This meant in practice that, when we were ashore, one, or more usually two of us, would remain in the house in case of emergency.  This did not by any means imply that we were always free from work after ten o’clock at night, in fact the very opposite was true, for it was J. P.’s custom to say, during dinner, that on the following day he would ride, drive, or walk with such a one or such a one, naming him; and the victim—­a term frequently used with a good deal of surprisingly frank enjoyment by J. P. himself—­had often to work well into the night preparing material for conversation.

I saw something of what this preparation meant before I left the villa after my first meeting with J. P. Two of the secretaries said they would go over to Monte Carlo, and they asked me to go with them; but I declined, preferring to remain behind for a chat with one of the secretaries, Mr. Norman G. Thwaites, an Englishman, who was secretary in a more technical sense than any of the rest of us, for he was a shorthand writer and did most of J. P.’s correspondence.

After the others had gone he showed me a table in the entrance hall of the villa, on which was a big pile of mail just arrived from London.  It included a great number of newspapers and weeklies, several copies of each.  There were The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Mail, The Morning Post, The Daily News, The Westminster Gazette, Truth, The Spectator, The Saturday Review, The Nation, The Outlook, and some other London publications, as well as the Paris editions of the New York Herald and The Daily Mail.

Thwaites selected a copy of each and then led the way to his bedroom, a large room on the top floor, from which we could see across the bay the brilliant lights of Monte Carlo.

He then explained to me that he had been selected to read to J. P. whilst the latter had his breakfast and his after-breakfast cigar the next morning.  In order to do this satisfactorily he had to go over the papers and read carefully whatever he could find that was suited to J. P.’s taste at that particular time of the day.  During the breakfast hour J. P. would not have anything read to him which was of an exciting nature.  This preference excluded political news, crime, disaster, and war correspondence, and left practically nothing but book reviews, criticisms of plays, operas, and art exhibitions, and publishers’ announcements.

The principal sources of information on these topics were the literary supplement of the London Times, the Literary Digest, and the literary, dramatic, and musical columns of the Athenaeum, The Spectator, and the Saturday Review.

These had to be “prepared,” to use J. P.’s phrase, which meant that they were read over rapidly once and then gone over again with some concentration so that the more important articles could be marked for actual reading, the other portions being dealt with conversationally, everything being boiled down to its essence before it reached Mr. Pulitzer’s ear.