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 u