"Ban will be glad to see you. Take off your things. I am Russell Edmonds."

He led the way into a spacious and beautiful room, filled with the composite hum of voices and the scent of half-hidden flowers. The Westerner glanced avidly about him, noting here a spoken name familiar in print, there a face recognized from far-spread photographic reproduction.

"Some different from Ban's shack on the desert," he muttered. "Hello! Mr. Edmonds, who's the splendid-looking woman in brown with the yellow orchids, over there in the seat back of the palms?"

Edmonds leaned forward to look. "Royce Melvin, the composer, I believe. I haven't met her."

"I have, then," returned the other, as the guest changed her position, fully revealing her face. "Tried to dig some information out of her once. Like picking prickly pears blindfold. That's Camilla Van Arsdale. What a coincidence to find her here!"

"No! Camilla Van Arsdale? You'll excuse me, won't you? I want to speak to her. Make yourself known to any one you like the looks of. That's the rule of the house; no introductions."

He walked across the room, made his way through the crescent curving about Miss Van Arsdale, and, presenting himself, was warmly greeted.

"Let me take you to Ban," he said. "He'll want to see you at once."

"But won't it disturb his work?"

"Nothing does. He writes with an open door and a shut brain."

He led her up the east flight of stairs and down a long hallway to an end room with door ajar, notwithstanding that even at that distance the hum of voices and the muffled throbbing of the concert grand piano from below were plainly audible. Banneker's voice, regular, mechanical, desensitized as the voices of those who dictate habitually are prone to become, floated out:

"Quote where ignorance is bliss 'tis folly to be wise end quote comma said a poet who was also a cynic period. Many poets are comma but not the greatest period. Because of their—turn back to the beginning of the paragraph, please, Miss Westlake."

"I've brought up an old friend, Ban," announced Edmonds, pushing wide the door.

Vaguely smiling, for he had trained himself to be impervious to interruptions, the editorializer turned in his chair. Instantly he sprang to his feet, and caught Miss Van Arsdale by both hands.

"Miss Camilla!" he cried. "I thought you said you couldn't come."

"I'm defying the doctors," she replied. "They've given me so good a report of myself that I can afford to. I'll go down now and wait for you."

"No; don't. Sit up here with me till I finish. I don't want to lose any of you," said he affectionately.

But she laughingly refused, declaring that he would be through all the sooner for his other guests, if she left him.

"See that she meets some people, Bop," Banneker directed. "Gaines of The New Era, if he's here, and Betty Raleigh, and that new composer, and the Junior Masters."

Edmonds nodded, and escorted her downstairs. Nicely judging the time when Banneker would have finished, he was back in quarter of an hour. The stenographer had just left.

"What a superb woman, Ban!" he said. "It's small wonder that Enderby lost himself."

Banneker nodded. "What would she have said if she could know that you, an absolute stranger, had been the means of saving her from a terrific scandal? Gives one a rather shivery feeling about the power and responsibility of the press, doesn't it?"

"It would have been worse than murder," declared the veteran, with so much feeling that his friend gave him a grateful look. "What's she doing in New York? Is it safe?"

"Came on to see a specialist. Yes; it's all right. The Enderbys are abroad."

"I see. How long since you'd seen her?"

"Before this trip? Last spring, when I took a fortnight off."

"You went clear West, just to see her?"

"Mainly. Partly, too, to get back to the restfulness of the place where I never had any troubles. I've kept the little shack I used to own; pay a local chap named Mindle to keep it in shape. So I just put in a week of quiet there."

"You're a queer chap, Ban. And a loyal one."

"If I weren't loyal to Camilla Van Arsdale—" said Banneker, and left the implication unconcluded.

"Another friend from your picturesque past is down below," said Edmonds, and named Gardner.

"Lord! That fellow nearly cost me my life, last time we met," laughed Banneker. Then his face altered. Pain drew its sharp lines there, pain and the longing of old memories still unassuaged. "Just the same, I'll be glad to see him."

He sought out the Californian, found him deep in talk with Guy Mallory of The Ledger, who had come in late, gave him hearty greeting, and looked about for Camilla Van Arsdale. She was supping in the center of a curiously assorted group, part of whom remembered the old romance of her life, and part of whom had identified her, by some chance, as Royce Melvin, the composer. All of them were paying court to her charm and intelligence. She made a place beside herself for Banneker.

"We've been discussing The Patriot, Ban," she said, "and Mr. Gaines has embalmed you, as an editorial writer, in the amber of one of his best epigrams."

The Great Gaines made a deprecating gesture. "My little efforts always sound better when I'm not present," he protested.

"To be the subject of any Gaines epigram, however stinging, is fame in itself," said Banneker.

"And no sting in this one. 'Attic salt and American pep,'" she quoted. "Isn't it truly spicy?"

Banneker bowed with half-mocking appreciation. "I fancy, though, that Mr. Gaines prefers his journalistic egg more au naturel."

"Sometimes," admitted the most famous of magazine editors, "I could dispense with some of the pep."

"I like the pep, too, Ban." Betty Raleigh, looking up from a seat where she sat talking to a squat and sensual-looking man, a dweller in the high places and cool serenities of advanced mathematics whom jocular-minded Nature had misdowered with the face of a satyr, interposed the suave candor of her voice. "I actually lick my lips over your editorials even where I least agree with them. But the rest of the paper—Oh, dear! It screeches."

"Modern life is such a din that one has to screech to be heard above it," said Banneker pleasantly.

"Isn't it the newspapers which make most of the din, though?" suggested the mathematician.

"Shouting against each other," said Gaines.

"Like Coney Island barkers for rival shows," put in Junior Masters.

"Just for variety how would it do to try the other tack and practice a careful but significant restraint?" inquired Betty.

"Wouldn't sell a ticket," declared Banneker.

"Still, if we all keep on yelling in the biggest type and hottest words we can find," pointed out Edmonds, "the effect will pall."

"Perhaps the measure of success is in finding something constantly more strident and startling than the other fellow's war whoop," surmised Masters.

"I have never particularly admired the steam calliope as a form of expression," observed Miss Van Arsdale.

"Ah!" said the actress, smiling, "but Royce Melvin doesn't make music for circuses."

"And a modern newspaper is a circus," pronounced the satyr-like scholar.

"Three-ring variety; all the latest stunts; list to the voice of the ballyhoo," said Masters.

"Panem et circenses" pursued the mathematician, pleased with his simile, "to appease the howling rabble. But it is mostly circus, and very little bread that our emperors of the news give us."

"We've got to feed what the animal eats," defended Banneker lightly.

"After having stimulated an artificial appetite," said Edmonds.

As the talk flowed on, Betty Raleigh adroitly drew Banneker out of the current of it. "Your Patriot needn't have screeched at me, Ban," she murmured in an injured tone.

"Did it, Betty? How, when, and where?"

"I thought you were horridly patronizing about the new piece, and quite unkind to me, for a friend."

"It wasn't my criticism, you know," he reminded her patiently. "I don't write the whole paper, though most of my acquaintances seem to think that I do. Any and all of it to which they take exception, at least."

"Of course, I know you didn't write it, or it wouldn't have been so stupid. I could stand anything except the charge that I've lost my naturalness and become conventional."

"You're like the man who could resist anything except temptation, my dear: you can stand anything except criticism," returned Banneker with a smile so friendly that there was no sting in the words. "You've never had enough of that. You're the spoiled pet of the critics."

"Not of this new one of yours. He's worse than Gurney. Who is he and where does he come from?"

"An inconsiderable hamlet known as Chicago. Name, Allan Haslett. Dramatic criticism out there is still so unsophisticated as to be intelligent as well as honest—at its best."

"Which it isn't here," commented the special pet of the theatrical reviewers.

"Well, I thought a good new man would be better than the good old ones. Less hampered by personal considerations. So I sent and got this one."

"But he isn't good. He's a horrid beast. We've been specially nice to him, on your account mostly—Ban, if you grin that way I shall hate you! I had Bezdek invite him to one of the rehearsal suppers and he wouldn't come. Sent word that theatrical suppers affected his eyesight when he came to see the play."

Banneker chuckled. "Just why I got him. He doesn't let the personal element prejudice him."

"He is prejudiced. And most unfair. Ban," said Betty in her most seductive tones, "do call him down. Make him write something decent about us. Bez is fearfully upset."

Banneker sighed. "The curse of this business," he reflected aloud, "is that every one regards The Patriot as my personal toy for me or my friends to play with."

"This isn't play at all. It's very much earnest. Do be nice about it, Ban."

"Betty, do you remember a dinner party in the first days of our acquaintance, at which I told you that you represented one essential difference from all the other women there?"

"Yes. I thought you were terribly presuming."

"I told you that you were probably the only woman present who wasn't purchasable."

"Not understanding you as well as I do now, I was quite shocked. Besides, it was so unfair. Nearly all of them were most respectable married people."

"Bought by their most respectable husbands. Some of 'em bought away from other husbands. But I gave you credit for not being on that market—or any other. And now you're trying to corrupt my professional virtue."

"Ban! I'm not."

"What else is it when you try to use your influence to have me fire our nice, new critic?"

"If that's being corruptible, I wonder if any of us are incorruptible." She stretched upward an idle hand and fondled a spray of freesia that drooped against her cheek. "Ban; there's something I've been waiting to tell you. Tertius Marrineal wants to marry me."

"I've suspected as much. That would settle the obnoxious critic, wouldn't it! Though it's rather a roundabout way."

"Ban! You're beastly."

"Yes; I apologize," he replied quickly. "But—have I got to revise my estimate of you, Betty? I should hate to."

