“At The Retreat, you mean?  I put him in because he looked to be polo stuff.  Now the young squirt won’t practice enough to be certain team material.”

“Found a bigger game.”

“Umph!  But what’s in back of it?”

“It’s the game for the game’s sake with him, I suspect.  I can only tell you that, wherever I’ve had contact with him, he has been perfectly straightforward.”

“Maybe.  But what about this anarchistic stuff of his?”

“Oh, anarchistic!  You mean his attacks on Wall Street?  The Stock Exchange isn’t synonymous with the Constitution of the United States, you know, Masters.  Do moderate your language.”

“Now you’re laughing at me, damn you, Enderby.”

“It’s good for you.  You ought to laugh at yourself more.  Ask Banneker what he’s at.  Very probably he’ll laugh at you inside.  But he’ll answer you.”

“That reminds me.  He had an editorial last week that stuck to me.  ’It is the bitter laughter of the people that shakes thrones.  Have a care, you money kings, not to become too ridiculous!’ Isn’t that socialist-anarchist stuff?”

“It’s very young stuff.  But it’s got a quality, hasn’t it?”

“Oh, hell, yes; quality!” rumbled the profane old man.  “Well, I will tackle your young prodigy one of these days.”

Which, accordingly, he did, encountering, some days later, Banneker in the reading-room at The Retreat.

“What are you up to; making trouble with that editorial screed of yours?” he growled at the younger man.

Banneker smiled.  He accepted that growl from Poultney Masters, not because Masters was a great and formidable figure in the big world, but because beneath the snarl there was a quality of—­no, not of friendliness, but of man-to-man approach.

“No.  I’m trying to cure trouble, not make it.”

“Umph!  Queer idea of curing.  Here we are in the midst of good times, everywhere, and you talk about—­what was the stuff?—­oh, yes:  ’The grinning mask of prosperity, beneath which Want searches with haggard and threatening eyes for the crust denied.’  Fine stuff!”

“Not mine.  I don’t write as beautifully as all that.  It’s quoted from a letter.  But I’ll take the responsibility, since I quoted it.  There’s some truth in it, you know.”

“Not a hair’s-weight.  If you fill the minds of the ignorant with that sort of thing, where shall we end?”

“If you fill the minds of the ignorant, they will no longer be ignorant.”

“Then they’ll be above their class and their work.  Our whole trouble is in that; people thinking they’re too good for the sort of work they’re fitted for.”

“Aren’t they too good if they can think themselves into something better?”

Poultney Masters delivered himself of a historical profundity.  “The man who first had the notion of teaching the mass of people to read will have something to answer for.”