Her Reputation by Talbot Mundy

There were no women on the San Francisco Tribune staff. John Covert Mansfield so decreed -- the "Iron Old Man," whose vitriolic pen and point of view, reenforced by a beaver's energy, had raised the Tribune from tenth to third place among daily newspapers. He was more than owner and managing editor; he was the power, the newspaper itself, and notorious as the ablest and most exacting editor alive. It was an education -- a cachet for advancement elsewhere -- to have worked under Mansfield on the Tribune.

He had a son, so he must have had a wife, and there was a legend, seldom mentioned, that an unfortunate marriage had embittered him against all women. "Dad" Lawrence, the Tribune's social reporter, who had been on the paper longer than any one except Mansfield himself, knew more about the facts than he generally cared to tell. "Dad" was privileged -- almost intimate with Mansfield -- even had a key to Mansfield's so-called "cabin" in the mountains and spent his rare vacations up there, and was about the only man in the Tribune Building who ever dared to oppose the old man's wishes or to criticize him to his face.