"Your estimate? Oh, as to purchasability. That's worse than what you've just said. Yet, somehow, I don't resent it. Because it's honest, I suppose," she said pensively. "No: it wouldn't be a—a market deal. I like Tertius. I like him a lot. I won't pretend that I'm madly in love with him. But—"

"Yes; I know," he said gently, as she paused, looking at him steadily, but with clouded eyes. He read into that "but" a world of opportunities; a theater of her own—the backing of a powerful newspaper—wealth—and all, if she so willed it, without interruption to her professional career.

"Would you think any the less of me?" she asked wistfully.

"Would you think any the less of yourself?" he countered.

The blossoming spray broke under her hand. "Ah, yes; that's the question after all, isn't it?" she murmured.

Meantime, Gardner, the eternal journalist, fostering a plan of his own, was gathering material from Guy Mallory who had come in late.

"What gets me," he said, looking over at the host, "is how he can do a day's work with all this social powwow going on."

"A day's? He does three days' work in every one. He's the hardest trained mind in the business. Why, he could sit down here this minute, in the middle of this room, and dictate an editorial while keeping up his end in the general talk. I've seen him do it."

"He must be a wonder at concentration."

"Concentration? If he didn't invent it, he perfected it. Tell you a story. Ban doesn't go in for any game except polo. One day some of the fellows at The Retreat got talking golf to him—"

"The Retreat? Good Lord! He doesn't belong to The Retreat, does he?"

"Yes; been a member for years. Well, they got him to agree to try it. Jim Tamson, the pro—he's supposed to be the best instructor in America—was there then. Banneker went out to the first tee, a 215-yard hole, watched Jim perform his show-em-how swing, asked a couple of questions. 'Eye on the ball,' says Jim. 'That's nine tenths of it. The rest is hitting it easy and following through. Simple and easy,' says Jim, winking to himself. Banneker tries two or three clubs to see which feels easiest to handle, picks out a driving-iron, and slams the ball almost to the edge of the green. Chance? Of course, there was some luck in it. But it was mostly his everlasting ability to keep his attention focused. Jim almost collapsed. 'First time I ever saw a beginner that didn't top,' says he. 'You'll make a golfer, Mr. Banneker.'

"'Not me,' says Ban. 'This game is too easy. It doesn't interest me.' He hands Jim a twenty-dollar bill, thanks him, goes in and has his bath, and has never touched a golf-stick since."

Gardner had been listening with a kindling eye. He brought his fist down on his knee. "You've told me something!" he exclaimed.

"Going to try it out on your own game?"

"Not about golf. About Banneker. I've been wondering how he managed to establish himself as an individual figure in this big town. Now I begin to see it. It's publicity; that's what it is. He's got the sense of how to make himself talked about. He's picturesque. I'll bet Banneker's first and last golf shot is a legend in the clubs yet, isn't it?"

"It certainly is," confirmed Mallory. "But do you really think that he reasoned it all out on the spur of the moment?"

"Oh, reasoned; probably not. It's instinctive, I tell you. And the twenty to the professional was a touch of genius. Tamson will never stop talking about it. Can't you hear him, telling it to his fellow pros? 'Golf's too easy for me,' he says, 'and hands me a double sawbuck! Did ye ever hear the like!' And so the legend is built up. It's a great thing to become a local legend. I know, for I've built up a few of 'em myself.... I suppose the gun-play on the river-front gave him his start at it and the rest came easy."

"Ask him. He'll probably tell you," said Mallory. "At least, he'll be interested in your theory."

Gardner strolled over to Banneker's group, not for the purpose of adopting Mallory's suggestion, for he was well satisfied with his own diagnosis, but to congratulate him upon the rising strength of The Patriot. As he approached, Miss Van Arsdale, in response to a plea from Betty Raleigh, went to the piano, and the dwindled crowd settled down into silence. For music, at The House With Three Eyes, was invariably the sort of music that people listen to; that is, the kind of people whom Banneker gathered around him.

After she had played, Miss Van Arsdale declared that she must go, whereupon Banneker insisted upon taking her to her hotel. To her protests against dragging him away from his own party, he retorted that the party could very well run itself without him; his parties often did, when he was specially pressed in his work. Accepting this, his friend elected to walk; she wanted to hear more about The Patriot. What did she think of it, he asked.

"I don't expect you to like it," he added.

"That doesn't matter. I do tremendously admire your editorials. They're beautifully done; the perfection of clarity. But the rest of the paper—I can't see you in it."

"Because I'm not there, as an individual."

He expounded to her his theory of journalism. That was a just characterization of Junior Masters, he said: the three-ringed circus. He, Banneker, would run any kind of a circus they wanted, to catch and hold their eyes; the sensational acts, the clowns of the funny pages, the blare of the bands, the motion, the color, and the spangles; all to beguile them into reading and eventually to thinking.

"But we haven't worked it out yet, as we should. What I'm really aiming at is a saturated solution, as the chemists say: Not a saturated solution of circulation, for that isn't possible, but a saturated solution of influence. If we can't put The Patriot into every man's house, we ought to be able to put it into every man's mind. All things to all men: that's the formula. We're far from it yet, but we're on the road. And in the editorials, I'm making people stir their minds about real things who never before developed a thought beyond the everyday, mechanical processes of living."

"To what end?" she asked doubtfully.

"Does it matter? Isn't the thinking, in itself, end enough?"

"Brutish thinking if it's represented in your screaming headlines."

"Predigested news. I want to preserve all their brain-power for my editorial page. And, oh, how easy I make it for them! Thoughts of one syllable."

"And you use your power over their minds to incite them to discontent."

"Certainly."

"But that's dreadful, Ban! To stir up bitterness and rancor among people."

"Don't you be misled by cant, Miss Camilla," adjured Banneker. "The contented who have everything to make them content have put a stigma on discontent. They'd have us think it a crime. It isn't. It's a virtue."

"Ban! A virtue?"

"Well; isn't it? Call it by the other name, ambition. What then?"

Miss Van Arsdale pondered with troubled eyes. "I see what you mean," she confessed. "But the discontent that arises within one's self is one thing; the 'divine discontent.' It's quite another to foment it for your own purposes in the souls of others."

"That depends upon the purpose. If the purpose is to help the others, through making their discontent effective to something better, isn't it justified?"

"But isn't there always the danger of making a profession of discontent?"

"That's a shrewd hit," confessed Banneker. "I've suspected that Marrineal means to capitalize it eventually, though I don't know just how. He's a secret sort of animal, Marrineal."

"But he gives you a free hand?" she asked.

"He has to," said Banneker simply.

Camilla Van Arsdale sighed. "It's success, Ban. Isn't it?"

"Yes. It's success. In its kind."

"Is it happiness?"

"Yes. Also in its kind."

"The real kind? The best kind?"

"It's satisfaction. I'm doing what I want to do."

She sighed. "I'd hoped for something more."

He shook his head. "One can't have everything."

"Why not?" she demanded almost fiercely. "You ought to have. You're made for it." After a pause she added: "Then it isn't Betty Raleigh. I'd hoped it was. I've been watching her. There's character there, Ban, as well as charm."

"She has other interests. No; it isn't Betty."

"Ban, there are times when I could hate her," broke out Miss Van Arsdale.

"Who? Betty?"

"You know whom well enough."

"I stand corrected in grammar as well as fact," he said lightly.

"Have you seen her?"

"Yes. I see her occasionally. Not often."

"Does she come here?"

"She has been."

"And her husband?"

"No."

"Ban, aren't you ever going to get over it?"

He looked at her silently.

"No; you won't. There are a few of us like that. God help us!" said Camilla Van Arsdale.



CHAPTER II

Others than Banneker's friends and frequenters now evinced symptoms of interest in his influence upon his environment. Approve him you might, or disapprove him; the palpable fact remained that he wielded a growing power. Several promising enterprises directed at the City Treasury had aborted under destructive pressure from his pen. A once impregnably cohesive ring of Albany legislators had disintegrated with such violence of mutual recrimination that prosecution loomed imminent, because of a two weeks' "vacation" of Banneker's at the State Capitol. He had hunted some of the lawlessness out of the Police Department and bludgeoned some decent housing measures through the city councils. Politically he was deemed faithless and unreliable which meant that, as an independent, he had ruined some hopefully profitable combinations in both parties. Certain men, high up in politics and finance at the point where they overlap, took thoughtful heed of him. How could they make him useful? Or, at least, prevent him from being harmful?

No less a potentate than Poultney Masters had sought illumination from Willis Enderby upon the subject in the days when people in street-cars first began to rustle through the sheets of The Patriot, curious to see what the editorial had to say to them that day.

"What do you think of him?" began the magnate.

"Able," grunted the other.

"If he weren't, I wouldn't be troubling my head about him. What else? Dangerous?"

"As dangerous as he is upright. Exactly."

"Now, I wonder what the devil you mean by that, Enderby," said the financier testily. "Dangerous as long as he's upright? Eh? And dangerous to what?"

"To anything he goes after. He's got a following. I might almost say a blind following."

"Got a boss, too, hasn't he?"

"Marrineal? Ah, I don't know how far Marrineal interferes. And I don't know Marrineal."

"Upright, too; that one?" The sneer in Masters's heavy voice was palpable.

"You consider that no newspaper can be upright," the lawyer interpreted.

"I've bought 'em and bluffed 'em and stood 'em in a corner to be good," returned the other simply. "What would you expect my opinion to be?"

"The Sphere, among them?" queried the lawyer.

"Damn The Sphere!" exploded the other. "A dirty, muck-grubbing, lying, crooked rag."

"Your actual grudge against it is not for those latter qualities, though," pointed out Enderby. "On questions where it conflicts with your enterprises, it's straight enough. That's it's defect. Upright equals dangerous. You perceive?"

