“Jollies you along until he can see the white of your mind, and then fires his slug into your head, point-blank,” Edmonds said.

With all this he had the high art to keep his style direct, unaffected, almost severe.  No frills, no literary graces, no flashes of wit except an occasional restrained touch of sarcasm:  the writing was in the purest style and of a classic simplicity.  The typical reader of The Patriot had a friendly and rather patronizing feeling for the editorials:  they were generally deemed quite ordinary, “common as an old shoe” (with an approving accent from the commentator), comfortably devoid of the intricate elegancies practiced by Banneker’s editorial compeers.  So they were read and absorbed, which was all that their writer hoped or wished for them.  He was not seeking the bubble, reputation, but the solid satisfaction of implanting ideas in minds hitherto unaroused to mental processes, and training the resultant thought in his chosen way and to eventual though still vague purposes.

“They’re beginning to imitate you, Ban,” commented Russell Edmonds in the days of The Patriot’s first surprising upward leap.  “Flattery of your peers.”

“Let ’em imitate,” returned Banneker indifferently.

“Yes; they don’t come very near to the original.  It’s a fundamental difference in style.”

“It’s a fundamental difference in aim.”

“Aim?”

“They’re writing at and for their owners; to make good with the boss.  I’m writing at my public.”

“I believe you’re right.  It’s more difficult, though, isn’t it, to write for a hundred thousand people than at one?”

“Not if you understand them from study at first hand, as I do.  That’s why the other fellows are five or ten-thousand-dollar men,” said Banneker, quite without boastfulness “while I’m—­”

“A fifty-thousand-dollar a year man,” supplied Edmonds.

“Well, getting toward that figure.  I’m on the target with the editorials and I’m going to hold on it.  But our news policy is different.  We still wobble there.”

“What do you want!  Look at the circulation.  Isn’t that good enough?”

“No.  Every time I get into a street-car and see a passenger reading some other paper, I feel that we’ve missed fire,” returned Banneker inexorably.  “Pop, did you ever see an actress make up?”

“I’ve a general notion of the process.”

“Find me a man who can make up news ready and rouged to go before the daily footlights as an actress makes up her face.”

The veteran grunted.  “Not to be found on Park Row.”

“Probably not.  Park Row is too deadly conventional.”

One might suppose that the environment of religious journalism would be equally conventional.  Yet it was from this department that the “find” eventually came, conducted by Edmonds.  Edgar Severance, ten years older than Banneker, impressed the guiding spirit of The Patriot at first sight with a sense of inner certitude and serenity not in the least impaired by his shabbiness which had the redeeming merit of being clean.