"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."