“Ask him?  I certainly did not.  You don’t understand much about politics, dearest.”

“I was thinking of it from the point of view of the newspaper.  If you’re going to answer him in The Patriot, I should think you’d want to know just what his basis was.  Besides, if he’s wrong, I believe he’d take it back.”

“After all the damage has been done.  He won’t get the chance.”  Banneker’s jaw set firm.

“What shall you do now?”

“Wait my chance, load my pen, and shoot to kill.”

“Let me see the editorial before you print it.”

“All right, Miss Meddlesome.  But you won’t let your ideas of fair play run away with you and betray me to the enemy?  You’re a Laird man, aren’t you?”

Her voice fell to a caressing half-note.  “I’m a Banneker woman—­in everything.  Won’t you ever remember that?”

“No.  You’ll never be that.  You’ll always be Io; yourself; remote and unattainable in the deeper sense.”

“Do you say that?” she answered.

“Oh, don’t think that I complain.  You’ve made life a living glory for me.  Yet”—­his face grew wistful—­“I suppose—­I don’t know how to say it—­I’m like the shepherd in the poem,

’Still nursing the unconquerable hope,
Still clutching the inviolable shade.’

Io, why do I always think in poetry, when I’m with you?”

“I want you always to,” she said, which was a more than sufficient answer.

Io had been back in Philadelphia several days, and had ’phoned Banneker that she was coming over on the following Tuesday, when, having worked at the office until early evening, he ran around the corner to Katie’s for dinner.  At the big table “Bunny” Fitch of The Record was holding forth.

Fitch was that invaluable type of the political hack-writer, a lackey of the mind, instinctively subservient to his paper’s slightest opinion, hating what it hates, loving what it loves, with the servile adherence of a medieval churchman.  As The Record was bitter upon reform, its proprietor having been sadly disillusioned in youth by a lofty but abortive experiment in perfecting human nature from which he never recovered, Bunny lost no opportunity to damn all reformers.

“Can’t you imagine the dirty little snob,” he was saying, as Banneker entered, “creeping and fawning and cringing for their favors?  Up for membership at The Retreat.  Dines with Poultney Masters, Jr., at his club.  Can’t you hear him running home to wifie all het up and puffed like a toad, and telling her about it?”

“Who’s all this, Bunny?” inquired Banneker, who had taken in only the last few words.

“Our best little society climber, the Honorable Robert Laird,” returned the speaker, and reverted to his inspirational pen-picture:  “Runs home to wifie and crows, ’What do you think, my dear!  Junior Masters called me ‘Bob’ to-day!”

In a flash, the murderous quality of the thing bit into Banneker’s sensitive brain.  “Junior Masters called me ‘Bob’ to-day.”  The apotheosis of snobbery!  Swift and sure poison for the enemy if properly compounded with printer’s ink.  How pat it fitted in with the carefully fostered conception, insisted upon in every speech by Marrineal, of the mayor as a Wall Street and Fifth Avenue tool and toady!