“Have you never had your editorials altered or cut or amended, in such manner as to give a side-slant toward the paper’s editorial fetiches?”

Again and most uncomfortably Banneker felt his color change.  “Yes; I have,” he admitted.

“What did you do?”

“What could I do?  The Chief controls the editorial page.”

“You might have stopped writing for it.”

“I needed the money.  No; that isn’t true.  More than the money, I wanted the practice and the knowledge that I could write editorials if I wished to.”

“Are you thinking of going on the editorial side?”

“God forbid!” cried Banneker.

“Unwilling to deal in other men’s ideas, eh?  Well, Mr. Banneker, you have plenty of troubles before you.  Interesting ones, however.”

“How much could I make by magazine writing?” asked Banneker abruptly.

“Heaven alone knows.  Less than you need, I should say, at first.  How much do you need?”

“My space bill last week was one hundred and twenty-one dollars.  I filled ’em up on Sunday specials.”

“And you need that?”

“It’s all gone,” grinned Banneker boyishly.

“As between a safe one hundred dollars-plus, and a highly speculative nothing-and-upwards, how could any prudent person waver?” queried Mr. Gaines as he shook hands in farewell.

For the first time in the whole unusual interview, Banneker found himself misliking the other’s tone, particularly in the light emphasis placed upon the word prudent.  Banneker did not conceive kindly of himself as a prudent person.

Back at the office, Banneker got out the story of which he had spoken to Mr. Gaines, and read it over.  It seemed to him good, and quite in the tradition of The New Era.  It was polite, polished, discreet, and, if not precisely subtle, it dealt with interests and motives lying below the obvious surfaces of life.  It had amused Banneker to write it; which is not to say that he spared laborious and conscientious effort.  The New Era itself amused him, with its air of well-bred aloofness from the flatulent romanticism which filled the more popular magazines of the day with duke-like drummers or drummer-like dukes, amiable criminals and brisk young business geniuses, possessed of rather less moral sense than the criminals, for its heroes, and for its heroines a welter of adjectives exhaling an essence of sex.  Banneker could imagine one of these females straying into Mr. Gaines’s editorial ken, and that gentleman’s bland greeting as to his own sprightly second maid arrayed and perfumed, unexpectedly encountered at a charity bazar.  Too rarefied for Banneker’s healthy and virile young tastes, the atmosphere in which The New Era lived and moved and had its consistently successful editorial being!  He preferred a freer air to the mild scents of lavender and rose-ash, even though it might blow roughly at times.  Nevertheless, that which was fine and fastidious in his mind recognized and admired the restraint, the dignity, the high and honorably maintained standards of the monthly.  It had distinction.  It stood apart from and consciously above the reading mob.  In some respects it was the antithesis of that success for which Park Row strove and sweated.