ng?"

"Ask Edmonds," said Banneker.

"Thirty years I've been in this business," said the veteran slowly. "I
suppose there are few of its problems and perplexities that I haven't
been up against. And I tell you, Miss Van Arsdale, all this froth and
noise and sensationalism doesn't matter. It's an offense to taste, I
know. But back of it is the big thing that we're trying to do; to enlist
the ignorant and helpless and teach them to be less ignorant and
helpless. If fostering the political ambitions of a Marrineal is part of
the price, why, I'm willing to pay it, so long as the paper keeps
straight and doesn't sell itself for bribe money. After all, Marrineal
can ride to his goal only on our chariot. The Patriot is an institution
now. You can't alter an institution, not essentially. You get committed
to it, to the thing you've made yourself. Ban and I have made the new
Patriot, not Marrineal. Even if he got rid of us, he couldn't change the
paper; not for a long time and only very gradually. The following that
we've built up would be too strong for him."

"Isn't it too strong for you two?" asked the doubting woman-soul.

"No. We understand it because we made it."

"Frankenstein once said something like that," she murmured.

"It isn't a monster," rumbled Edmonds. "Sometimes I think it's a toy
dog, with Ban's ribbon around its cute little neck. I'll answer for Ban,
Miss Van Arsdale."

The smoke of his minute pipe went up, tenuous and graceful, incense
devoted to the unseen God behind the strangely patterned curtain of
print; to Baal who was perhaps even then grinning down upon his
unsuspecting worshipers.

But Banneker, moving purposefully amidst that vast phantasmagoria of
pulsing print, wherein all was magnified, distorted, perverted to the
claims of a gross and rabid public appetite, dreamed his pure, untainted
dream; the conception of his newspaper as a voice potent enough to reach
and move all; dominant enough to impose its underlying ideal; confident
enough of righteousness to be free of all silencing and control. That
voice should supply the long unsatisfied hunger of the many for truth
uncorrupted. It should enunciate straightly, simply, without
reservation, the daily verities destined to build up the eternal
structure. It should be a religion of seven days a week, set forth by a
thousand devoted preachers for a million faithful hearers.

Camilla Van Arsdale had partly read his dream, and could have wept fo