The New Reporter
ton or any other young man; and as for his aunt, who had said, "Oh, but to be a reporter is so beneath you," all that had only made him more anxious to try it; and now that their only dinner invitations were the "We'll be glad to have you come any time" sort, he was all the more determined to stick to reporting. He had no respect at all, he wished them to know, for the opinion of those who respected him less for doing the work he had chosen to do; and he enjoyed the situation. He found himself pitying their nice little New York sons, with the well-beaten, perfectly proper path of life they would have to follow after college, with its office at nine o'clock, home at six, dress for dinner, then, nice little New York girls to see in the evening. And the same set of New York people to spend the summer with, and always when they went abroad the same hotels that other nice New Yorkers go to, and thus the same thing over and over and over in exactly the same way as ever so many other nice little dapper New Yorkers—unless, indeed, they had blood enough in them to sicken of it, in which case they would prob-
79