Masters shrugged the problem away with a thick and ponderous jerk of his shoulders. "What's young Banneker after?" he demanded.

"You ought to know him as well as I. He's a sort of protege of yours, isn't he?"

"At The Retreat, you mean? I put him in because he looked to be polo stuff. Now the young squirt won't practice enough to be certain team material."

"Found a bigger game."

"Umph! But what's in back of it?"

"It's the game for the game's sake with him, I suspect. I can only tell you that, wherever I've had contact with him, he has been perfectly straightforward."

"Maybe. But what about this anarchistic stuff of his?"

"Oh, anarchistic! You mean his attacks on Wall Street? The Stock Exchange isn't synonymous with the Constitution of the United States, you know, Masters. Do moderate your language."

"Now you're laughing at me, damn you, Enderby."

"It's good for you. You ought to laugh at yourself more. Ask Banneker what he's at. Very probably he'll laugh at you inside. But he'll answer you."

"That reminds me. He had an editorial last week that stuck to me. 'It is the bitter laughter of the people that shakes thrones. Have a care, you money kings, not to become too ridiculous!' Isn't that socialist-anarchist stuff?"

"It's very young stuff. But it's got a quality, hasn't it?"

"Oh, hell, yes; quality!" rumbled the profane old man. "Well, I will tackle your young prodigy one of these days."

Which, accordingly, he did, encountering, some days later, Banneker in the reading-room at The Retreat.

"What are you up to; making trouble with that editorial screed of yours?" he growled at the younger man.

Banneker smiled. He accepted that growl from Poultney Masters, not because Masters was a great and formidable figure in the big world, but because beneath the snarl there was a quality of—no, not of friendliness, but of man-to-man approach.

"No. I'm trying to cure trouble, not make it."

"Umph! Queer idea of curing. Here we are in the midst of good times, everywhere, and you talk about—what was the stuff?—oh, yes: 'The grinning mask of prosperity, beneath which Want searches with haggard and threatening eyes for the crust denied.' Fine stuff!"

"Not mine. I don't write as beautifully as all that. It's quoted from a letter. But I'll take the responsibility, since I quoted it. There's some truth in it, you know."

"Not a hair's-weight. If you fill the minds of the ignorant with that sort of thing, where shall we end?"

"If you fill the minds of the ignorant, they will no longer be ignorant."

"Then they'll be above their class and their work. Our whole trouble is in that; people thinking they're too good for the sort of work they're fitted for."

"Aren't they too good if they can think themselves into something better?"

Poultney Masters delivered himself of a historical profundity. "The man who first had the notion of teaching the mass of people to read will have something to answer for."

"Destructive, isn't it?" said Banneker, looking up quickly.

"Now, you want to go farther. You want to teach 'em to think."

"Exactly. Why not?"

"Why not? Why, because, you young idiot, they'll think wrong."

"Very likely. At first. We all had to spell wrong before we spelled right. What if people do think wrong? It's the thinking that's important. Eventually they'll think right."

"With the newspapers to guide them?" There was a world of scorn in the magnate's voice.

"Some will guide wrong. Some will guide right. The most I hope to do is to teach 'em a little to use their minds. Education and a fair field. To find out and to make clear what is found; that's the business of a newspaper as I see it."

"Tittle-tattle. Tale-mongering," was Masters's contemptuous qualification.

"A royal mission," laughed Banneker. "I call the Sage to witness. 'But the glory of kings is to search out a matter.'"

"But they've got to be kings," retorted the other quickly. "It's a tricky business, Banneker. Better go in for polo. We need you." He lumbered away, morose and growling, but turned back to call over his shoulder: "Read your own stuff when you get up to-morrow and see if polo isn't a better game and a cleaner."

What the Great of the city might think of his journalistic achievement troubled Banneker but little, so long as they thought of it at all, thereby proving its influence; the general public was his sole arbiter, except for the opinions of the very few whose approval he really desired, Io Eyre, Camilla Van Arsdale, and more remotely the men for whose own standards he maintained a real respect, such as Willis Enderby and Gaines. Determined to make Miss Van Arsdale see his point of view, as well as to assure himself of hers, he had extracted from her a promise that she would visit The Patriot office before she returned to the West. Accordingly, on a set morning she arrived on her trip of inspection, tall, serene, and, in her aloof genre, beautiful, an alien figure in the midst of that fevered and delirious energy. He took her through the plant, elucidating the mechanical processes of the daily miracle of publication, more far-reaching than was ever any other voice of man, more ephemeral than the day of the briefest butterfly. Throughout, the visitor's pensive eyes kept turning from the creature to the creator, until, back in the trim quietude of his office, famed as the only orderly working-room of journalism, she delivered her wondering question:

"And you have made all this, Ban?"

"At least I've remade it."

She shook her head. "No; as I told you before, I can't see you in it."

"You mean, it doesn't express me. It isn't meant to.'

"Whom does it express, then? Mr. Marrineal?"

"No. It isn't an expression at all in that sense. It's a—a response. A response to the demand of hundreds of thousands of people who have never had a newspaper made for them before."

"An echo of vox populi? Does that excuse its sins?"

"I'm not putting it forth as an excuse. Is it really sins or only bad taste that offends you?"

"Clever, Ban. And true in a measure. But insincerity is more than bad taste. It's one of the primal sins."

"You find The Patriot insincere?"

"Can I find it anything else, knowing you?"

"Ah, there you go wrong again, Miss Camilla. As an expression of my ideals, the news part of the paper would be insincere. I don't like it much better than you do. But I endure it; yes, I'll be frank and admit that I even encourage it, because it gives me wider scope for the things I want to say. Sincere things. I've never yet written in my editorial column anything that I don't believe from the bottom of my soul. Take that as a basis on which to judge me."

"My dear Ban! I don't want to judge you."

"I want you to," he cried eagerly. "I want your judgment and your criticism. But you must see what I'm aiming for. Miss Camilla, I'm making people stir their minds and think who never before had a thought beyond the everyday processes of life."

"For your own purposes? Thought, as you manipulate it, might be a high-explosive. Have you thought of using it in that way?"

"If I found a part of the social edifice that had to be blown to pieces, I might."

"Take care that you don't involve us all in the crash. Meantime, what is the rest of your editorial page; a species of sedative to lull their minds? Who is Evadne Ellington?"

"One of our most prominent young murderesses."

"And you let her sign a column on your page?"

"Oh, she's a highly moral murderess. Killed her lover in defense of her honor, you know. Which means that she shot him when he got tired of her. A sobbing jury promptly acquitted her, and now she's writing 'Warnings to Young Girls.' They're most improving and affecting, I assure you. We look after that."

"Ban! I hate to have you so cynical."

"Not at all," he protested. "Ask the Prevention of Vice people and the criminologists. They'll tell you that Evadne's column is a real influence for good among the people who read and believe it."

"What class is Reformed Rennigan's sermon aimed at?" she inquired, with wrinkling nostrils. "'Soaking it to Satan'; is that another regular feature?"

"Twice a week. It gives us a Y.M.C.A. circulation that is worth a good deal to us. Outside of my double column, the page is a sort of forum. I'll take anything that is interesting or authoritative. For example, if Royce Melvin had something of value to say to the public about music, where else could she find so wide a hearing as through The Patriot?"

"No, I thank you," returned his visitor dryly.

"No? Are you sure? What is your opinion of 'The Star-Spangled Banner' as a national song?"

"It's dreadful."

"Why?"

"For every reason. The music misfits the words. It's beyond the range of most voices. The harmonies are thin. No crowd in the world can sing it. What is the value or inspiration of a national song that the people can't sing?"

"Ask it of The Patriot's public. I'll follow it up editorially; 'Wanted; A Song for America.'"

"I will," she answered impulsively. Then she laughed. "Is that the way you get your contributors?"

"Often, as the spider said to the fly," grinned Banneker the shameless. "Take a thousand words or more and let us have your picture."

"No. Not that. I've seen my friends' pictures too often in your society columns. By the way, how comes it that a paper devoted to the interests of the common people maintains that aristocratic feature?"

"Oh, the common people eat it alive. Russell Edmonds is largely responsible for keeping it up. You should hear his theory. It's ingenious. I'll send for him."

Edmonds, who chanced to be at his desk, entered the editorial den with his tiny pipe between his teeth, and, much disconcerted at finding a lady there, hastily removed it until Miss Van Arsdale suggested its restitution.

"What? The society page?" said he. "Yes; I was against dropping it. You see, Miss Van Arsdale, I'm a Socialist in belief."

"Is there a pun concealed in that or are you serious, Mr. Edmonds?"

"Serious. I'm always that on the subjects of Socialism and The Patriot."

"Then you must explain if I'm to understand."

"By whom is society news read? By two classes," expounded the veteran; "those whose names appear, and those who are envious of those whose names appear. Well, we're after the envious."

"Still I don't see. With what purpose?'

"Jim Simpson, who has just got his grocery bill for more than he can pay, reads a high-colored account of Mrs. Stumpley-Triggs's aquatic dinner served in the hundred-thousand-dollar swimming-pool on her Westchester estate. That makes Jim think."

"You mean that it makes him discontented."

"Well, discontent is a mighty leaven."

Miss Van Arsdale directed her fine and serious eyes upon Banneker. "So it comes back to the cult of discontent. Is that Mr. Marrineal's formula, too, Mr. Edmonds?"

"Underneath all his appearance of candor, Marrineal's a secret animal," said Edmonds.

"Does he leave you a free hand with your editorials, Ban?" inquired the outsider.

"Absolutely."

"Watches the circulation only," said Edmonds. "Thus far," he added.

