“I like the pep, too, Ban.”  Betty Raleigh, looking up from a seat where she sat talking to a squat and sensual-looking man, a dweller in the high places and cool serenities of advanced mathematics whom jocular-minded Nature had misdowered with the face of a satyr, interposed the suave candor of her voice.  “I actually lick my lips over your editorials even where I least agree with them.  But the rest of the paper—­Oh, dear!  It screeches.”

“Modern life is such a din that one has to screech to be heard above it,” said Banneker pleasantly.

“Isn’t it the newspapers which make most of the din, though?” suggested the mathematician.

“Shouting against each other,” said Gaines.

“Like Coney Island barkers for rival shows,” put in Junior Masters.

“Just for variety how would it do to try the other tack and practice a careful but significant restraint?” inquired Betty.

“Wouldn’t sell a ticket,” declared Banneker.

“Still, if we all keep on yelling in the biggest type and hottest words we can find,” pointed out Edmonds, “the effect will pall.”

“Perhaps the measure of success is in finding something constantly more strident and startling than the other fellow’s war whoop,” surmised Masters.

“I have never particularly admired the steam calliope as a form of expression,” observed Miss Van Arsdale.

“Ah!” said the actress, smiling, “but Royce Melvin doesn’t make music for circuses.”

“And a modern newspaper is a circus,” pronounced the satyr-like scholar.

“Three-ring variety; all the latest stunts; list to the voice of the ballyhoo,” said Masters.

“Panem et circenses” pursued the mathematician, pleased with his simile, “to appease the howling rabble.  But it is mostly circus, and very little bread that our emperors of the news give us.”

“We’ve got to feed what the animal eats,” defended Banneker lightly.

“After having stimulated an artificial appetite,” said Edmonds.

As the talk flowed on, Betty Raleigh adroitly drew Banneker out of the current of it.  “Your Patriot needn’t have screeched at me, Ban,” she murmured in an injured tone.

“Did it, Betty?  How, when, and where?”

“I thought you were horridly patronizing about the new piece, and quite unkind to me, for a friend.”

“It wasn’t my criticism, you know,” he reminded her patiently.  “I don’t write the whole paper, though most of my acquaintances seem to think that I do.  Any and all of it to which they take exception, at least.”

“Of course, I know you didn’t write it, or it wouldn’t have been so stupid.  I could stand anything except the charge that I’ve lost my naturalness and become conventional.”

“You’re like the man who could resist anything except temptation, my dear:  you can stand anything except criticism,” returned Banneker with a smile so friendly that there was no sting in the words.  “You’ve never had enough of that.  You’re the spoiled pet of the critics.”