure they don’t think the advertising will do them any good—they all just give them out of kindness. We hate kindness.”“There’s an ungrateful pair for you,” the doctor said, but he patted Phyl’s shoulders so sympathetically that both girls burst out at last with an excited,[246]almost tearful account of the hatefulness of the work. They had bottled it up between them until now, for one of their mother’s earliest teachings had been to make the best of things and not to whine.That was almost the end of the little paper. The girls maintained their resolution; rather than bring out one more issue under the existing circumstances they would go and be governesses on some bush station, or send Mary away and do all the work of the house themselves; earn money in some way they must, for they could not bear the thought of being a burden on the doctor.Then the printer, seeing the advertisements were well started, offered to take the paper for his property, and pay the editors a joint salary of five pounds a month.They accepted thankfully and fell to work again with fresh spirits to fill the twenty-eight pages of letterpress that was required monthly.Sometimes they received outside contributions to help them in the task; the undergraduates whom Ted brought home for tennis on the chip court he and Clif had made, sometimes dropped into poetry or prose for them; once or twice when columns gaped hungrily the girls had begged from them various prize essays, and then the classic pages had held, side by side with an article on “How to Renovate a Drawing-room for Five Pounds,” or “Cookery Chats for Young Housewives,” “The Effect of the[247]Renaissance on the Theology of the Period,” or “The Architecture of Cheops and Cephrenes.”But there were many months when they had no help at all, and then they had fourteen pages each of assorted matter, signed by a number of different names, to furnish.That was what was the matter with the tempers of both of them this same evening when the carpenters had driven them into the cribbed study and then wasted time in carping at them.On top of the book-case was the pile of finished matter. The ninth and tenth chapters of Phyl’s serial were there—“The Master of Malbrook Court.” There were quotations at the head of both chapters, a couple from Browning, one from Tennyson. The prose too was broken up in several parts with verses; when the heroine, for instance, went to the piano and sangFor Ever and For Ever—the words of all the verses were given, and never did the hero grow agitated or impassioned, but he flung a few lines of Whitman or Heine, or whatever last poet the authoress had been reading, at the head of the person to whom he was speaking.There was also Dolly’s serial, likewise full of quotations and similar in style, except that she did not attempt to work out the intricate plots in which Phyl revelled, but occupied herself chiefly in piling as much pathos as she could possibly manage upon every page.Then there was Dolly’s children’s page ready, and[248]for this she generally let pathos alone, and scribbled off in half-an-hour a little tale, in which occasionally Freddie’s latest prank or some of their own home fun figured. Then there were poems, two each, signed either with thenom-de-plumesof “Fleur-de-lis” or “Wild Hyacinth,” “Robert Bernard Wycherly” or “Rupert Grey.”Dolly delighted in such forms as the Villanelle, the Rondeau redouble, the dainty Triolet, and Phyl wrote in the strain of a still more diluted Lewis Morris.“It’s your month to do the Home Article,” Phyl said, looking up from her own more congenial task of a paper on the blind poet, Philip Bourke Marston.“I know,” groaned Dolly.“And you’ll really have to be more careful this time,” the elder editor said. “Alice Ellerton told me her mother laughed like anything at your ‘How to Furnish a Girl’s Sitting-room for Three Pounds.’”“Laughed!” said the writer anxiously, “why there wasn’t anything wrong.”“Yes, there was,—you said, ‘First operate upon your inartistic walls, which I dare say are covered with some ugly wall-paper. Now nothing is easier than to enamel them all over with a delicate hedge-sparrow green.’”“Well,” contended Dolly, “and what is wrong with that? Enamellingiseasy. Look at the way I enamelled that little table in the drawing-room.”