"You're looking for an ulterior motive, then," interpreted Miss Van Arsdale.

"I'm looking for whatever I can find in Marrineal, Miss Van Arsdale," confessed the patriarch of the office. "As yet I haven't found much."

"I have," said Banneker. "I've discovered his theory of journalism. We three, Edmonds, Marrineal, and I, regard this business from three diverse viewpoints. To Edmonds it's a vocation and a rostrum. He wants really, under his guise as the most far-seeing news man of his time, to call sinners against society to repentance, or to force repentance down their throats. There's a good deal of the stern evangelist about you, you know, Pop."

"And you?" The other's smile seemed enmeshed in the dainty spiral of smoke brooding above his pursed lips.

"Oh, I'm more the pedagogue. With me, too, the game is a vocation. But it's a different one. I'd like to marshal men's minds as a generalissimo marshals armies."

"In the bonds of your own discipline?" asked Miss Van Arsdale.

"If I could chain a mind I'd be the most splendid tyrant of history. No. Free leadership of the free is good enough."

"If Marrineal will leave you free," commented the veteran. "What's your diagnosis of Marrineal, then?"

"A priest of Baal."

"With The Patriot in the part of Baal?"

"Not precisely The Patriot. Publicity, rather, of which The Patriot is merely the instrument. Marrineal's theory of publicity is interesting. It may even be true. Substantially it is this: All civilized Americans fear and love print; that is to say, Publicity, for which read Baal. They fear it for what it may do to them. They love and fawn on it for what it may do for them. It confers the boon of glory and launches the bolts of shame. Its favorites, made and anointed from day to day, are the blessed of their time. Those doomed by it are the outcasts. It sits in momentary judgment, and appeal from its decisions is too late to avail anything to its victims. A species of auto-juggernaut, with Marrineal at the wheel."

"What rubbish!" said Miss Van Arsdale with amused scorn.

"Oh, because you've nothing to ask or fear from Baal. Yet even you would use it, for your musical preachment."

As he spoke, he became aware of Edmonds staring moodily and with pinched lips at Miss Van Arsdale. To the mind's eye of the old stager had flashed a sudden and astounding vision of all that pride of womanhood and purity underlying the beauty of the face, overlaid and fouled by the inky vomit of Baal of the printing-press, as would have come to pass had not he, Edmonds, obstructed the vengeance.

"I can imagine nothing printed," said the woman who had loved Willis Enderby, "that could in any manner influence my life."

"Fortunate you!" Edmonds wreathed his little congratulation in festoons of light vapor. "But you live in a world of your own making. Marrineal is reckoning on the world which lives and thinks largely in terms of what its neighbor thinks of it."

"He once said to me," remarked Banneker, "that the desire to get into or keep out of print could be made the master-key to new and undreamed-of powers of journalism if one had the ability to find a formula for it."

"I'm not sure that I understand what he means," said Miss Van Arsdale, "but it has a sinister sound."

"Are Baal's other names Bribery and Blackmail?" glowered Edmonds.

"There has never been a hint of any illegitimate use of the paper, so far as I can discover. Yet it's pretty plain to me that he intends to use it as an instrument."

"As soon as we've made it strong enough," supplied Edmonds.

"An instrument of what?" inquired Miss Van Arsdale.

"Power for himself. Political, I suppose."

"Does he want office?" she asked.

"Perhaps. Perhaps he prefers the deeper-lying power to make and unmake politicians. We've done it already in a few cases. That's Edmonds's specialty. I'll know within a few days what Marrineal wants, if I can get a showdown. He and I are coming to a new basis of finance."

"Yes; he thinks he can't afford to keep on paying you by circulation. You're putting on too much." This from Edmonds.

"That's what he got me here for. However, I don't really believe he can. I'm eating up what should be the paper's legitimate profits. And yet"—he smiled radiantly—"there are times when I don't see how I'm going to get along with what I have. It's pretty absurd, isn't it, to feel pinched on fifty thousand a year, when I did so well at Manzanita on sixty a month?"

"It's a fairy-tale," declared Miss Van Arsdale. "I knew that you were going to arrive sooner or later, Ban. But this isn't an arrival. It's a triumph."

"Say rather it's a feat of balancing," he propounded. "A tight-rope stunt on a gilded rope. Failure on one side; debt on the other. Keep going like the devil to save yourself from falling."

"What is it making of him, Mr. Edmonds?" Banneker's oldest friend turned her limpid and anxious regard upon his closest friend.

"A power. Oh, it's real enough, all this empire of words that crumbles daily. It leaves something behind, a little residue of thought, ideals, convictions. What do you fear for him?"

"Cynicism," she breathed uneasily.

"It's the curse of the game. But it doesn't get the worker who feels his work striking home."

"Do you see any trace of cynicism in the paper?" asked Banneker curiously.

"All this blaring and glaring and froth and distortion," she replied, sweeping her hand across the issue which lay on the desk before her. "Can you do that sort of thing and not become that sort of thing?"

"Ask Edmonds," said Banneker.

"Thirty years I've been in this business," said the veteran slowly. "I suppose there are few of its problems and perplexities that I haven't been up against. And I tell you, Miss Van Arsdale, all this froth and noise and sensationalism doesn't matter. It's an offense to taste, I know. But back of it is the big thing that we're trying to do; to enlist the ignorant and helpless and teach them to be less ignorant and helpless. If fostering the political ambitions of a Marrineal is part of the price, why, I'm willing to pay it, so long as the paper keeps straight and doesn't sell itself for bribe money. After all, Marrineal can ride to his goal only on our chariot. The Patriot is an institution now. You can't alter an institution, not essentially. You get committed to it, to the thing you've made yourself. Ban and I have made the new Patriot, not Marrineal. Even if he got rid of us, he couldn't change the paper; not for a long time and only very gradually. The following that we've built up would be too strong for him."

"Isn't it too strong for you two?" asked the doubting woman-soul.

"No. We understand it because we made it."

"Frankenstein once said something like that," she murmured.

"It isn't a monster," rumbled Edmonds. "Sometimes I think it's a toy dog, with Ban's ribbon around its cute little neck. I'll answer for Ban, Miss Van Arsdale."

The smoke of his minute pipe went up, tenuous and graceful, incense devoted to the unseen God behind the strangely patterned curtain of print; to Baal who was perhaps even then grinning down upon his unsuspecting worshipers.

But Banneker, moving purposefully amidst that vast phantasmagoria of pulsing print, wherein all was magnified, distorted, perverted to the claims of a gross and rabid public appetite, dreamed his pure, untainted dream; the conception of his newspaper as a voice potent enough to reach and move all; dominant enough to impose its underlying ideal; confident enough of righteousness to be free of all silencing and control. That voice should supply the long unsatisfied hunger of the many for truth uncorrupted. It should enunciate straightly, simply, without reservation, the daily verities destined to build up the eternal structure. It should be a religion of seven days a week, set forth by a thousand devoted preachers for a million faithful hearers.

Camilla Van Arsdale had partly read his dream, and could have wept for it and him.

Io Eyre had begun to read it, and her heart went out to him anew. For this was the test of success.



CHAPTER III

It was one of those mornings of coolness after cloying heat when even the crowded, reeking, frowzy metropolis wakes with a breath of freshness in its nostrils. Independent of sleep as ever, Banneker was up and footing it briskly for the station before eight o'clock, for Camilla Van Arsdale was returning to Manzanita, having been ordered back to her seclusion with medical science's well-considered verdict wrapped up in tactful words to bear her company on the long journey. When she would be ordered on a longer journey by a mightier Authority, medical science forbore to specify; but in the higher interests of American music it was urgently pressed upon her that she be abstemious in diet, niggardly of work, careful about fatigue and excitement, and in general comport herself in such manner as to deprive the lease of life remaining to her of most of its savor and worth. She had told Ban that the physicians thought her condition favorable.

Invalidism was certainly not suggested in her erect bearing and serene face as she moved about her stateroom setting in order the books, magazines, flowers, and candy, with which Banneker had sought to fortify her against the tedium of the trip. As the time for departure drew near, they fell into and effortfully maintained that meaningless, banal, and jerky talk which is the inevitable concomitant of long partings between people who, really caring for each other, can find nothing but commonplaces wherewith to ease their stress of mind. Miss Van Arsdale's common sense came to the rescue.

"Go away, my dear," she said, with her understanding smile. "Don't think that you're obliged to cling to the dragging minutes. It's an ungraceful posture.... Ban! What makes you look like that?"

"I thought—I heard—"

A clear voice outside said, "Then it must be this one." There was a decisive tap on the door. "May I come in?"..."Come in," responded Miss Van Arsdale. "Bring them here, porter," directed the voice outside, and Io entered followed by an attendant almost hidden in a huge armful of such roses as are unpurchasable even in the most luxurious of stores.

"I've looted our conservatory," said she. "Papa will slay me. They'll last to Chicago."

After an almost imperceptible hesitation she kissed the older woman. She gave her hand to Banneker. "I knew I should find you here."

"Any other woman of my acquaintance would have said, 'Who would have expected to find you here!'" commented Miss Van Arsdale.

"Yes? I suppose so. But we've never been on that footing, Ban and I." Io's tone was casual; almost careless.

"I thought that you were in the country," said Banneker.

"So we are. I drove up this morning to bid Miss Van Arsdale bon voyage, and all the luck in the world. I suppose we three shall meet again one of these days."

"You prophesy in the most matter-of-fact tone a gross improbability," observed Miss Van Arsdale.

"Oh, our first meeting was the gross improbability," retorted the girl lightly. "After that anything might be logical. Au revoir."

"Go with her, Ban," said Miss Camilla.

"It isn't leaving time yet," he protested. "There's five whole minutes."

