Note 2 — Chapter XXVII · RAGOUSA TALK

“I ought to have been a reporter,” he said. “I’ve got more newsgetting ideas than any of the cubs I’ve met in my professional life. Lord! when I think of the scoops I could have got,” he said reminiscently. “I’ll tell you something, Bullott, as a guarantee of good faith, as the newspapers say. I did a two years’ course of deed-box work. That’s a new one on you? In that two years I broke into a hundred and twenty-three lawyers’ offices. It was a hobby, you understand; just an in-something-able curiosity—what’s the word? Thank you—insatiable. There’s no money in lawyers, but a whole fortune if I’d been ‘putting the black’.[2] I did other work, because a man’s got to live, and hobbies are expensive. But the documents I’ve read! The bundles of letters, tied up with red tape, what wives have said to their husbands and what husbands have said to their wives, the confessions and deeds of assignment—there’s a Cabinet Minister who’s been paying three thousand a year blackmail for the last twelve years; did you know it?” He mentioned a great name. “I’m a reporter, I tell you—I want to know. A lot of people think that a born reporter is a fellow who wants to write, but that’s not so, and Holbrook will tell you the same. A born reporter just wants to know, and he doesn’t care a darn whether he writes or whether he doesn’t.”