“Yes,” said Phyl, “but you didn’t say anything[249]about taking the old wall-paper off first, and you didn’t allow any of your three pounds for it. Mrs. Ellerton says a tin would only do about two yards, and it’s a shilling a tin, so it would cost a frightful lot, pounds and pounds.”Dolly looked discomfited,—then she revived a little.“It’s not worse than the time you wrote ‘How to Furnish a House on £100 for a Newly Married Couple,’ and only left two pounds for all the kitchen and laundry,” she said.Phyl went on writing. When she finished Marston, she seized a Cookery Book and hastily made up an article on “Over the Kitchen Fire.”“We’ll have to do Answers to Correspondents between us,” said Dolly, “there’s a whole page, and we must fill it.”No correspondents ever wrote and asked a question of any sort, but the editors would not have considered it possible for a Magazine to be produced without such a page, so they were obliged to make it up, with the help of an Encyclopædia.Some of this month’s answers ran likethis—Ximenes.—The quotation you ask for is from Browning, “The Last Ride together.” Lest you should not have the book at hand, we give you the context. Here followed twenty favourite lines.Forget-me-not.—(1) We are sorry to hear your hair is coming out. Have you tried ammonia for it? Wash[250]it once a week, and do not use curling-tongs. (2) The books you refer to areAlton Lockeand theEssays of Elia. (3) No.Constant Reader.—“Where but to think is to be full of sorrows,And leaden-eyed despairs.”From Keats’Ode to Nightingale.Titus.—(1) The most highly salaried of her Majesty’s Ministers is the Lord High Chancellor, the Right Hon. Lord Halsbury, who receives £10,000 per annum. (2) A Kreutzer is worth very little—five are equal to a penny in our coinage. Thanks for your kind wishes; it is very pleasant to receive so appreciative a letter as yours.Portia.—(1) Fur, passementerie, and various braids will be used as trimming. (2) Cover it with pale pink chiffon. (3)Jacta est alea, “The die is cast.”Pace tua, “With your consent.” Questions requiring answers in these columns should be in our hands quite six days before publication.Ignoramus.—(1) Chopin, as if spelt Shopain, the last syllable pronounced as the word “bread” in French; Goethe—Gerter. (2) March 14, 1872, was a Thursday.Literary Puzzled One.—(a) You must not take Poe’sPhilosophy of Compositiontoo seriously. (b) No; many prefer not to regard “The Raven” as emblematic of drink. Read “Annabel Lee,”—will not this verse tempt you?[251]“I was a child and she was a childIn this kingdom by the sea,And we loved with a love that was more than love,I and my Annabel Lee;With a love that the winged seraphs of heavenCoveted her and me.”Harduppe.—Yes, you can have this paper posted free to you for a year if you send us three yearly subscribers. Thanks for kind wishes.“Oh,” said Dolly, “you’ll really have to do something about Mervyn’s hair, Phyl. You know there really was a letter, this month.” She reached it out of the pigeon-hole that was marked—“Answers to Correspondents,” and that always stood empty.In the first chapter of “The Master of Malbrook Court,” Phyl had said that “the morning sunshine streamed into the room and turned to burnished gold the sunny hair of Mervyn Malbrook.” And alas! in the seventh she had written, “Overcome with anguish Mervyn bowed her dusky head upon her hands and gave herself up to a fit of bitter weeping.”An anonymous correspondent, possibly one of those undergraduates, wrote to point out the mistake.“Lover of Truth,” wrote Phyl now, on that correspondence column. “We sorrowfully note the discrepancy you speak of. Mervyn’s tresses have certainly changed in some mysterious way during the course of seven months from gold to raven. We[252]had hitherto had rather a high opinion of the young person’s character but now we feel reluctantly compelled to admit she must have been of a designing nature and had some hair dye or Peerless Gloss among her toilet appliances.”
Theirlittle paper had met with a fair amount of success, but they had both grown thin with the worry of it.
The printer of their School Magazine had undertaken to print and publish this new one for twenty-five pounds a month. He was interested in the little venture, and really gave the editors thicker paper, better type, and handsomer headlines than he could afford for the sum. They would easily get advertisements to pay his charge, he told them, and the circulation would pay themselves.