"Yes; come with me, Ban," said Io tranquilly.

Camilla Van Arsdale kissed his cheek, gave him a little, half-motherly pat, said, "Keep on making me proud of you," in her even, confident tones, and pushed him out of the door.

Ban and Io walked down the long platform in a thoughtful silence which disconcerted neither of them. Io led the way out of it.

"At half-past four," she stated, "I had a glass of milk and one cracker."

"Where do you want to breakfast?"

"Thanking you humbly, sir, for your kind invitation, the nearer the better. Why not here?"

They found a table in the well-appointed railroad restaurant and ordered. Over her honey-dew melon Io asked musingly:

"What do you suppose she thinks of us?"

"Miss Camilla? What should she think?"

"What, indeed? What do we think, ourselves?"

"Has it any importance?" he asked gloomily.

"And that's rather rude," she chided. "Anything that I think should, by courtesy, be regarded as important.... Ban, how often have we seen each other?"

"Since I came to New York, you mean?"

"Yes."

"Nine times."

"So many? And how much have we talked together? All told; in time, I mean."

"Possibly a solid hour. Not more."

"It hasn't made any difference, has it? There's been no interruption. We've never let the thread drop. We've never lost touch. Not really."

"No. We've never lost touch."

"You needn't repeat it as if it were a matter for mourning and repentance. I think it rather wonderful.... Take our return from the train, all the way down without a word. Were you sulking, Ban?"

"No. You know I wasn't."

"Of course I know it. It was simply that we didn't need to talk. There's no one else in the world like that.... How long is it? Three years—four—more than four years.

'We twain once well in sunder What will the mad gods do For hate with me, I wond—'"

"My God, Io! Don't!"

"Oh, Ban; I'm sorry! Have I hurt you? I was dreaming back into the old world."

"And I've been trying all these years not to."

"Is the reality really better? No; don't answer that! I don't want you to. Answer me something else. About Betty Raleigh."

"What about her?"

"If I were a man I should find her an irresistible sort of person. Entirely aside from her art. Are you going to marry her, Ban?"

"No."

"Tell me why not."

"For one reason because she doesn't want to marry me."

"Have you asked her? It's none of my business. But I don't believe you have. Tell me this; would you have asked her, if it hadn't been for—if Number Three had never been wrecked in the cut? You see the old railroad terms you taught me still cling. Would you?"

"How do I know? If the world hadn't changed under my feet, and the sky over my head—"

"Is it so changed? Do the big things, the real things, ever change?... Don't answer that, either. Ban, if I'll go out of your life now, and stay out, honestly, will you marry Betty Raleigh and—and live happy ever after?"

"Would you want me to?"

"Yes. Truly. And I'd hate you both forever."

"Betty Raleigh is going to marry some one else."

"No! I thought—people said—Are you sorry, Ban?"

"Not for myself. I think he's the wrong man for her."

"Yes; that would be a change of the earth underfoot and the sky overhead, if one cared," she mused. "And I said they didn't change."

"Don't they!" retorted Banneker bitterly. "You are married."

"I have been married," she corrected, with an air of amiable rectification. "It was a wise thing to do. Everybody said so. It didn't last. Nobody thought it would. I didn't really think so myself."

"Then why in Heaven's name—"

"Oh, let's not talk about it now. Some other time, perhaps. Say next time we meet; five or six months from now.... No; I won't tease you any more, Ban. It won't be that. It won't be long. I'll tell you the truth: I'd heard a lot about you and Betty Raleigh, and I got to know her and I hoped it would be a go. I did; truly, Ban. I owed you that chance of happiness. I took mine, you see; only it wasn't happiness that I gambled for. Something else. Safety. The stakes are usually different for men and women. So now you know.... Well, if you don't, you've grown stupid. And I don't want to talk about it any more. I want to talk about—about The Patriot. I read it this morning while I was waiting; your editorial. Ban"—she drew a derisive mouth—"I was shocked."

"What was it? Politics?" asked Banneker, who, turning out his editorials several at a time, seldom bothered to recall on what particular day any one was published. "You wouldn't be expected to like our politics."

"Not politics. It is about Harvey Wheelwright."

Banneker was amused. "The immortally popular Wheelwright. We're serializing his new novel, 'Satiated with Sin,' in the Sunday edition. My idea. It'll put on circulation where we most need it."

"Is that any reason why you should exploit him as if he were the foremost living novelist?"

"Certainly. Besides, he is, in popularity."

"But, Ban; his stuff is awful! If this latest thing is like the earlier. ["Worse," murmured Banneker.] And you're writing about him as if he were—well, Conrad and Wells rolled into one."

"He's better than that, for the kind of people that read him. It's addressed to them, that editorial. All the stress is on his piety, his popularity, his power to move men's minds; there isn't a word that even touches on the domain of art or literary skill."

"It has that effect."

"Ah! That's my art," chuckled Banneker. "That's literary skill, if you choose!"

"Do you know what I call it? I call it treason."

His mind flashed to meet hers. She read comprehension in his changed face and the shadow in her eyes, lambent and profound, deepened.

"Treason to the world that we two made for ourselves out there," she pursued evenly.

"You shattered it."

"To the Undying Voices."

"You stilled them, for me."

"Oh, Ban! Not that!" A sudden, little sob wrenched at her throat. She half thrust out a hand toward him, and withdrew it, to cup and hold her chin in the old, thoughtful posture that plucked at his heart with imperious memories. "Don't they sing for you any more?" begged Io, wistful as a child forlorn for a dream of fairies dispelled.

"I wouldn't let them. They all sang of you."

She sighed, but about the tender corners of her lips crept the tremor of a smile. Instantly she became serious again.

"If you still heard the Voices, you could never have written that editorial.... What I hate about it is that it has charm; that it imparts charm to a—to a debasing thing."

"Oh, come, Io!" protested the victim of this criticism, more easily. "Debasing? Why, Wheelwright is considered the most uplifting of all our literary morality-improvers."

Io amplified and concluded her critique briefly and viciously. "A slug!"

"No; seriously. I'm not sure that he doesn't inculcate a lot of good in his way. At least he's always on the side of the angels."

"What kind of angels? Tinsel seraphs with paint on their cheeks, playing rag-time harps out of tune! There's a sickly slaver of sentiment over everything he touches that would make any virtue nauseous."

"Don't you want a job as a literary critic Our Special Reviewer, Miss Io Wel—Mrs. Delavan Eyre," he concluded, in a tone from which the raillery had flattened out.

At that bald betrayal, Io's color waned slightly. She lifted her water-glass and sipped at it. When she spoke again it was as if an inner scene had been shifted.

"What did you come to New York for?"

"Success."

"As in all the fables. And you've found it. It was almost too easy, wasn't it?"

"Indeed, not. It was touch and go."

"Would you have come but for me?"

He stared at her, considering, wondering.

"Remember," she adjured him; "success was my prescription. Be flattering for once. Let me think that I'm responsible for the miracle."

"Perhaps. I couldn't stay out there—afterward. The loneliness...."

"I didn't want to leave you loneliness," she burst out passionately under her breath. "I wanted to leave you memory and ambition and the determination to succeed."

"For what?"

"Oh, no; no!" She answered the harsh thought subtending his query. "Not for myself. Not for any pride. I'm not cheap, Ban."

"No; you're not cheap."

"I would have kept my distance.... It was quite true what I said to you about Betty Raleigh. It was not success alone that I wanted for you; I wanted happiness, too. I owed you that—after my mistake."

He caught up the last word. "You've admitted to yourself, then, that it was a mistake?"

"I played the game," she retorted. "One can't always play right. But one can always play fair."

"Yes; I know your creed of sportsmanship. There are worse religions."

"Do you think I played fair with you, Ban? After that night on the river?"

He was mute.

"Do you know why I didn't kiss you good-bye in the station? Not really kiss you, I mean, as I did on the island?"

"No."

"Because, if I had, I should never have had the strength to go away." She lifted her eyes to his. Her voice fell to a half whisper. "You understood, on the island?... What I meant?"

"Yes."

"But you didn't take me. I wonder. Ban, if it hadn't been for the light flashing in our eyes and giving us hope...?"

"How can I tell? I was dazed with the amazement and the glory of it—of you. But—yes. My God, yes! And then? Afterward?"

"Could there have been any afterward?" she questioned dreamily. "Would we not just have waited for the river to sweep us up and carry us away? What other ending could there have been, so fitting?"

"Anyway," he said with a sudden savage jealousy, "whatever happened you would not have gone away to marry Eyre."

"Should I not? I'm by no means sure. You don't understand much of me, my poor Ban."

"How could you!" he burst out. "Would that have been—"

"Oh, I should have told him, of course. I'd have said, 'Del, there's been another man, a lover.' One could say those things to him."

"Would he have married you?"

"You wouldn't, would you?" she smiled. "All or nothing, Ban, for you. About Del, I don't know." She shrugged dainty shoulders. "I shouldn't have much cared."

"And would you have come back to me, Io?"

"Do you want me to say 'Yes'? You do want me to say' Yes,' don't you, my dear? How can I tell?... Sooner or later, I suppose. Fate. The irresistible current. I am here now."

"Io." He leaned to her across the little table, his somber regard holding hers. "Why did you tell Camilla Van Arsdale that you would never divorce Eyre?"

"Because it's true."

"But why tell her? So that it should come back to me?"

She answered him straight and fearlessly. "Yes. I thought it would be easier for you to hear from her."

"Did you?" He sat staring past her at visions. It was not within Banneker's code, his sense of fair play in the game, to betray to Io his wonderment (shared by most of her own set) that she should have endured the affront of Del Eyre's openly flagitious life, even though she had herself implied some knowledge of it in her assumption that a divorce could be procured. However, Io met his reticence with characteristic candor.

