“He’s got to have the cash,” was the expert’s opinion upon Banneker.  “There’s your hold on him....  Quit?  No danger.  New York’s in his blood.  He’s in love with life, puppy-love; his clubs, his theater first-nights, his invitations to big houses which he seldom accepts, big people coming to his House with Three Eyes.  And, of course, his sense of power in the paper.  No; he won’t quit.  How could he?  He’ll compromise.”

“Do you figure him to be the compromising sort?” asked Marrineal doubtfully.

“He isn’t the journalistic Puritan that he lets on to be.  Look at that Harvey Wheelwright editorial,” pointed out the acute Ives.  “He don’t believe what he wrote about Wheelwright; just did it for his own purposes.  Well, if the oracle can work himself for his own purposes, others can work him when the time comes, if it’s properly managed.”

Marrineal shook his head.  “If there’s a weakness in him I haven’t found it.”

Ives put on a look of confidential assurance.  “Be sure it’s there.  Only it isn’t of the ordinary kind.  Banneker is pretty big in his way.  No,” he pursued thoughtfully; “it isn’t women, and it isn’t Wall Street, and it isn’t drink; it isn’t even money, in the usual sense.  But it’s something.  By the way, did I tell you that I’d found an acquaintance from the desert where Banneker hails from?”

“No.”  Marrineal’s tone subtly indicated that he should have been told at once.  That sort of thing was, indeed, the basis on which Ives drew a considerable stipend from his patron’s private purse, as “personal representative of Mr. Marrineal” for purposes unspecified.

“A railroad man.  From what he tells me there was some sort of love-affair there.  A girl who materialized from nowhere and spent two weeks, mostly with the romantic station-agent.  Might have been a princess in exile, by my informant, who saw her twice.  More likely some cheap little skate of a movie actress on a bust.”

“A station-agent’s taste in women friends—­” began Marrineal, and forbore unnecessarily to finish.

“Possibly it has improved.  Or—­well, at any rate, there was something there.  My railroad man thinks the affair drove Banneker out of his job.  The fact of his being woman-proof here points to its having been serious.”

“There was a girl out there about that time visiting Camilla Van Arsdale,” remarked Marrineal carelessly; “a New York girl.  One of the same general set.  Miss Van Arsdale used to be a New Yorker and rather a distinguished one.”

Too much master of his devious craft to betray discomfiture over another’s superior knowledge of a subject which he had tried to make his own, Ely Ives remarked: 

“Then she was probably the real thing.  The princess on vacation.  You don’t know who she was, I suppose,” he added tentatively.

Marrineal did not answer, thereby giving his factotum uncomfortably to reflect that he really must not expect payment for information and the information also.