But again the business was running down, and this time he must jerk it back before it got beyond him.  He set himself doggedly to the task, calling in his assistants one by one, going through the work in those outer rooms, where at tables long rows of busy young girls, with colored pencils, scissors and paste, were demolishing enormous piles of newspapers and magazines.  And vaguely, little by little, he came to a realization of how while he had slumbered the life of the country had swept on.  For as he studied the lists and the letters of his patrons, Roger felt confusedly that a new America was here.

Clippings, clippings, clippings.  Business men and business firms, gigantic corporations, kept sending here for clippings, news of themselves or their rivals, keeping keen watch on each other’s affairs for signs of strength or weakness.  How savage was the fight these days.  Here was news of mines and mills and factories all over the land, clippings sent each morning by special messengers downtown to reach the brokers’ offices before the market opened.  One broker wrote, “Please quote your terms for the following.  From nine to two o’clock each day our messenger will call at your office every hour for clippings giving information of the companies named below.”

The long list appended carried Roger’s fancy out all over the continent.  And then came this injunction:  “Remember that our messenger must leave your office every hour.  In information of this kind every minute counts.”

Clippings, clippings, clippings.  As Roger turned over his morning mail, in spite of himself he grew absorbed.  What a change in the world of literature.  What a host of names of scribblers, not authors but just writers, not only men but women too, novelists and dramatists, poets and muckrakers all jumbled in together, each one of them straining for a place.  And the actors and the actresses, the musicians and the lecturers, each with his press agent and avid for publicity, “fame!” And here were society women, from New York and other cities, all eager for press notices of social affairs they had given or managed, charity work they had conducted, suffrage speeches they had made.  Half the women in the land were fairly talking their heads off, it seemed.  Some had been on his lists for years.  They married and wanted to hear what was said in the papers about their weddings, they quarreled and got divorces and still sent here for clippings, they died and still their relatives wrote in for the funeral notices.  And even death was commercialized.  A maker of monuments wanted news “of all people of large means, dead or dangerously ill, in the State of Pennsylvania.”  Here were demands from charity bodies, hospitals and colleges, from clergymen with an anxious eye on the Monday morning papers.  And here was an anarchist millionaire!  And here was an insane asylum wanting to see itself in print!

With a grim smile on his heavy visage, Roger stared out of his window.  Slowly the smile faded, a wistful look came on his face.