IT marked a sort of sublimination of the Fleet Street spirit in my sister-in-law that, within healthy limits, she not only could do everything, but she would do anything. Her work was patchwork of the wildest and most bizarre description; and she was almost continuously in a state of hilarious irony in contemplation of its contrast. She would turn easily from a direct and demagogic, though quite tragically sincere, appeal in a Sunday paper against official oppression of poor mothers, to an almost cynical modern criticism of the most sophisticated modern plays. She would finish a hard controversial comment on the Marconi case, full of facts and figures, for the Eye-Witness, and lightly turn to the next chapter in a shamelessly melodramatic and Victorian serial, full of innocent heroines and infamous villains, for Fireside Romances or Wedding Bells. It was of her that the story was told that, having driven whole teams of plotters and counter-plotters through a serious Scotch newspaper, she was pursuing one of the side-plots for a few chapters, when she received a telegram from the editor, 'You have left your hero and heroine tied up in a cavern under the Thames for a week, and they are not married.'
From G. K. Chesterton, Autobiography (1936), p. 189.