“Not a great deal.  I’ve bumped into ’em too hard.  Not so long ago I was publisher of a paying daily in an Eastern city.  The directors were all high-class business men, and the chairman of the board was one of those philanthropist-charity-donator-pillar-of-the-church chaps with a permanent crease of high respectability down his front.  Well, one day there turned up a double murder in the den of one of these venereal quacks that infest every city.  It set me on the trail, and I had my best reporter get up a series about that gang of vampires.  Naturally that necessitated throwing out their ads.  The advertising manager put up a howl, and we took the thing to the board of directors.  In those days I had all my enthusiasm on tap.  I had an array of facts, too, and I went at that board like a revivalist, telling ’em just the kind of devil-work the ‘men’s specialists’ did.  At the finish I sat down feeling pretty good.  Nobody said anything for quite a while.  Then the chairman dropped the pencil he’d been puttering with, and said, in a kind of purry voice:  ’Gentlemen:  I thought Mr. Ellis’s job on this paper was to make it pay dividends, and not to censor the morals of the community.’”

“And, by crikey, he was right!” cried Dr. Surtaine.

“From the business point of view.”

“Oh, you theorists!  You theorists!” Dr. Surtaine threw out his hands in a gesture of pleasant despair.  “You want to run the world like a Sunday-school class.”

“Instead of like a three-card-monte game.”

“With your lofty notions, Ellis, how did you ever come to work on a sheet like the ’Clarion’?”

“A man’s got to eat.  When I walked out of that directors’ meeting I walked out of my job and into a saloon; and from that saloon I walked into a good many other saloons.  Luckily for me, booze knocked me out early.  I broke down, went West, got my health and some sense back again, drifted to this town, found an opening on the ‘Clarion,’ and took it, to make a living.”

“You won’t continue to do that,” advised Dr. Surtaine bluntly, “if you keep on trying to reform your bosses.”

“But what makes me sick,” continued Ellis, disregarding this hint, “is to have people assume that newspaper men are a lot of semi-crooks and shysters.  What does the petty grafting that a few reporters do—­and, mind you, there’s mighty little of it done—­amount to, compared with the rottenness of a paper run by my church-going reformer with the business standards?”

A call from the business office took Hal away.  At once Ellis turned to the older man.

“Are you going to run the paper, Doc?”

“No:  no, my boy.  Hal owns it, on his own money.”

“Because if you are, I quit.”

“That’s no way to talk,” said the magnate, aggrieved.  “There isn’t a man in Worthington treats his employees better or gets along with ’em smoother than me.”

“That’s right, too, I guess.  Only I don’t happen to want to be your employee.”