“I have,” said Banneker.  “I’ve discovered his theory of journalism.  We three, Edmonds, Marrineal, and I, regard this business from three diverse viewpoints.  To Edmonds it’s a vocation and a rostrum.  He wants really, under his guise as the most far-seeing news man of his time, to call sinners against society to repentance, or to force repentance down their throats.  There’s a good deal of the stern evangelist about you, you know, Pop.”

“And you?” The other’s smile seemed enmeshed in the dainty spiral of smoke brooding above his pursed lips.

“Oh, I’m more the pedagogue.  With me, too, the game is a vocation.  But it’s a different one.  I’d like to marshal men’s minds as a generalissimo marshals armies.”

“In the bonds of your own discipline?” asked Miss Van Arsdale.

“If I could chain a mind I’d be the most splendid tyrant of history.  No.  Free leadership of the free is good enough.”

“If Marrineal will leave you free,” commented the veteran.  “What’s your diagnosis of Marrineal, then?”

“A priest of Baal.”

“With The Patriot in the part of Baal?”

“Not precisely The Patriot.  Publicity, rather, of which The Patriot is merely the instrument.  Marrineal’s theory of publicity is interesting.  It may even be true.  Substantially it is this:  All civilized Americans fear and love print; that is to say, Publicity, for which read Baal.  They fear it for what it may do to them.  They love and fawn on it for what it may do for them.  It confers the boon of glory and launches the bolts of shame.  Its favorites, made and anointed from day to day, are the blessed of their time.  Those doomed by it are the outcasts.  It sits in momentary judgment, and appeal from its decisions is too late to avail anything to its victims.  A species of auto-juggernaut, with Marrineal at the wheel.”

“What rubbish!” said Miss Van Arsdale with amused scorn.

“Oh, because you’ve nothing to ask or fear from Baal.  Yet even you would use it, for your musical preachment.”

As he spoke, he became aware of Edmonds staring moodily and with pinched lips at Miss Van Arsdale.  To the mind’s eye of the old stager had flashed a sudden and astounding vision of all that pride of womanhood and purity underlying the beauty of the face, overlaid and fouled by the inky vomit of Baal of the printing-press, as would have come to pass had not he, Edmonds, obstructed the vengeance.

“I can imagine nothing printed,” said the woman who had loved Willis Enderby, “that could in any manner influence my life.”

“Fortunate you!” Edmonds wreathed his little congratulation in festoons of light vapor.  “But you live in a world of your own making.  Marrineal is reckoning on the world which lives and thinks largely in terms of what its neighbor thinks of it.”

“He once said to me,” remarked Banneker, “that the desire to get into or keep out of print could be made the master-key to new and undreamed-of powers of journalism if one had the ability to find a formula for it.”