"Of course I know about Del. We have a perfect understanding. He's agreed to maintain the outward decencies, from now on. I don't consider that I've the right to ask more. You see, I shouldn't have married him ... even though he understood that I wasn't really in love with him. We're friends; and we're going to remain friends. Just that. Del's a good sort," she added with a hint of pleading the cause of a misunderstood person. "He'd give me my divorce in a minute; even though he still cares—in his way. But there's his mother. She's a sort of latter-day saint; one of those rare people that you respect and love in equal parts; the only other one I know is Cousin Willis Enderby. She's an invalid, hopeless, and a Roman Catholic, and for me to divorce Del would poison the rest of her life. So I won't. I can't."

"She won't live forever," muttered Banneker.

"No. Not long, perhaps." There was pain and resolution in Io's eyes as they were lifted to meet his again. "There's another reason. I can't tell even you, Ban. The secret isn't mine.... I'm sorry."

"Haven't you any work to do to-day?" she asked after a pause, with a successful effect of lightness.

He roused himself, settled the check, and took her to her car, parked near by.

"Where do you go now?" he asked.

"Back to the country."

"When shall I see you again?"

"I wonder," said Io.



CHAPTER IV

Panem et Circenses; bread and the Big Show. The diagnosis of the satyr-like mathematician had been accurate. That same method whereby the tyrants of Rome had sought to beguile the restless and unthinking multitude, Banneker adopted to capture and lead the sensation-avid metropolitan public through his newspaper. As a facture, a creation made to the mind of the creator, The Patriot was Banneker's own. True, Marrineal reserved full control. But Marrineal, after a few months spent in anxious observation of his editor's headlong and revolutionary method, had taken the sales reports for his determinative guide and decided to give the new man full sway.

Circulation had gone up as water rises in a tube under irresistible pressure from beneath. Nothing like it had ever been known in local journalism. Barring some set-back, within four years of the time when Banneker's introductory editorial appeared, the paper would have eclipsed all former records. In less than two years it had climbed to third place, and already Banneker's salary, under the percentage agreement, was, in the words of the alliterative Gardner, whose article describing The House With Three Eyes and its owner had gone forth on the wings of a far-spreading syndicate, "a stupendous stipend."

Banneker's editorials pervaded and gave the keynote. With sublime self-confidence he had adopted the untried scheme of having no set and determined place for the editorial department. Sometimes, his page appeared in the middle of the paper; sometimes on the back; and once, when a most promising scheme of municipal looting was just about to be put through, he fired his blast from the front sheet in extra heavy, double-leaded type, displacing an international yacht race and a most titillating society scandal with no more explanation than was to be found in the opening sentence:

"This is more important to YOU, Mr. New Yorker, than any other news in to-day's issue."

"Where Banneker sits," Russell Edmonds was wont to remark between puffs, "is the head of the paper."

"Let 'em look for the stuff," said Banneker confidently. "They'll think all the more of it when they find it."

Often he used inset illustrations, not so much to give point to his preachments, as to render them easier of comprehension to the unthinking. And always he sought the utmost of sensationalism in caption and in type, employing italics, capitals, and even heavy-face letters with an effect of detonation.

"Jollies you along until he can see the white of your mind, and then fires his slug into your head, point-blank," Edmonds said.

With all this he had the high art to keep his style direct, unaffected, almost severe. No frills, no literary graces, no flashes of wit except an occasional restrained touch of sarcasm: the writing was in the purest style and of a classic simplicity. The typical reader of The Patriot had a friendly and rather patronizing feeling for the editorials: they were generally deemed quite ordinary, "common as an old shoe" (with an approving accent from the commentator), comfortably devoid of the intricate elegancies practiced by Banneker's editorial compeers. So they were read and absorbed, which was all that their writer hoped or wished for them. He was not seeking the bubble, reputation, but the solid satisfaction of implanting ideas in minds hitherto unaroused to mental processes, and training the resultant thought in his chosen way and to eventual though still vague purposes.

"They're beginning to imitate you, Ban," commented Russell Edmonds in the days of The Patriot's first surprising upward leap. "Flattery of your peers."

"Let 'em imitate," returned Banneker indifferently.

"Yes; they don't come very near to the original. It's a fundamental difference in style."

"It's a fundamental difference in aim."

"Aim?"

"They're writing at and for their owners; to make good with the boss. I'm writing at my public."

"I believe you're right. It's more difficult, though, isn't it, to write for a hundred thousand people than at one?"

"Not if you understand them from study at first hand, as I do. That's why the other fellows are five or ten-thousand-dollar men," said Banneker, quite without boastfulness "while I'm—"

"A fifty-thousand-dollar a year man," supplied Edmonds.

"Well, getting toward that figure. I'm on the target with the editorials and I'm going to hold on it. But our news policy is different. We still wobble there."

"What do you want! Look at the circulation. Isn't that good enough?"

"No. Every time I get into a street-car and see a passenger reading some other paper, I feel that we've missed fire," returned Banneker inexorably. "Pop, did you ever see an actress make up?"

"I've a general notion of the process."

"Find me a man who can make up news ready and rouged to go before the daily footlights as an actress makes up her face."

The veteran grunted. "Not to be found on Park Row."

"Probably not. Park Row is too deadly conventional."

One might suppose that the environment of religious journalism would be equally conventional. Yet it was from this department that the "find" eventually came, conducted by Edmonds. Edgar Severance, ten years older than Banneker, impressed the guiding spirit of The Patriot at first sight with a sense of inner certitude and serenity not in the least impaired by his shabbiness which had the redeeming merit of being clean.

"You're not a newspaper man?" said Banneker after the introduction. "What are you?"

"I'm a prostitute," answered the other equably.

Banneker smiled. "Where have you practiced your profession?"

"As assistant editor of Guidance. I write the blasphemous editorials which are so highly regarded by the sweetly simple souls that make up our clientele; the ones which weekly give gratuitous advice to God."

"Did Mr. Edmonds find you there?"

"No," put in the veteran; "I traced him down through some popular scientific stuff in the Boston Sunday Star."

"Fake, all of it," proffered Severance. "Otherwise it wouldn't be popular."

"Is that your creed of journalism?" asked Banneker curiously.

"Largely."

"Why come to The Patriot, then? It isn't ours."

Severance raised his fine eyebrows, but contented himself with saying: "Isn't it? However, I didn't come. I was brought." He indicated Edmonds.

"He gave me more ideas on news-dressing," said the veteran, "than I'd pick up in a century on the Row."

"Ideas are what we're after. Where do you get yours, Mr. Severance, since you are not a practical newspaper man?"

"From talking with people, and seeing what the newspapers fail to do."

"Where were you before you went on Guidance?"

"Instructor at Harvard."

"And you practiced your—er—specified profession there, too?"

"Oh, no. I was partly respectable then.

"Why did you leave?"

"Drink."

"Ah? You don't build up much of a character for yourself as prospective employee."

"If I join The Patriot staff I shall probably disappear once a month or so on a spree."

"Why should you join The Patriot staff? That is what you fail to make clear to me."

"Reference, Mr. Russell Edmonds," returned the other negligently.

"You two aren't getting anywhere with all this chatter," growled the reference. "Come, Severance; talk turkey, as you did to me."

"I don't want to talk," objected the other in his gentle, scholarly accents. "I want to look about: to diagnose the trouble in the news department."

"What do you suspect the trouble to be?" asked Banneker.

"Oh, the universal difficulty. Lack of brains."

Banneker laughed, but without relish. "We pay enough for what we've got. It ought to be good quality."

"You pay not wisely but too well. My own princely emolument as a prop of piety is thirty-five dollars a week."

"Would you come here at that figure?"

"I should prefer forty. For a period of six weeks, on trial."

"As Mr. Edmonds seems to think it worth the gamble, I'll take you on. From to-day, if you wish. Go out and look around."

"Wait a minute," interposed Edmonds. "What's his title? How is his job to be defined?"

"Call him my representative in the news department. I'll pay his salary myself. If he makes good, I'll more than get it back."

Mr. Severance's first concern appeared to be to make himself popular. In the anomalous position which he occupied as representative between two mutually jealous departments, this was no easy matter. But his quiet, contained courtesy, his tentative, almost timid, way of offering suggestions or throwing out hints which subsequently proved to have definite and often surprising value, his retiring willingness to waive any credit in favor of whosoever might choose to claim it, soon gave him an assured if inconspicuous position. His advice was widely sought. As an immediate corollary a new impress made itself felt in the daily columns. With his quick sensitiveness Banneker apprehended the change. It seemed to him that the paper was becoming feminized in a curious manner.

"Is it a play for the women?" he asked Severance in the early days of the development.

"No."

"You're certainly specializing on femaleness."

"For the men. Not the women. It's an old lure."

Banneker frowned. "And not a pretty one."

"Effective, though. I bagged it from the Police Gazette. Have you ever had occasion to note the almost unvarying cover appeal of that justly popular weekly?"

"Half-dressed women," said Banneker, whose early researches had extended even to those levels.

"Exactly. With all they connote. Thereby attracting the crude and roving male eye. Of course, we must do the trick more artistically and less obviously. But the pictured effect is the thing. I'm satisfied of that. By the way, I am having a little difficulty with your art department. Your man doesn't adapt himself to new ideas."

"I've thought him rather old-fashioned. What do you want to do?"

"Bring in a young chap named Capron whom I've run upon. He used to be an itinerant photographer, and afterward had a try at the movies, but he's essentially a news man. Let him read the papers for pictures."

