e office and down
the stairway to the street.

CHAPTER II

THE BUBBLE REPUTATION

Despite its thirty thousand population--"Forty thousand, and growing,
sir!" loyally declared those disinterested citizens engaged in the
sale of remote fields of ragweed as building lots--Westville was still
but half-evolved from its earlier state of an overgrown country town.
It was as yet semi-pastoral, semi-urban. Automobiles and farm wagons
locked hubs in brotherly embrace upon its highways; cowhide boots and
patent leather shared its sidewalks. There was a stockbroker's office
that was thoroughly metropolitan in the facilities it afforded the
elite for relieving themselves of the tribulation of riches; and
adjoining it was Simpson Brothers & Company, wherein hick'ry-shirted
gentlemen bartered for threshing machines, hayrakes, axle grease, and
such like baubles of Arcadian pastime.

There were three topics on which one could always start an argument in
Westville--politics, religion, and the editor of the _Express_. A
year before Arnold Bruce, who had left Westville at eighteen and whom
the town had vaguely heard of as a newspaper man in Chicago and New
York but whom it had not seen since, had returned home and taken
charge of the _Express_, which had been willed him by the late editor,
his uncle. The _Express_, which had been a slippered, dozing, senile
sheet under old Jimmie Bruce, burst suddenly into a volcanic youth.
The new editor used huge, vociferous headlines instead of the mere
whispering, timorous types of his uncle; he wrote a rousing,
rough-and-ready English; occasionally he placed an important
editorial, set up in heavy-faced type and enclosed in a black border,
in the very centre of his first page; and from the very start he had
had the hardihood to attack the "established order" at several points
and to preach unorthodox political doctrines. The wealthiest citizens
were outraged, and hotly denounced Bruce as a "yellow journalist" and
a "red-mouthed demagogue." It was commonly held by the better element
that his ultra-democracy was merely a mask, a pose, an advertising
scheme, to gather in the gullible subscriber and to force himself
sensationally into the public eye.

But despite all hostile criticism of the paper, people read the
_Express_--many staid ones surreptitiously--for it had a snap, a go, a
tang, that at times almost took the breath. And despite the estimate
of its editor as a charlatan, the peopl