“Thanks for the parallel.  I don’t like it.  But never mind that.  The question is, What am I going to do?”

“That’s the question all right.  Are you putting it to me?”

“I am.”

“Well, I was just going to put it to you.”

“No use.  I don’t know.”

The two men looked each other in the eye, long and steadily.  Ellis’s harsh face relaxed to a sort of grin.

“You want me to tell you?”

“Yes.”

“What do you think you’re hiring, a Professor of Journalism in the infant class?” The tone of the question offset any apparent ill-nature in the wording.

“It might be made worth your while.”

“All right; I’m hired.”

“That’s good,” said Hal heartily.  “I think you’ll find I’m not hard to get along with.”

“I think you’ll find I am,” replied the other with some grimness.  “But I know the game.  Well, let’s get down to cases.  What do you want to do with the ’Clarion’?”

“Make it the cleanest, decentest newspaper in the city.”

“Then you don’t think it’s that, now.”

“No.  I know it isn’t.”

“Did you get that from Dr. Surtaine?”

“Partly.”

“What’s the other part?”

“First-hand impressions.  I’ve been going through the files.”

“When?”

“Since nine o’clock this morning.”

“With what idea?”

“Why, having bought a piece of property, I naturally want to know about it.”

“Been through the plant yet?  That’s your property, too.”

“No.  I thought I’d find out more from the files.  I’ve bought a newspaper, not a building.”

The characteristic grunt with which Ellis favored his employer in reply to this seemed to have a note of approval in it.

“Well; now that you own the ‘Clarion,’” he said after a pause, “what do you think of it?”

“It’s yellow, and it’s sensational, and—­it’s vulgar.”

There was nothing complimentary in the other’s snort this time.

“Of course it’s vulgar.  You can’t sell a sweet-scented, prim old-maidy newspaper to enough people to pay for the z’s in one font of type.  People are vulgar.  Don’t forget that.  And you’ve got to make a newspaper to suit them.  Lesson Number One.”

“It needn’t be a muckraking paper, need it, forever smelling out something rotten, and exploiting it in big headlines?”

“Oh, that’s all bluff,” replied the journalist easily.  “We never turn loose on anything but the surface of things.  Why, if any one started in really to muckrake this old respectable burg, the smell would drive most of our best citizens to the woods.”

“Frankly, Mr. Ellis, I don’t like cheap cynicism.”

“Prefer to be fed up on pleasant lies?” queried his employee, unmoved.

“Not that either.  I can take an unpleasant truth as well as the next man.  But it’s got to be the truth.”