She saw a good deal of Maggy, but Maggy was only able to offer advice and the use of her purse, neither of which Alexandra would accept. It hurt her to refuse. The advice she could not reconcile with her conscience: the money, being Woolf's, seemed tainted. All this while her one attempt at literature had kept returning to her with hopeless monotony. A month had elapsed since she had last seen it. She had all but forgotten it when a letter unexpectedly reached her, nebulously signed "The Editor," requesting her to call at the offices of his paper.
She went there full of a natural excitement at the prospect of hearing that her article was to be printed. To her chagrin the Editor, otherwise quite a pleasant person, disillusioned her on this point.
"It's quite all right," he told her; "but I can't use it."
"Then why did you send for me?" asked poor Alexandra helplessly.
"For one reason, because I saw you knew your subject, and it struck me you might put your knowledge to a more commercial use. My dear young lady, there isn't a paper in England that would print this as it stands."
"It's quite simple," he went on. "Papers live by advertisement. The stage is one of their sources of revenue. Besides, it doesn't pay to vilify the stage. It's too popular. We have to butter it up. Look at this," he flicked over the pages of his popular weekly. "Full of photos of stage beauties, with a eulogistic paragraph to each. Many of them paid for. Well, we can't publish a picture of, say, Miss Tottie Fluff on one page and an indictment of her morals on the next. Now can we?"
"I--I suppose not," said Alexandra, vastly impressed by this amiable frankness.
"If you'll be guided by me you'll leave the question of stage morality alone. The press, the public and the profession all unite in a conspiracy of silence about it. You're on the stage, I suppose?"
"Well, look here: why not write something in a chatty way about theatrical matters? Take the exact opposite view to what you have here. Treat the stage sympathetically. Point out its elevating influence on the masses. Sugar it all up. And, I say, not twelve pages: a thousand words or so. I'll give you thirty shillings for it."
Alexandra went back to Sidey Street and sat down to try and write fulsome untruths about the stage. She thought and thought. The ink dried on her pen. Presently an idea came. She commenced to write swiftly. When she had covered two pages she stopped and read them over, realizing what she was doing. For the paltry sum of thirty shillings she, who recoiled from sacrificing her body, was prostituting her pen.