I liked these men.  But they gave me an incomplete idea of the race of interviewers in the United States.  There is a variety of interviewers very different from them.  I am, I think, entitled to consider myself a fairly first-class authority on all varieties of interviewer, not only in New York but in sundry other great cities.  My initiation was brief, but it was thorough.  Many varieties won my regard immediately, and kept it; but I am conscious that my sympathy with one particular brand (perhaps not numerous) was at times imperfect.  The brand in question, as to which I was amiably cautioned before even leaving the steamer, is usually very young, and as often a girl as a youth.  He or she cheerfully introduces himself or herself with a hint that of course it is an awful bore to be interviewed, but he or she has a job to do and he or she must be allowed to do it.  Just so!  But the point which, in my audacity, I have occasionally permitted to occur to me is this:  Is this sort of interviewer capable of doing the job allotted to him?  I do not mind slips of reporting, I do not mind a certain agreeable malice (indeed, I reckon to do a bit in that line myself).  I do not even mind hasty misrepresentations (for, after all, we are human, and the millennium is still unannounced); but I do object to inefficiency—­especially in America, where sundry kinds of efficiency have been carried farther than any efficiency was ever carried before.

[Illustration:  The down-town Broadway of crowded sky-scrapers]

Now this sort of interviewer too often prefaces the operation itself by the remark that he really doesn’t know what question to ask you. (Too often I have been tempted to say:  “Why not ask me to write the interview for you?  It will save you trouble.”) Having made this remark, the interviewer usually proceeds to give a sketch of her own career, together with a conspectus of her opinions on everything, a reference to her importance in the interviewing world, and some glimpse of the amount of her earnings.  This achieved, she breaks off breathless and reproaches you:  “But, my dear man, you aren’t saying anything at all.  You really must say something.” ("My dear man” is the favorite form of address of this sort of interviewer when she happens to be a girl.) Too often I have been tempted to reply:  “Cleopatra, or Helen, which of us is being interviewed?” When he has given you a chance to talk, this sort of interviewer listens, helps, corrects, advises, but never makes a note.  The result the next morning is the anticipated result.  The average newspaper reader gathers that an extremely brilliant young man or woman has held converse with a very commonplace stranger who, being confused in his or her presence, committed a number of absurdities which offered a strong and painful contrast to the cleverness and wisdom of the brilliant youth.  This result apparently satisfies the average newspaper reader, but it does not satisfy the expert.  Immediately after my first bout with interviewers I was seated at a table in the dining-saloon of the ship with my particular friend and three or four friendly, quiet, modest, rather diffident human beings whom I afterward discovered to be among the best and most experienced newspaper men in New York—­not interviewers.