His first words to Banneker, after his greeting, were:  “You are exceedingly well tailored.”

“Does it matter?” asked Banneker, smiling.

“I’m disappointed.  I had read into your writing midnight toil and respectable, if seedy, self-support.”

“After the best Grub Street tradition?  Park Row has outlived that.”

“I know your tailor, but what’s your college?” inquired this surprising man.

Banneker shook his head.

“At least I was right in that.  I surmised individual education.  Who taught you to think for yourself?”

“My father.”

“It’s an uncommon name.  You’re not a son of Christian Banneker, perhaps?”

“Yes.  Did you know him?”

“A mistaken man.  Whoring after strange gods.  Strange, sterile, and disappointing.  But a brave soul, nevertheless.  Yes; I knew him well.  What did he teach you?”

“He tried to teach me to stand on my own feet and see with my own eyes and think for myself.”

“Ah, yes!  With one’s own eyes.  So much depends upon whither one turns them.  What have you seen in daily journalism?”

“A chance.  Possibly a great chance.”

“To think for yourself?”

Banneker started, at this ready application of his words to the problem which was already outlining itself by small, daily limnings in his mind.

“To write for others what you think for yourself?” pursued the editor, giving sharpness and definition to the outline.

“Or,” concluded Mr. Gaines, as his hearer preserved silence, “eventually to write for others what they think for themselves?” He smiled luminously.  “It’s a problem in stress:  x = the breaking-point of honesty.  Your father was an absurdly honest man.  Those of us who knew him best honored him.”

“Are you doubting my honesty?” inquired Banneker, without resentment or challenge.

“Why, yes.  Anybody’s.  But hopefully, you understand.”

“Or the honesty of the newspaper business?”

A sigh ruffled the closer tendrils of Mr. Gaines’s beard.  “I have never been a journalist in the Park Row sense,” he said regretfully.  “Therefore I am conscious of solutions of continuity in my views.  Park Row amazes me.  It also appalls me.  The daily stench that arises from the printing-presses.  Two clouds; morning and evening....  Perhaps it is only the odor of the fertilizing agent, stimulating the growth of ideas.  Or is it sheer corruption?”

“Two stages of the same process, aren’t they?” suggested Banneker.

“Encouraging to think so.  Yet labor in a fertilizing plant, though perhaps essential, is hardly conducive to higher thinking.  You like it?”

“I don’t accept your definition at all,” replied Banneker.  “The newspapers are only a medium.  If there is a stench, they do not originate it.  They simply report the events of the day.”

“Exactly.  They simply disseminate it.”