"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.