“Right you are, my boy.  And it’s the motto of sound business.  What is business?” he continued, soaring aloft upon the wings of a Paean of Policy.  “Why, business is a deal between you and me in which I give you my goods and a pleasant word, and you give me your dollar and a polite reply.  Some folks always want to know where the dollar came from.  Not me!  I’m satisfied to know that its coming to me.  Money has wings, and if you throw stones at it, it’ll fly away fast.  And you want to remember,” he concluded with the fervor of honest conviction, “that a newspaper can’t be quite right, any more than a man can, unless it makes its own living.  Well.  I’m not going to preach any more.  So long, boys.”

“What do you think of it, Mr. Surtaine?” inquired McGuire Ellis, after the lecturer had gone his way.  “Pretty sound sense, eh?”

“I wonder just what you mean by that, Ellis.  Not what you say, certainly.”

But Ellis only laughed and turned to his “flimsy.”

Meantime the editor of the “Clarion” was being quietly but persistently beset by another sermonizer, less cocksure of text than the Sweet Singer of Policy, but more subtle in influence.  This was Miss Esme Elliot.  Already, the half-jocular partnership undertaken at the outset of their acquaintance had developed into a real, if somewhat indeterminate connection.  Esme found her new acquaintance interesting both for himself and for his career.  Her set in general considered the ripening friendship merely “another of Esme’s flirtations,” and variously prophesied the denouement.  To the girl’s own mind it was not a flirtation at all.  She was (she assured herself) genuinely absorbed in the development of a new mission in which she aspired to be influential.  That she already exercised a strong sway of personality over Hal Surtaine, she realized.  Indeed, in the superb confidence of her charm, she would have been astonished had it been otherwise.  Just where her interest in the newly adventured professional field ended, and in Harrington Surtaine, the man, began, she would have been puzzled to say.  Kathleen Pierce had bluntly questioned her on the subject.

“Yes, of course I like him,” said Esme frankly.  “He’s interesting and he’s a gentleman, and he has a certain force about him, and he’s”—­she paused, groping for a characterization—­“he’s unexpected.”

“What gets me,” said Kathleen, in her easy slang, “is that he never pulls any knighthood-in-flower stuff, yet you somehow feel it’s there.  Know what I mean?  There’s a scrapper behind that nice-boy smile.”

“He hasn’t scrapped with me, yet, Kathie,” smiled the beauty.

“Don’t let him,” advised the other.  “It mightn’t be safe.  Still, I suppose you understand him by now, down to the ground.”

“Indeed I do not.  Didn’t I tell you he was unexpected?  He has an uncomfortable trick,” complained Miss Elliot, “just when everything is smooth and lovely, of suddenly leveling those gray-blue eyes of his at you, like two pistols.  ’Throw up your hands and tell me what you really mean!’ One doesn’t always want to tell what one really means.”