“Look at me.  I’m twenty-eight and making a good income.  When I was twenty-three, I was making nearly as much.  When I’m thirty-eight, where shall I be?”

“Can’t you keep on making it?” asked Banneker.

“Doubtful.  A fellow goes stale on the kind of stuff I do.  And if I do keep on?  Five to six thousand is fine now.  It won’t be so much ten years from now.  That’s the hell of this game; there’s no real chance in it.”

“What about the editing jobs?”

“Desk-work?  Chain yourself by the leg, with a blue pencil in your hand to butcher better men’s stuff?  A managing editor, now, I’ll grant you.  He gets his twenty or twenty-five thousand if he doesn’t die of overstrain, first.  But there’s only a few managing editors.”

“There are more editorial writers.”

“Hired pens.  Dishing up other fellows’ policies, whether you believe in ’em or not.  No; I’m not of that profession, anyway.”  He specified the profession, a highly ancient and dishonorable one.  Mr. Burt, in his gray moods, was neither discriminating nor quite just.

Banneker voiced the question which, at some point in his progress, every thoughtful follower of journalism must meet and solve as best he can.  “When a man goes on a newspaper I suppose he more or less accepts that paper’s standards, doesn’t he?”

“More or less?  To what extent?” countered the expert.

“I haven’t figured that out, yet.”

“Don’t be in a hurry about it,” advised the other with a gleam of malice.  “The fellows that do figure it out to the end, and are honest enough about it, usually quit.”

“You haven’t quit.”

“Perhaps I’m not honest enough or perhaps I’m too cowardly,” retorted the gloomy Burt.

Banneker smiled.  Though the other was nearly two years his senior, he felt immeasurably the elder.  There is about the true reporter type an infinitely youthful quality; attractive and touching; the eternal juvenile, which, being once outgrown with its facile and evanescent enthusiasms, leaves the expert declining into the hack.  Beside this prematurely weary example of a swift and precarious success, Banneker was mature of character and standard.  Nevertheless, the seasoned journalist was steeped in knowledge which the tyro craved.

“What would you do,” Banneker asked, “if you were sent out to write a story absolutely opposed to something you believed right; political, for instance?”

“I don’t write politics.  That’s a specialty.”

“Who does?”

“‘Parson’ Gale.”

“Does he believe in everything The Ledger stands for?”

“Certainly.  In office hours.  For and in consideration of one hundred and twenty-five dollars weekly, duly and regularly paid.”

“Outside of office hours, then.”

“Ah; that’s different.  In Harlem where he lives, the Parson is quite a figure among the reform Democrats.  The Ledger, as you know, is Republican; and anything in the way of reform is its favorite butt.  So Gale spends his working day poking fun at his political friends and associates.”