The girls engaged canvassers for the very necessary advertisements, and that is the reason they began to grow so thin. The first two men undertook the work on commission, but came back after some time with the sad news that no one seemed to want to advertise, and that it would not pay them to work for commission only. In fear and trembling the editors engaged one of them at the alarming salary of ten shillings a[243]week, and a commission of so much per cent. The man drew his ten shillings a week for a month, and found one pound’s worth of advertisements; that did not answer at all.
Then a very energetic man came along who only wanted commission, and said he could get any amount of people to advertise. In a week he filled three pages of the paper, and the two breathed freely again. They sent him out at the end of the month to collect the moneys due, and then came a frightful blow,—he quietly absconded with the full purse.
They almost gave in after that; yet how could they allow the expenses of that first issue to fall on the doctor?
The printer suggested that they should go and get advertisements for themselves; lots of ladies did, he said. He himself gave them a list of City men likely (he judged by their kind hearts) to advertise.
It was the only course left; even the doctor and Mrs. Wise could think of no other way to pay for that first issue, and allow a second one to make its appearance. So there came a summer’s day when two trembling girls in white muslin dresses and sailor hats went forth and assailed the big insurances offices, and the busy agents of various patent cocoas, and soaps and perfumes.
When they finally knocked for admittance at the inner glass doors, no manager ever dreamed how long they had been outside the great building, hesitating,[244]trying to screw up their courage, walking up the steps, assailed with fears and descending again, finally biting their lips and forcing themselves to walk in.
The clerks did not take them for canvassers, they looked too youthful, and they had no difficulty in gaining the private room.
“And what can I do for you?” a manager would say, at a loss to think what two nervous-looking girls could want with them.
Then Phyl or Dolly, for they took the speaking strictly inturn—
“This is our paper, Mr. Jamieson prints it; the circulation is a thousand; will you advertise in it?—it is a pound for one month, but less for a year.”
They were never met with anything but the greatest kindness and courtesy, even when they intruded, as they must sometimes have done, on mail-days, and other busy hours. The manager used to take the little paper and look it through in an interested fashion, asking questions as he turned the leaves. And it was very seldom the advertisement was refused; the biggest office in Sydney had taken one whole page for a year; this example and a kindly feeling for the young editors led nearly every manager to take a certain space and to ask to be put down as a yearly subscriber.
[Plate][Plate]“‘This is our paper: the circulation is a thousand; will you advertise in it?’”Three Little Maids][Page244
[Plate][Plate]“‘This is our paper: the circulation is a thousand; will you advertise in it?’”Three Little Maids][Page244
[Plate][Plate]“‘This is our paper: the circulation is a thousand; will you advertise in it?’”Three Little Maids][Page244
“‘This is our paper: the circulation is a thousand; will you advertise in it?’”Three Little Maids][Page244
[245]The finances of the paper were for two or three months in a flourishing condition, and after allexpenses were paid there were from six to ten pounds each month to divide between the editors.
What keen pleasure then to buy pretty things for the home and pay Weenie’s and Freddie’s school bills, and clothe themselves, and have spare money for books and music, and little presents for the mother!
But after a very few months their repugnance for the work became too strong for them.
“I can’t do it again,” Phyl said vehemently, when after a long afternoon she and Dolly came home just in time for dinner.
“If we never get another penny, if the paper goes altogether, I won’t ask for another advertisement,” Dolly said, and she flung the little paper with its severe classical title and stilted motto right to the other end of the room.
“Hello!” said the doctor; “a strike of editors, eh?”
“It’s hateful!” repeated Phyl.
“No one has been rough to you, have they?” said the mother quickly.
“I’d rather they had,” Dolly said. “It’s reallyhorridmother. I’m sure they don’t think the advertising will do them any good—they all just give them out of kindness. We hate kindness.”
“There’s an ungrateful pair for you,” the doctor said, but he patted Phyl’s shoulders so sympathetically that both girls burst out at last with an excited,[246]almost tearful account of the hatefulness of the work. They had bottled it up between them until now, for one of their mother’s earliest teachings had been to make the best of things and not to whine.