Capron came on the staff as an insignificant member with an insignificant salary. Personally a man of blameless domesticity, he was intellectually and professionally a sex-monger. He conceived the business of a news art department to be to furnish pictured Susannahs for the delectation of the elders of the reading public. His flair for femininity he transferred to The Patriot's pages, according to a simple and direct formula; the greater the display of woman, the surer the appeal and therefore the sale. Legs and bosoms he specialized for in illustrations. Bathing-suits and boudoir scenes were his particular aim, although any picture with a scandal attachment in the accompanying news would serve, the latter, however, to be handled in such manner as invariably to point a moral. Herein his team work with Severance was applied in high perfection.

"Should Our Girls Become Artists' Models" was one of their early and inspired collaborations, a series begun with a line of "beauty pictures" and spun out by interviews with well or less known painters and illustrators, giving rich opportunity for displays of nudity, the moral being pointed by equally lavish interviews with sociologists and prominent Mothers in Israel. Although at least ninety-nine per cent of all professional posing is such as would not be out of place at a church sociable, the casual reader of the Capron-Severance presentation would have supposed that a lace veil was the extent of the protection allowed to a female model between sheer nakedness and the outer artistic world. Following this came a department devoted (ostensibly) to physical culture for women. It was conducted by the proprietress of a fashionable reducing gymnasium, who was allowed, as this was a comparatively unimportant feature, to supply the text subject to Severance's touching-up ingenuity; but the models were devised and posed by Capron. They were extremely shapely and increasingly expressive in posture and arrangement until they attained a point where the post-office authorities evinced symptoms of rising excitement—though not the type of excitement at which the Art Expert was aiming—when the series took a turn for the milder, and more purely athletic, and, by the same token, less appetizing; and presently faded away in a burst of semi-editorial self-laudation over The Patriot's altruistic endeavors to improve the physical status of the "future mothers of the nation."

Failing any other excuse for their careful lubricities, the team could always conjure up an enticing special feature from an imaginary foreign correspondent, aimed direct at the family circle and warning against the "Moral Pitfalls of Paris," or the "Vampires of High Life in Vienna." The invariable rule was that all sex-stuff must have a moral and virtuous slant. Thus was afforded to the appreciative reader a double satisfaction, physical and ethical, pruriency and piety.

It was Capron who devised the simple but effective legend which afterward became, in a thousand variants, a stock part of every news item interesting enough to merit graphic treatment, "The X Marks the Spot Where the Body Was Found." He, too, adapted, from a design in a drug-store window picturing a sponge fisherman in action, the cross-section illustration for news. Within a few weeks he had displaced the outdated art editor and was in receipt of a larger salary than the city editor, who dealt primarily in news, not sensations, panem not circenses.

Sensationalism of other kinds was spurred to keep pace with the sex appeal. The news columns became constantly more lurid. They shrieked, yelled, blared, shrilled, and boomed the scandals and horrors of the moment in multivocal, multigraphic clamor, tainting the peaceful air breathed by everyday people going about their everyday business, with incredible blatancies which would be forgotten on the morrow in the excitement of fresh percussions, though the cumulative effect upon the public mind and appetite might be ineradicable. "Murderer Dabbles Name in Bloody Print." "Wronged Wife Mars Rival's Beauty." "Society Woman Gives Hundred-Dollar-Plate Dinner." "Scientist Claims Life Flickers in Mummy." "Cocktails, Wine, Drug, Ruin for Lovely Girl of Sixteen." "Financier Resigns After Sprightly Scene at Long Beach." Severance developed a literary genius for excitant and provocative word-combinations in the headings; "Love-Slave," "Girl-Slasher," "Passion-Victim," "Death-Hand," "Vengeance-Oath," "Lust-Fiend." The articles chosen for special display were such as lent themselves, first, to his formula for illustration, and next to captions which thrilled with the sensations of crime, mystery, envy of the rich and conspicuous, or lechery, half concealed or unconcealed. For facts as such he cared nothing. His conception of news was as a peg upon which to hang a sensation. "Love and luxury for the women: money and power for the men," was his broad working scheme for the special interest of the paper, with, of course, crime and the allure of the flesh for general interest. A jungle man, perusing one day's issue (supposing him to have been competent to assimilate it), would have judged the civilization pictured therein too grisly for his unaccustomed nerves and fled in horror back to the direct, natural, and uncomplicated raids and homicides of the decent wilds.

The Great Gaines, descending for once from the habitual classicism of his phraseology, described The Patriot of Severance's production in two terse and sufficient words.

"It itches."

That itch irked Banneker almost unendurably at times. He longed to be relieved of it; to scratch the irritant Severance clean off the skin of The Patriot. But Severance was too evidently valuable. Banneker did go so far as to protest.

"Aren't you rather overdoing this thing, Severance?"

"Which thing? We're overdoing everything; hence the growth of the paper."

Banneker fell back upon banality. "Well, we've got to draw the line somewhere."

Severance bestowed upon the other his well-bred and delicate smile. "Exactly my principle. I'm for drawing the line every issue and on every page, if there's room for it. 'Nulla dies sine linea.' The line of appeal to the sensations, whether it's a pretty face or a caption that jumps out and grabs you by the eye. I want to make 'em gloat."

"I see. You were in earnest more or less when in our first talk, you defined your profession."

Severance waved a graceful hand. "Prostitution is the profession of all successful journalism which looks at itself honestly. Why not play the pander frankly?—among ourselves, of course. Perhaps I'm offending you, Mr. Banneker."

"You're interesting me. But, 'among ourselves' you say. You're not a newspaper man; you haven't the traditions."

"Therefore I haven't the blind spots. I'm not fooled by the sentimentalism of the profession or the sniveling claims of being an apostle of public enlightenment. If enlightenment pays, all very well. But it's circulation, not illumination, that's the prime desideratum. Frankly, I'd feed the public gut with all it can and will stand."

"Even to the extent of keeping the Tallman divorce scandal on the front page for a week consecutively. You won't pretend that, as news, it's worth it."

"Give me a definition of news," retorted the expert. "The Tallman story won't alter the history of the world. But it has its—well, its specialized value for our purposes."

"You mean," said Banneker, deliberately stimulating his own growing nausea, "that it makes the public's mind itch."

"It's a pretty filthy and scabby sort of animal, the public, Mr. Banneker. We're not trying to reform its morals in our news columns, I take it."

"No. No; we're not. Still—"

"That's the province of your editorials," went on the apostle of titillation smoothly. "You may in time even educate them up to a standard of decency where they won't demand the sort of thing we're giving them now. But our present business with the news columns is to catch them for you to educate."

"Quite so! You lure them into the dive where I wait to preach them a sermon."

After that conversation Banneker definitely decided that Severance's activities must be curbed. But when he set about it, he suffered an unpleasant surprise. Marrineal, thoroughly apprised of the new man's activities (as he was, by some occult means of his own, of everything going on in the office), stood fast by the successful method, and let Banneker know, tactfully but unmistakably, that Severance, who had been transferred to the regular payroll at a highly satisfactory figure, was to have a free hand. So the ex-religious editor continued to stroll leisurely through his unauthoritative and influential routine, contributing his commentary upon the news as it flowed in. He would saunter over to the make-up man's clotted desk, run his eye over the dummy of the morrow's issue, and inquire;

"Wasn't there a shooting scrape over a woman in a big West-Side apartment?... Being kept by the chap that was shot, wasn't she?... Oh, a bank clerk?... Well, that's a pretty dull-looking seventh page. Why not lift this text of the new Suburban Railways Bill and spread the shooting across three columns? Get Sanderson to work out a diagram and do one of his filmy line drawings of the girl lying on the couch. And let's be sure to get the word 'Banker' into the top head."

Or he would deliver a practical lecture from a text picked out of what to a less keen-scented news-hound might have appeared an unpromising subject.

"Can't we round out that disappearance story a little; the suburban woman who hasn't been seen since she went to New York three days ago? Get Capron to fake up a picture of the home with the three children in it grouped around Bereaved Husband, and—here, how would something like this do for caption: '"Mamma, Mamma! Come Back!" Sob Tiny Tots.' The human touch. Nothing like a bit of slush to catch the women. And we've been going a little shy on sentiment lately."

The "human touch," though it became an office joke, also took its place as an unwritten law. Severance's calm and impersonal cynicism was transmuted into a genuine enthusiasm among the copy-readers. Headlining took on a new interest, whetted by the establishment of a weekly prize for the most attractive caption. Maximum of sensationalism was the invariable test.

Despite his growing distaste for the Severance cult, Banneker was honest enough to admit that the original stimulus dated from the day when he himself had injected his personality and ideas into the various departments of the daily. He had established the new policy; Severance had done no more than inform it with the heated imaginings and provocative pictorial quality inherent in a mind intensely if scornfully apprehensive of the unsatiated potential depravities of public taste. It was Banneker's hand that had set the strings vibrating to a new tune; Severance had only raised the pitch, to the nth degree of sensationalism. And, in so far as the editorial page gave him a lead, the disciple was faithful to the principles and policies of his chief. The practice of the news columns was always informed by a patently defensible principle. It paeaned the virtues of the poor and lowly; it howled for the blood of the wicked and the oppressor; it was strident for morality, the sanctity of the home, chastity, thrift, sobriety, the People, religion, American supremacy. As a corollary of these pious standards it invariably took sides against wealth and power, sentimentalized every woman who found her way into the public prints, whether she had perpetrated a murder or endowed a hospital, simpered and slavered over any "heart-interest story" of childhood ("blue-eyed tot stuff" was the technical office term), and licked reprehensive but gustful lips over divorce, adultery, and the sexual complications. It peeped through keyholes of print at the sanctified doings of Society and snarled while it groveled. All the shibboleths of a journalism which respected neither itself, its purpose, nor its readers echoed from every page. And this was the reflex of the work and thought of Errol Banneker, who intimately respected himself, and his profession as expressed in himself. There is much of the paradoxical in journalism—as, indeed, in the life which it distortedly mirrors.

