“You’re frank, at least, Mr. Ellis.”

“Why not?  I’ve laid my cards on the table.  You know me for what I am, a disgruntled dreamer.  I know you for what you are, a hard-headed business man.  We don’t have to quarrel about it.  Tell you what I’ll do:  I’ll match you, horse-and-horse, for the soul of your boy.”

“You’re a queer Dick, Ellis.”

“Don’t want to match?  Then I suppose I’ve got to fight you for him,” sighed the editor.

The big man laughed whole-heartedly.  “Not a chance, my friend!  Not a chance on earth.  I don’t believe even a woman could come between Hal and me, let alone a man.”

“Or a principle?”

“Ah—­ah!  Dealing in abstractions again.  Look out for this fellow, Boyee,” he called jovially as Hal came back to his desk.  “He’ll make your paper the official organ of the Muckrakers’ Union.”

“I’ll watch him,” promised Hal.  “Meantime I’ll take your advice about my speech, Mac, and blue-pencil the how-to-be-good stuff.”

“Now you’re talking!  I’ll tell you, Boss:  why not get some of the fellows to speak up.  You might learn a few things about your own paper that would interest you.”

“Good idea!  But, Mac, I wish you wouldn’t call me ‘Boss.’  It makes me feel absurdly young.”

“All right, Hal,” returned Ellis, with a grin.  “But you’ve still got some youngness to overcome, you know.”

An hour later, looking down the long luncheon table, the editor-owner felt his own inexperience more poignantly.  With a very few exceptions, these men, his employees, were his seniors in years.  More than that, he thought to see in the faces an air of capability, of assurance, of preparedness, a sort of work-worthiness like the seaworthiness of a vessel which has passed the high test of wind and wave.  And to him, untried, unformed, ignorant, the light amateur, all this human mechanism must look for guidance.  Humility clouded him at the recollection of the spirit in which he had taken on the responsibility so vividly personified before him, a spirit of headlong wrath and revenge, and he came fervently to a realization and a resolve.  He saw himself as part of a close-knit whole; he visioned, sharply, the Institution, complex, delicate, almost infinitely powerful for good or evil, not alone to those who composed it, but to the community to which it bore so subtle a relationship.  And he resolved, with a determination that partook of the nature of prayer and yet was more than prayer, to give himself loyally, unsparingly, devotedly to the common task.  In this spirit he rose, at the close of the luncheon, to speak.