That was almost the end of the little paper. The girls maintained their resolution; rather than bring out one more issue under the existing circumstances they would go and be governesses on some bush station, or send Mary away and do all the work of the house themselves; earn money in some way they must, for they could not bear the thought of being a burden on the doctor.
Then the printer, seeing the advertisements were well started, offered to take the paper for his property, and pay the editors a joint salary of five pounds a month.
They accepted thankfully and fell to work again with fresh spirits to fill the twenty-eight pages of letterpress that was required monthly.
Sometimes they received outside contributions to help them in the task; the undergraduates whom Ted brought home for tennis on the chip court he and Clif had made, sometimes dropped into poetry or prose for them; once or twice when columns gaped hungrily the girls had begged from them various prize essays, and then the classic pages had held, side by side with an article on “How to Renovate a Drawing-room for Five Pounds,” or “Cookery Chats for Young Housewives,” “The Effect of the[247]Renaissance on the Theology of the Period,” or “The Architecture of Cheops and Cephrenes.”
But there were many months when they had no help at all, and then they had fourteen pages each of assorted matter, signed by a number of different names, to furnish.
That was what was the matter with the tempers of both of them this same evening when the carpenters had driven them into the cribbed study and then wasted time in carping at them.
On top of the book-case was the pile of finished matter. The ninth and tenth chapters of Phyl’s serial were there—“The Master of Malbrook Court.” There were quotations at the head of both chapters, a couple from Browning, one from Tennyson. The prose too was broken up in several parts with verses; when the heroine, for instance, went to the piano and sangFor Ever and For Ever—the words of all the verses were given, and never did the hero grow agitated or impassioned, but he flung a few lines of Whitman or Heine, or whatever last poet the authoress had been reading, at the head of the person to whom he was speaking.
There was also Dolly’s serial, likewise full of quotations and similar in style, except that she did not attempt to work out the intricate plots in which Phyl revelled, but occupied herself chiefly in piling as much pathos as she could possibly manage upon every page.
Then there was Dolly’s children’s page ready, and[248]for this she generally let pathos alone, and scribbled off in half-an-hour a little tale, in which occasionally Freddie’s latest prank or some of their own home fun figured. Then there were poems, two each, signed either with thenom-de-plumesof “Fleur-de-lis” or “Wild Hyacinth,” “Robert Bernard Wycherly” or “Rupert Grey.”
Dolly delighted in such forms as the Villanelle, the Rondeau redouble, the dainty Triolet, and Phyl wrote in the strain of a still more diluted Lewis Morris.
“It’s your month to do the Home Article,” Phyl said, looking up from her own more congenial task of a paper on the blind poet, Philip Bourke Marston.
“I know,” groaned Dolly.
“And you’ll really have to be more careful this time,” the elder editor said. “Alice Ellerton told me her mother laughed like anything at your ‘How to Furnish a Girl’s Sitting-room for Three Pounds.’”
“Laughed!” said the writer anxiously, “why there wasn’t anything wrong.”
“Yes, there was,—you said, ‘First operate upon your inartistic walls, which I dare say are covered with some ugly wall-paper. Now nothing is easier than to enamel them all over with a delicate hedge-sparrow green.’”
“Well,” contended Dolly, “and what is wrong with that? Enamellingiseasy. Look at the way I enamelled that little table in the drawing-room.”
“Yes,” said Phyl, “but you didn’t say anything[249]about taking the old wall-paper off first, and you didn’t allow any of your three pounds for it. Mrs. Ellerton says a tin would only do about two yards, and it’s a shilling a tin, so it would cost a frightful lot, pounds and pounds.”
Dolly looked discomfited,—then she revived a little.
“It’s not worse than the time you wrote ‘How to Furnish a House on £100 for a Newly Married Couple,’ and only left two pounds for all the kitchen and laundry,” she said.
Phyl went on writing. When she finished Marston, she seized a Cookery Book and hastily made up an article on “Over the Kitchen Fire.”
