Gail’s maid came in, and Mrs. Davies bade her sister’s niece good-night most cordially, and retired with a great load off her mind; and half an hour later the lights in Gail’s pretty little suite went out.
If she lay long hours looking out at the pale stars, if, in the midst of her calm logic, she suddenly buried her face in her pillows and sobbed silently, if, toward morning, she awoke with a little cry to find her face and her hands hot, all these things were but normal and natural. It is enough to know that she came to her breakfast bright-eyed and rosy-cheeked and smiling with the pleasant greetings of the day, and picked up the papers casually, and lit upon the newest sensation of the free and entirely uncurbed metropolitan press!
The free and entirely uncurbed metropolitan press had found Vedder Court, and had made it the sudden focus of the public eye. Those few who were privileged to know intimately the workings of that adroit master of the public welfare, Tim Corman, could have recognised clearly his fine hand in the blaze of notoriety which obscure Vedder Court had suddenly received. After having endured the contamination and contagion of the Market Square Church tenements for so many years, the city had, all at once, discovered that the condition was unbearable! The free and entirely uncurbed metropolitan press had taken up, with great enthusiasm, the work of poking the finger of scorn at Vedder Court. It had published photographs of the disreputable old sots of buildings, and, where they did not seem to drip enough, the artists had retouched them. It had sent budding young Poes and Dickenses down there to write up the place in all the horrors which a lurid fancy could portray, or a hectic mind conceive; and it had given special prominence to the masterly effort of one litterateur, who never went near the place, but, after dancing ably until three A.M., had dashed up to his lonely room, and had wrapped a wet towel around his head, and had conceived of the scene as it would look in absolute darkness, with one pale lamp gleaming on the Doréian faces of the passersby! It had sent the sob sisters there in shoals to interview the down-trodden, and, above all things, it had put prominently before the public eye the immense profit which Market Square Church wrung from this organised misery!