voice of Banneker, clear, serene, compelling.

And Banneker took his pay for it, deeming it well earned.

CHAPTER V

Life was broadening out before Banneker into new and golden persuasions.
He had become a person of consequence, a force to be reckoned with, in
the great, unheeding city. By sheer resolute thinking and planning,
expressed and fulfilled in unsparing labor, he had made opportunity lead
to opportunity until his position was won. He was courted, sought after,
accepted by representative people of every sort, their interest and
liking answering to his broad but fine catholicity of taste in human
relationships. If he had no intimates other than Russell Edmonds, it was
because he felt no need of them.

He had found Io again.

Prophecies had all failed in the matter of his rise. He thought, with
pardonable exultation, of how he had confuted them, one after another.
Cressey had doubted that one could be at the same time a successful
journalist and a gentleman; Horace Vanney had deemed individuality
inconsistent with newspaper writing; Tommy Burt and other jejune
pessimists of the craft had declared genuine honesty incompatible with
the higher and more authoritative phases of the profession. Almost
without set plan and by an inevitable progress, as it now seemed to him,
he had risen to the most conspicuous, if not yet the most important,
position on Park Row, and had suffered no conscious compromise of
standards, whether of self-respect, self-assertion, or honor.

Had he ever allowed monetary considerations seriously to concern him, he
might have been troubled by an untoward and not easily explicable
phenomenon. His bank account consistently failed to increase in ratio to
his earnings. In fact, what with tempting investments, the importunities
of a highly luxurious taste in life hitherto unsuspected, and an
occasional gambling flyer, his balance was precarious, so to speak. With
the happy optimism of one to whom the rosy present casts an intensified
glow upon the future, he confidently anticipated a greatly and steadily
augmented income, since the circulation of The Patriot was now the
terror of its rivals. That any radical alteration could be made in his
method of recompense did not occur to him. So completely had he
identified himself with The Patriot that he subconsciously regarded
himself as essential to its prosperity if not to its actual existence.
Therein he was supported by all the expert opini