Every other newspaper in town caught the contagion; became by insensible degrees more sensational and pornographic. The Patriot had started a rag-time pace (based on the same fundamental instinct which the rhythm of rag-time expresses, if the psychologists are correct) and the rest must, perforce, adopt it. Such as lagged in this Harlot's Progress suffered a loss of circulation, journalism's most condign penalty. For there are certain appetites which, once stimulated, must be appeased. Otherwise business wanes!

Out of conscious nothing, as represented by the now moribund News, there was provoked one evening a large, round, middle-aged, smiling, bespectacled apparition who named himself as Rudy Sheffer and invited himself to a job. Marrineal had sent him to Severance, and Severance, ever tactful, had brought him to Banneker. Russell Edmonds being called in, the three sat in judgment upon the Big Idea which Mr. Sheffer had brought with him and which was:

"Give 'em a laugh."

"The potentialities of humor as a circulation agency," opined Severance in his smoothest academic voice, "have never been properly exploited."

"A laugh on every page where there ain't a thrill," pursued Sheffer confidently.

"You find some of our pages dull?" asked Banneker, always interested in any new view.

"Well, your market page ain't no scream. You gotta admit it."

"People don't usually want to laugh when they're studying the stock market," growled Edmonds.

"Surprise 'em, then. Give 'em a jab in the ribs and see how they like it. Pictures. Real comics. Anywhere in the paper that there's room for 'em."

"There's always a cartoon on the editorial page," pointed out Banneker.

"Cartoon? What does that get you? A cartoon's an editorial, ain't it?"

Russell Edmonds shot a side glance at Banneker, meaning: "This is no fool. Watch him."

"Makes 'em think, don't it?" pursued the visitor. "If it tickles 'em, that's on the side. It gets after their minds, makes 'em work for what they get. That's an effort. See?"

"All right. What's your aim?"

"Not their brains. I leave that to Mr. Banneker's editorials. I'm after the laugh that starts down here." He laid hand upon his rotund waistcoat. "The belly-laugh."

"The anatomy of anti-melancholy," murmured Severance. "Valuable."

"You're right, it's valuable," declared its proponent. "It's money; that's what it is. Watch 'em at the movies. When their bellies begin to shake, the picture's got 'em."

"How would you produce this desirable effect?" asked Severance.

"No trouble to show goods. I'm dealing with gents, I know. This is all under your shirt for the present, if you don't take up the scheme."

From a portfolio which he had set in a corner he produced a sheaf of drawings. They depicted the adventures, mischievous, predatory, or criminal, of a pair of young hopefuls whose physiognomies and postures were genuinely ludicrous.

"Did you draw these?" asked Banneker in surprise, for the draughtsmanship was expert.

"No. Hired a kid artist to do 'em. I furnished the idea."

"Oh, you furnished the idea, did you?" queried Edmonds. "And where did you get it?"

With an ineffably satisfied air, Mr. Sheffer tapped his bullet head.

"You must be older than you look, then. Those figures of the kids are redrawn from a last-century German humorous classic, 'Max und Moritz.' I used to be crazy over it when I was a youngster. My grandfather brought it to me from Europe, and made a translation for us youngsters."

"Sure! Those pictures'd make a reformer laugh. I picked up the book in German on an Ann Street sidewalk stand, caught the Big Idea right then and there; to Americanize the stuff and—"

"For 'Americanize,' read 'steal,'" commented Edmonds.

"There ain't no thin' crooked in this," protested the other with sincerity. "The stuff ain't copyrighted here. I looked that up particularly."

"Quite true, I believe," confirmed Severance. "It's an open field."

"I got ten series mapped out to start. Call 'em 'The Trouble-hunter Twins, Ruff and Reddy.' If they catch on, the artist and me can keep 'em goin' forever. And they'll catch."

"I believe they will," said Severance.

"Smeared across the top of a page it'll make a business man laugh as hard as a kid. I know business men. I was one, myself. Sold bar fixtures on the road for four years. And my best selling method was the laughs I got out of 'em. Used to take a bit of chalk and do sketches on the table-tops. So I know what makes 'em laugh. Belly-laughs. You make a business man laugh that way, and you get his business. It ain't circulation alone; it's advertising that the stuff will bring in. Eh?"

"What do you think, Mr. Banneker?" asked Severance.

"It's worth trying," decided Banneker after thought. "You don't think so, do you, Pop?"

"Oh, go ahead!" returned Edmonds, spewing forth a mouthful of smoke as if to expel a bad taste. "What's larceny among friends?"

"But we're not taking anything of value, since there's no copyright and any one can grab it," pointed out the smooth Severance.

Thus there entered into the high-tension atmosphere of the sensationalized Patriot the relaxing quality of humor. Under the ingenuous and acquisitive Sheffer, whose twins achieved immediate popularity, it developed along other lines. Sheffer—who knew what makes business men laugh—pinned his simple faith to three main subjects, convulsive of the diaphragmatic muscles, building up each series upon the inherent humor to be extracted from physical violence as represented in the perpetrations and punishments of Ruff and Reddy, marital infidelity as mirrored in the stratagems and errancies of an amorous ape with an aged and jealous spouse, and the sure-fire familiarity of aged minstrel jokes (mother-in-law, country constable, young married cookery, and the like) refurbished in pictorial serials through the agency of two uproarious and imbecilic vulgarians, Bonehead and Buttinsky.

Children cried for them, and laughed to exhaustion over them. Not less did the mentally exhausted business man writhe abdominally over their appeal. Spread across the top of three pages they wrung the profitable belly-laugh from growing thousands of new readers. If Banneker sometimes had misgivings that the educational influence of The Patriot was not notably improved by all this instigation of crime and immorality made subject for mirth in the mind of developing youth, he stifled them in the thought of increased reading public for his own columns. Furthermore, it was not his newspaper, anyway.

But the editorial page was still peculiarly his own, and with that clarity of view which he never permitted personal considerations to prejudice, Banneker perceived that it was falling below pitch. Or, rather, that, while it remained static, the rest of the paper, under the stimulus of Severance, Capron, Sheffer, and, in the background but increasingly though subtly assertive, Marrineal, had raised its level of excitation. Change his editorials he would not. Nor was there need; the response to them was too widespread and fervent, their following too blindly fanatic, the opposition roused by them too furious to permit of any doubt as to their effectiveness. But that portion of the page not taken up by his writings and the cartoon (which was often based upon an idea supplied by him), was susceptible of alteration, of keying-up. Casting about him for the popular note, the circus appeal, he started a "signed-article" department of editorial contributions to which he invited any and all persons of prominence in whatever line. The lure of that universal egotism which loves to see itself in the public eye secured a surprising number of names. Propagandists were quick to appreciate the opportunity of The Patriot's wide circulation for furthering their designs, selfish or altruistic. To such desirables as could not be caught by other lures, Banneker offered generous payment.

It was on this latter basis that he secured a prize, in the person of the Reverend George Bland, ex-revivalist, ex-author of pious stories for the young, skilled dealer in truisms, in wordy platitudes couched largely in plagiarized language from the poets and essayists, in all the pseudo-religious slickeries wherewith men's souls are so easily lulled into self-satisfaction. The Good, the True, the Beautiful; these were his texts, but the real god of his worship was Success. This, under the guise of Duty ("man's God-inspired ambition to be true to his best possibilities"), he preached day in and day out through his "Daily Help" in The Patriot: Be guided by me and you will be good: Be good and you will be prosperous: Be prosperous and you will be happy. On an adjoining page there were other and far more specific instructions as to how to be prosperous and happy, by backing Speedfoot at 10 to 1 in the first race, or Flashaway at 5 to 2 in the third. Sometimes the Reverend Bland inveighed convincingly against the evils of betting. Yet a cynic might guess that the tipsters' recipes for being prosperous and happy (and therefore, by a logical inversion, good) were perhaps as well based and practical as the reverend moralist's. His correspondence, surest indication of editorial following, grew to be almost as large as Banneker's. Severance nicknamed him "the Oracle of Boobs," and for short he became known as the "Booblewarbler," for there were times when he burst into verse, strongly reminiscent of the older hymnals. This he resented hotly and genuinely, for he was quite sincere; as sincere as Sheffer, in his belief in himself. But he despised Sheffer and feared Severance, not for what the latter represented, but for the cynical honesty of his attitude. In retort for Severance's stab, he dubbed the pair Mephistopheles and Falstaff, which was above his usual felicitousness of characterization. Sheffer (who read Shakespeare to improve his mind, and for ideas!) was rather flattered.

Even the platitudinous Bland had his practical inspirations; if they had not been practical, they would not have been Bland's. One of these was an analysis of the national business character.

"We Americans," he wrote, "are natural merchandisers. We care less for the making of a thing than for the selling of it. Salesmanship is the great American game. It calls forth all our native genius; it is the expression of our originality, our inventiveness, our ingenuity, our idealism," and so on, for a full column slathered with deadly and self-betraying encomiums. For the Reverend Bland believed heartily that the market was the highest test of humankind. He would rather sell a thing than make it! In fact, anything made with any other purpose than to sell would probably not be successful, and would fail to make its author prosperous; therefore it must be wrong. Not the creator, but the salesman was the modern evangel.

"The Booblewarbler has given away the game," commented Severance with his slight, ironic smile, the day when this naive effusion appeared. "He's right, of course. But he thinks he's praising when he's damning."