“You’ve got a big establishment here, a credit to the city.  I’ve got a friend in there—­I shall see you again, sir.”

By the next day something more of Laura’s own story began to appear in the newspapers, colored and heightened by reporters’ rhetoric.  Some of them cast a lurid light upon the Colonel’s career, and represented his victim as a beautiful avenger of her murdered innocence; and others pictured her as his willing paramour and pitiless slayer.  Her communications to the reporters were stopped by her lawyers as soon as they were retained and visited her, but this fact did not prevent—­it may have facilitated—­the appearance of casual paragraphs here and there which were likely to beget popular sympathy for the poor girl.

The occasion did not pass without “improvement” by the leading journals; and Philip preserved the editorial comments of three or four of them which pleased him most.  These he used to read aloud to his friends afterwards and ask them to guess from which journal each of them had been cut.  One began in this simple manner:—­

History never repeats itself, but the Kaleidoscopic combinations of the pictured present often seem to be constructed out of the broken fragments of antique legends.  Washington is not Corinth, and Lais, the beautiful daughter of Timandra, might not have been the prototype of the ravishing Laura, daughter of the plebeian house of Hawkins; but the orators add statesmen who were the purchasers of the favors of the one, may have been as incorruptible as the Republican statesmen who learned how to love and how to vote from the sweet lips of the Washington lobbyist; and perhaps the modern Lais would never have departed from the national Capital if there had been there even one republican Xenocrates who resisted her blandishments.  But here the parallel:  fails.  Lais, wandering away with the youth Rippostratus, is slain by the women who are jealous of her charms.  Laura, straying into her Thessaly with the youth Brierly, slays her other lover and becomes the champion of the wrongs of her sex.

Another journal began its editorial with less lyrical beauty, but with equal force.  It closed as follows:—­

With Laura Hawkins, fair, fascinating and fatal, and with the dissolute Colonel of a lost cause, who has reaped the harvest he sowed, we have nothing to do.  But as the curtain rises on this awful tragedy, we catch a glimpse of the society at the capital under this Administration, which we cannot contemplate without alarm for the fate of the Republic.

A third newspaper took up the subject in a different tone.  It said:—­

Our repeated predictions are verified.  The pernicious doctrines which we have announced as prevailing in American society have been again illustrated.  The name of the city is becoming a reproach.  We may have done something in averting its ruin in our resolute exposure of the Great Frauds; we shall not be deterred from insisting that the outraged laws for the protection of human life shall be vindicated now, so that a person can walk the streets or enter the public houses, at least in the day-time, without the risk of a bullet through his brain.

A fourth journal began its remarks as follows:—­