“I don’t care to be a reporter on The Patriot.”

“Well, this would hardly be reporting.  At least, a very specialized and important type.”

“For that matter, I don’t care to be a reporter on any paper much longer.  Besides, you need me—­or some one—­in another department more than in the news section.”

“You don’t like the editorials,” was the inference which Marrineal drew from this, and correctly.

“I think they’re solemn flapdoodle.”

“So do I. Occasionally I write them myself and send them in quietly.  It isn’t known yet that I own the property; so I don’t appear at the office.  Mine are quite as solemn and flapdoodlish as the others.  To which quality do you object the most?”

“Solemnity.  It’s the blight of editorial expression.  All the papers suffer from it.”

“Then you wouldn’t have the editorial page modeled on that of any of our contemporaries.”

“No.  I’d try to make it interesting.  There isn’t a page in town that the average man-in-the-street-car can read without a painful effort at thought.”

“Editorials are supposed to be for thinking men,” put in Edmonds.

“Make the thinking easy, then.  Don’t make it hard, with heavy words and a didactic manner.  Talk to ’em.  You’re trying to reach for their brain mechanism.  Wrong idea.  Reach for their coat-lapels.  Hook a finger in the buttonholes and tell ’em something about common things they never stopped to consider.  Our editorializers are always tucking their hands into their oratorical bosoms and discoursing in a sonorous voice about freight differentials as an element in stabilizing the market.  How does that affect Jim Jones?  Why, Jim turns to the sporting page.  But if you say to him casually, in print, ’Do you realize that every woman who brings a child into the world shows more heroism than Teddy Roosevelt when he charged up San Juan Hill?’—­what’ll Jim do about that?  Turn to the sporting page just the same, maybe.  But after he’s absorbed the ball-scores, he’ll turn back to the editorial.  You see, he never thought about Mrs. Jones just that way before.”

“Sentimentalism,” observed Marrineal.  “Not altogether original, either.”  But he did not speak as a critic.  Rather as one pondering upon new vistas of thought.

“Why shouldn’t an editorial be sentimental about something besides the starry flag and the boyhood of its party’s candidate?  Original?  I shouldn’t worry overmuch about that.  All my time would be occupied in trying to be interesting.  After I got ’em interested, I could perhaps be instructive.  Very cautiously, though.  But always man to man:  that’s the editorial trick, as I see it.  Not preacher to congregation.”

“Where are your editorials, son?” asked the veteran Edmonds abruptly.

“Locked up.”  Banneker tapped his forehead.

“In the place of their birth?” smiled Marrineal.