“I’ll show him something interesting if I get hold of that editorial page.”

“Son, are you up to it, d’you think?” asked Edmonds with affectionate solicitude.  “It takes a lot of experience to handle policies.”

“I’ll have you with me, won’t I, Pop?  Besides, if my little scheme works, I’m going out to gather experience like a bee after honey.”

“We’ll make a queer team, we three,” mused the veteran, shaking his bony head, as he leaned forward over his tiny pipe.  His protuberant forehead seemed to overhang the idea protectively.  Or perhaps threateningly.  “None of us looks at a newspaper from the same angle or as the same kind of a machine as the others view it.”

“Never mind our views.  They’ll assimilate.  What about his?”

“Ah!  I wish I knew.  But he wants something.  Like all of us.”  A shade passed across the clearly modeled severity of the face.  Edmonds sighed.  “I don’t know but that I’m too old for this kind of experiment.  Yet I’ve fallen for the temptation.”

“Pop,” said Banneker with abrupt irrelevance, “there’s a line from Emerson that you make me think of when you look like that.  ’His sad lucidity of soul.’”

“Do I?  But it isn’t Emerson.  It’s Matthew Arnold.”

“Where do you find time for poetry, you old wheelhorse!  Never mind; you ought to be painted as the living embodiment of that line.”

“Or as a wooden automaton, jumping at the end of a special wire from ‘our correspondent.’  Ban, can you see Marrineal’s hand on a wire?”

“If it’s plain enough to be visible, I’m underestimating his tact.  I’d like to have a lock of his hair to dream on to-night.  I’m off to think things over, Pop.  Good-night.”

Banneker walked uptown, through dimmed streets humming with the harmonic echoes of the city’s never-ending life, faint and delicate.  He stopped at Sherry’s, and at a small table in the side room sat down with a bottle of ale, a cigarette, and some stationery.  When he rose, it was to mail a letter.  That done, he went back to his costly little apartment upon which the rent would be due in a few days.  He had the cash in hand:  that was all right.  As for the next month, he wondered humorously whether he would have the wherewithal to meet the recurring bill, not to mention others.  However, the consideration was not weighty enough to keep him sleepless.

Custom kindly provides its own patent shock-absorbers to all the various organisms of nature; otherwise the whole regime would perish.  Necessarily a newspaper is among the best protected of organisms against shock:  it deals, as one might say, largely in shocks, and its hand is subdued to what it works in.  Nevertheless, on the following noon The Ledger office was agitated as it hardly would have been had Brooklyn Bridge fallen into the East River, or the stalest mummy in the Natural History Museum shown stirrings of life.  A word was passing from eager mouth to incredulous ear.