“We’ll have to do Answers to Correspondents between us,” said Dolly, “there’s a whole page, and we must fill it.”
No correspondents ever wrote and asked a question of any sort, but the editors would not have considered it possible for a Magazine to be produced without such a page, so they were obliged to make it up, with the help of an Encyclopædia.
Some of this month’s answers ran likethis—
Ximenes.—The quotation you ask for is from Browning, “The Last Ride together.” Lest you should not have the book at hand, we give you the context. Here followed twenty favourite lines.
Forget-me-not.—(1) We are sorry to hear your hair is coming out. Have you tried ammonia for it? Wash[250]it once a week, and do not use curling-tongs. (2) The books you refer to areAlton Lockeand theEssays of Elia. (3) No.
Constant Reader.—
“Where but to think is to be full of sorrows,And leaden-eyed despairs.”
“Where but to think is to be full of sorrows,And leaden-eyed despairs.”
“Where but to think is to be full of sorrows,And leaden-eyed despairs.”
“Where but to think is to be full of sorrows,
And leaden-eyed despairs.”
From Keats’Ode to Nightingale.
Titus.—(1) The most highly salaried of her Majesty’s Ministers is the Lord High Chancellor, the Right Hon. Lord Halsbury, who receives £10,000 per annum. (2) A Kreutzer is worth very little—five are equal to a penny in our coinage. Thanks for your kind wishes; it is very pleasant to receive so appreciative a letter as yours.
Portia.—(1) Fur, passementerie, and various braids will be used as trimming. (2) Cover it with pale pink chiffon. (3)Jacta est alea, “The die is cast.”Pace tua, “With your consent.” Questions requiring answers in these columns should be in our hands quite six days before publication.
Ignoramus.—(1) Chopin, as if spelt Shopain, the last syllable pronounced as the word “bread” in French; Goethe—Gerter. (2) March 14, 1872, was a Thursday.
Literary Puzzled One.—(a) You must not take Poe’sPhilosophy of Compositiontoo seriously. (b) No; many prefer not to regard “The Raven” as emblematic of drink. Read “Annabel Lee,”—will not this verse tempt you?
[251]“I was a child and she was a childIn this kingdom by the sea,And we loved with a love that was more than love,I and my Annabel Lee;With a love that the winged seraphs of heavenCoveted her and me.”
[251]“I was a child and she was a childIn this kingdom by the sea,And we loved with a love that was more than love,I and my Annabel Lee;With a love that the winged seraphs of heavenCoveted her and me.”
[251]“I was a child and she was a childIn this kingdom by the sea,And we loved with a love that was more than love,I and my Annabel Lee;With a love that the winged seraphs of heavenCoveted her and me.”
[251]“I was a child and she was a child
In this kingdom by the sea,
And we loved with a love that was more than love,
I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.”
Harduppe.—Yes, you can have this paper posted free to you for a year if you send us three yearly subscribers. Thanks for kind wishes.
“Oh,” said Dolly, “you’ll really have to do something about Mervyn’s hair, Phyl. You know there really was a letter, this month.” She reached it out of the pigeon-hole that was marked—“Answers to Correspondents,” and that always stood empty.
In the first chapter of “The Master of Malbrook Court,” Phyl had said that “the morning sunshine streamed into the room and turned to burnished gold the sunny hair of Mervyn Malbrook.” And alas! in the seventh she had written, “Overcome with anguish Mervyn bowed her dusky head upon her hands and gave herself up to a fit of bitter weeping.”
An anonymous correspondent, possibly one of those undergraduates, wrote to point out the mistake.
“Lover of Truth,” wrote Phyl now, on that correspondence column. “We sorrowfully note the discrepancy you speak of. Mervyn’s tresses have certainly changed in some mysterious way during the course of seven months from gold to raven. We[252]had hitherto had rather a high opinion of the young person’s character but now we feel reluctantly compelled to admit she must have been of a designing nature and had some hair dye or Peerless Gloss among her toilet appliances.”