I've seen your portraits, and let me respectfully tell you that _you're_
no Lillian Russell.'"

Some mornings I, too, might have sat down and written, from visual
observation, "Let me respectfully tell you that _you're_ no Lillian
Russell."

Said a third among my companions:

"No importance whatever is attached to a certain kind of interview in
the United States."

Which I found, later, was quite true in theory, but not in practice.
Whenever, in that kind of interview, I had been made to say something
more acutely absurd and maladroit than usual, my friends who watched
over me, and to whom I owe so much that cannot be written, were a little
agitated--for about half an hour; in about half an hour the matter had
somehow passed from their minds.

"Supposing I refuse to talk to that sort of interviewer?" I asked, at
the saloon table.

"The interviews will appear all the same," was the reply.

My subsequent experience contradicted this. On the rare occasions when I
refused to be interviewed, what appeared was not an interview, but
invective.

Let me not be misunderstood. I have been speaking of only one brand of
American interviewer. I encountered a couple of really admirable women