"I had no advantages when I was young, you see," he added.
"Not in the least, my dear fellow," said I."Only the next time you wish to do me a service, just speak about my work; leave my wretched person out, and my still more wretched conversation; and above all," I added, with an irrepressible shudder, "don't tell them how I said it! There's that phrase, now: 'With a proud, glad smile.' Who cares whether I smiled or not ?" "Oh, there now, Loudon, you're entirely wrong," he broke in.

"That's what the public likes; that's the merit of the thing, the literary value.

It's to call up the scene before them; it's to enable the humblest citizen to enjoy that afternoon the same as I did.

Think what it would have been to me when I was tramping around with my tin-types to find a column and a half of real, cultured conversation--an artist, in his studio abroad, talking of his art--and to know how he looked as he did it, and what the room was like, and what he had for breakfast; and to tell myself, eating tinned beans beside a creek, that if all went well, the same sort of thing would, sooner or later, happen to myself: why, Loudon, it would have been like a peephole into heaven!" "Well, if it gives so much pleasure," I admitted, "the sufferers shouldn't complain.

Only give the other fellows a turn." The end of the matter was to bring myself and the journalist in a more close relation.