On the ninth of July, from the window of his office, he saw the _Oceanic_ steam up the bay and up the river to her pier. He sent down a request that the ship-news reporter be sent up as soon as he returned. “Is it a good story?” he asked when the reporter, Blackwell, entered. “Was there anybody on board?”
“A lot of swell people,” the young man answered; “all the women got up in the latest Paris gowns.”
“Did you notice whether Mrs. Provost came?”
“Came? Well, rather, with two French maids chattering and chasing after her. And there was a tall girl with her, a stunner, a girl she called ‘Marian, my dear.’”
Howard stopped him with “Thank you. Don’t write anything about them.”
“It was the best thing I saw--the funniest.”
Young Blackwell turned to go. “Oh, I see--friends of yours,” he smiled. “Very well. I’ll keep ‘em out.”
Howard flushed and called him back. “Go ahead,” he said. “Write just what you were going to. Of course you wouldn’t write anything that was not fair and truthful. We don’t ‘play favourites’ here. Forget what I said.”
And so it came to pass that Mrs. Provost, half pleased, half indignant, said to Miss Trevor as they sat in the drawing room of the Pullman on the way to Newport the next day: “Just look at this, Marian dear, in the horrid _News-Record_. And it used to be such a nice paper with that slimy Coulter bowing and scraping to everybody.”
“This” was Mrs. Provost and her dogs and her maids and her asides to “Marian dear,” described with accuracy and a keen sense of the ludicrous.
“It’s too dreadful,” she continued. “There is no such thing as privacy in this country. The newspapers are making us,” with a slight accent on the pronoun, “as common and public as tenement-house people.”
“Yes,” Miss Trevor answered absently. “But why read the newspapers? I never could get interested in them, though I’ve tried.”
On the evening of Howard’s arrival at Newport, Mrs. Carnarvon was having a few people in to dine. He had just time to dress and so saw no one until he descended to the reception room.
“You are to take in Marian,” said his hostess, going with him to where Miss Trevor was sitting, her back to the door and her attention apparently absorbed by the man facing her.