.. waving my arms
wildly. It was said that, full of threats, I had taken a shotgun
menacingly from a rack ... that a vicious bull dog lay between my feet,
growling ... that I went, sockless, in sandals ... had long, flowing,
uncombed hair....
Once a party of three reporters, from a big metropolitan paper,--two men
and a woman, after stopping at a nearby road house till they were well
lit,--drove about in a livery rig till they finally located us at the
house of Mrs. Rond....
All the old nonsense was re-written ... things we had never said or even
had in our thought ... vulgarities alien to Hildreth's mouth or mine....
The final insinuation--a sly touching on the fact that the Rond family
was on intimate terms with me, and that the young daughters were
attractive-looking, and seemed to favour the ideals I expressed with
murmurs of approval ... thus the story afterward appeared....
Mrs. Rond, after a peculiarly impertinent question of the woman member
of the party, realised by this time that the three reporters were more
than a little tipsy, and ordered these guardians of the public morality
out of the house....
In the first place, they had wormed admittance through a fraud to
Hildreth and me ... the woman falsely pretended that she was a friend of
Hildreth's mother ... a great stroke of journalistic enterprise.
Mrs. Rond's rebuke was so sharply worded that it got through even their
thick skins.
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