“Out West we’d call that kind of fellow a yellow pup.”

“Well, don’t call the Parson that; not to me,” warned the other indignantly.  “He’s as square a man as you’ll find on Park Row.  Why, you were just saying, yourself, that a reporter is bound to accept his paper’s standards when he takes the job.”

“Then I suppose the answer is that a man ought to work only on a newspaper in whose policies he believes.”

“Which policies?  A newspaper has a hundred different ones about a hundred different things.  Here in this office we’re dead against the split infinitive and the Honest Laboring Man.  We don’t believe he’s honest and we’ve got our grave doubts as to his laboring.  Yet one of our editorial writers is an out-and-out Socialist and makes fiery speeches advising the proletariat to rise and grab the reins of government.  But he’d rather split his own head than an infinitive.”

“Does he write anti-labor editorials?” asked the bewildered Banneker.

“Not as bad as that.  He confines himself to European politics and popular scientific matters.  But, of course, wherever there is necessity for an expression of opinion, he’s anti-socialist in his writing, as he’s bound to be.”

“Just a moment ago you were talking of hired pens.  Now you seem to be defending that sort of thing.  I don’t understand your point of view.”

“Don’t you?  Neither do I, I guess,” admitted the expositor with great candor.  “I can argue it either way and convince myself, so far as the other fellow’s work is concerned.  But not for my own.”

“How do you figure it out for yourself, then?”

“I don’t.  I dodge.  It’s a kind of tacit arrangement between the desk and me.  In minor matters I go with the paper.  That’s easy, because I agree with it in most questions of taste and the way of doing things.  After all The Ledger has got certain standards of professional conduct and of decent manners; it’s a gentleman’s paper.  The other things, the things where my beliefs conflict with the paper’s standards, political or ethical, don’t come my way.  You see, I’m a specialist; I do mostly the fluffy stuff.”

“If that’s the way to keep out of embarrassing decisions, I’d like to become a specialist myself.”

“You can do it, all right,” the other assured him earnestly.  “That story of yours shows it.  You’ve got The Ledger touch—­no, it’s more individual than that.  But you’ve got something that’s going to stick out even here.  Just the same, there’ll come a time when you’ll have to face the other issue of your job or your—­well, your conscience.”

What Tommy Burt did not say in continuation, and had no need to say, since his expressive and ingenuous face said it for him, was, “And I wonder what you’ll do with that!”

A far more influential friend than Tommy Burt had been wondering, too, and had, not without difficulty, expressed her doubts in writing.  Camilla Van Arsdale had written to Banneker: