“Destructive, isn’t it?” said Banneker, looking up quickly.

“Now, you want to go farther.  You want to teach ’em to think.”

“Exactly.  Why not?”

“Why not?  Why, because, you young idiot, they’ll think wrong.”

“Very likely.  At first.  We all had to spell wrong before we spelled right.  What if people do think wrong?  It’s the thinking that’s important.  Eventually they’ll think right.”

“With the newspapers to guide them?” There was a world of scorn in the magnate’s voice.

“Some will guide wrong.  Some will guide right.  The most I hope to do is to teach ’em a little to use their minds.  Education and a fair field.  To find out and to make clear what is found; that’s the business of a newspaper as I see it.”

“Tittle-tattle.  Tale-mongering,” was Masters’s contemptuous qualification.

“A royal mission,” laughed Banneker.  “I call the Sage to witness.  ’But the glory of kings is to search out a matter.’”

“But they’ve got to be kings,” retorted the other quickly.  “It’s a tricky business, Banneker.  Better go in for polo.  We need you.”  He lumbered away, morose and growling, but turned back to call over his shoulder:  “Read your own stuff when you get up to-morrow and see if polo isn’t a better game and a cleaner.”

What the Great of the city might think of his journalistic achievement troubled Banneker but little, so long as they thought of it at all, thereby proving its influence; the general public was his sole arbiter, except for the opinions of the very few whose approval he really desired, Io Eyre, Camilla Van Arsdale, and more remotely the men for whose own standards he maintained a real respect, such as Willis Enderby and Gaines.  Determined to make Miss Van Arsdale see his point of view, as well as to assure himself of hers, he had extracted from her a promise that she would visit The Patriot office before she returned to the West.  Accordingly, on a set morning she arrived on her trip of inspection, tall, serene, and, in her aloof genre, beautiful, an alien figure in the midst of that fevered and delirious energy.  He took her through the plant, elucidating the mechanical processes of the daily miracle of publication, more far-reaching than was ever any other voice of man, more ephemeral than the day of the briefest butterfly.  Throughout, the visitor’s pensive eyes kept turning from the creature to the creator, until, back in the trim quietude of his office, famed as the only orderly working-room of journalism, she delivered her wondering question: 

“And you have made all this, Ban?”

“At least I’ve remade it.”

She shook her head.  “No; as I told you before, I can’t see you in it.”

“You mean, it doesn’t express me.  It isn’t meant to.’

“Whom does it express, then?  Mr. Marrineal?”

“No.  It isn’t an expression at all in that sense.  It’s a—­a response.  A response to the demand of hundreds of thousands of people who have never had a newspaper made for them before.”