“No; I don’t,” replied Banneker ruefully.  “I feel like a man trying to hold up a bigger man with a toy pistol.”

“Then you’d better get into some other line.”

But whatever hopes Banneker may have had of the magazine line suffered a set-back when, a few days later, he called upon the Great Gaines at his office, and was greeted with a cheery though quizzical smile.

“Yes; I’ve read it,” said the editor at once, not waiting for the question.  “It’s clever.  It’s amazingly clever.”

“I’m glad you like it,” replied Banneker, pleased but not surprised.

Mr. Gaines’s expression became one of limpid innocence.  “Like it?  Did I say I liked it?”

“No; you didn’t say so.”

“No.  As a matter of fact I don’t like it.  Dear me, no!  Not at all.  Where did you get the idea?” asked Mr. Gaines abruptly.

“The plot?”

“No; no.  Not the plot.  The plot is nothing.  The idea of choosing such an environment and doing the story in that way.”

“From The New Era Magazine.”

“I begin to see.  You have been studying the magazine.”

“Yes.  Since I first had the idea of trying to write for it.”

“Flattered, indeed!” said Mr. Gaines dryly.  “And you modeled yourself upon—­what?”

“I wrote the type of story which the magazine runs to.”

“Pardon me.  You did not.  You wrote, if you will forgive me, an imitation of that type.  Your story has everything that we strive for except reality.”

“You believe that I have deliberately copied—­”

“A type, not a story.  No; you are not a plagiarist, Mr. Banneker.  But you are very thoroughly a journalist.”

“Coming from you that can hardly be accounted a compliment.”

“Nor is it so intended.  But I don’t wish you to misconstrue me.  You are not a journalist in your style and method; it goes deeper than that.  You are a journalist in your—­well, in your approach.  ’What the public wants.’”

Inwardly Banneker was raging.  The incisive perception stung.  But he spoke lightly.  “Doesn’t The New Era want what its public wants?”

“My dear sir, in the words of a man who ought to have been an editor of to-day, ‘The public be damned!’ What I looked to you for was not your idea of what somebody else wanted you to write, but your expression of what you yourself want to write.  About hoboes.  About railroad wrecks.  About cowmen or peddlers or waterside toughs or stage-door Johnnies, or ward politicians, or school-teachers, or life.  Not pink teas.”

“I have read pink-tea stories in your magazine.”

“Of course you have.  Written by people who could see through the pink to the primary colors underneath.  When you go to a pink tea, you are pink.  Did you ever go to one?”

Still thoroughly angry, Banneker nevertheless laughed, “Then the story is no use?”

“Not to us, certainly.  Miss Thornborough almost wept over it.  She said that you would undoubtedly sell it to The Bon Vivant and be damned forever.”