and before we were out of the building they presented us with copies of the
paper with accounts of our visit in the usual colossalised style. Was not
that quick work, Mamma?

The things they put in the papers here are really terrible, and must be
awfully exciting for the little boys and girls who read them going to
school; every paltry scandal in enormous headlines, and the most intimate
details of people's lives exposed and exaggerated, while the divorces and
suicides fill every page. But if there is anything good happening, like
sailors behaving well at sea and saving lives, or any fine but
unsensational thing, it only gets a small notice. The poor reporters can't
help it; they are dismissed unless they worry people for interviews and
write "catchy" articles about them, so, of course, they can't stick to the
truth; and as the people who read like to hear something spicy, they are
obliged to give it all a lurid turn. The female ones are sometimes
spiteful; I expect because women often can't help being so about
everything. These wonderfully sensational papers have only developed in the
last ten years, we are told, so they have not had time to see the effect it
is going to have upon the coming generation.

The better people don't pay the least attention to anything that is
printed, but of course ordinary people in any country would.

We lunched in the most fashionable restaurant down town, but I never can
describe to you, Mamma, the noise and flurry and rush of it. As if
countless men screaming at the top of their voices and every plate being
rattled by scurrying waiters, were not enough, there was the loudest band
as well! Unless you simply yelled you could not make your neighbour hear. I
suppose it is listening to the other din at the Stock Exchange all the
morning;--they would feel lonely if they had quiet to eat in.