h."

"I stand corrected in grammar as well as fact," he said lightly.

"Have you seen her?"

"Yes. I see her occasionally. Not often."

"Does she come here?"

"She has been."

"And her husband?"

"No."

"Ban, aren't you ever going to get over it?"

He looked at her silently.

"No; you won't. There are a few of us like that. God help us!" said
Camilla Van Arsdale.

CHAPTER II

Others than Banneker's friends and frequenters now evinced symptoms of
interest in his influence upon his environment. Approve him you might,
or disapprove him; the palpable fact remained that he wielded a growing
power. Several promising enterprises directed at the City Treasury had
aborted under destructive pressure from his pen. A once impregnably
cohesive ring of Albany legislators had disintegrated with such violence
of mutual recrimination that prosecution loomed imminent, because of a
two weeks' "vacation" of Banneker's at the State Capitol. He had hunted
some of the lawlessness out of the Police Department and bludgeoned some
decent housing measures through the city councils. Politically he was
deemed faithless and unreliable which meant that, as an independent, he
had ruined some hopefully profitable combinations in both parties.
Certain men, high up in politics and finance at the point where they
overlap, took thoughtful heed of him. How could they make him useful?
Or, at least, prevent him from being harmful?

No less a potentate than Poultney Masters had sought illumination from
Willis Enderby upon the subject in the days when people in street-cars
first began to rustle through the sheets of The Patriot, curious to see
what the editorial had to say to them that day.

"What do you think of him?" began the magnate.

"Able," grunted the other.

"If he weren't, I wouldn't be troubling my head about him. What else?
Dangerous?"

"As dangerous as he is upright. Exactly."

"Now, I wonder what the devil you mean by that, Enderby," said the
financier testily. "Dangerous as long as he's upright? Eh? And dangerous
to what?"

"To anything he goes after. He's got a following. I might almost say a
blind following."

"Got a boss, too, hasn't he?"

"Marrineal? Ah, I don't know how far Marrineal interferes. And I don't
know Marrineal."

"Upright, too; that one?" The sneer in Masters's heavy voice was
palpable.

"You consider that no newspaper can be upright," the lawyer interpreted.

"I've bought 'em and bluffed