Many people did not like Jessop. He had rather a brutal manner sometimes of telling brutal things—the truth, he called it. "They don't like it," he once said to me in a rare moment of confidence. "But why the devil shouldn't they? They pretend these sorts of things, battle, murder, and sudden death, are so real—more real than white kid gloves and omnibuses and rose leaves—and yet when you give them the real thing, they curl up like school girls. It does them good, you know, does them a world of good."