By so much, at least, Jeremy would hold her. And in doing what she would have him do, he would fill that bleak and arid void, which, lacking hope, can be appeased only by activity. It was no easy task which Jeremy Robson had set himself, that of making his new property a vehicle for ideals. He was content that it should not be easy. He craved hard, exacting, stimulant work. The Guardian offered it in more generous measure than a better paper could have done. Jeremy purposed to save The Guardian’s soul. Perhaps he had some underlying notion that he might save his own, in the process. That bad name which, given to a dog, is proverbially alleged to bring down upon him a peculiarly un-canine fate at the hangman’s hands, had long attached to The Fenchester Guardian. But the paper’s ill-repute was no man’s gift. It had been justly earned. Once the stiffly high-minded personal organ of a stilted and honorable old-school statesman, it had fallen, under A. M. Wymett, to become a mongrel of journalism, a forlorn and servile whiner, fawning for petty favors, kicked about by the financial and political interests of the State, and not infrequently ornamented with a tin can of scandal to its tail in the form of dirty work performed for some temporary subsidizer in the background. Thanks to shrewd legal advice and his own editorial adroitness, its guiding spirit had contrived to escape the law, and, up to the episode of the disastrously imprudent “cheese-check” letter, open and public contumely. Further, he had, by dint of sheer ability of a low ethical order but high technical grade, maintained a fair circulation for his paper. Its only competitor in the bustling, growing State capital, with its seventy thousand inhabitants, was The Record. There was no morning newspaper. Several plans to start one had come to naught, because of the secret opposition of the local leaders of politics and industry, who were well content with the two mild and amenable specimens of journalism already in the field. The Record represented stolid, stodgy, profitable, and unprogressive respectability in a community now astir with new and uneasy fermentations. The Guardian had always represented what it was bidden to represent. What attitude it might adopt under the new control, was a question not assumed to be troublesome by those whom a change might conceivably trouble in no small degree. It was comfortably taken for granted that The Guardian would “be good” when the time and test came. For the corruptible to put on incorruptibility, in the newspaper world, is a phenomenon so rare as to be practically negligible.