He had kept his head during the publicity and, unaccountably, his thought had turned to his sister as the crusade gathered momentum, as the "menace grew." Although alive with a powerful indignation against the enemy, Basine remained mentally aloof in contemplating the situation. His aloofness was not a cynicism but a guide. He studied the fact that the clamor was in the main artificial. The menace of the private bank was a thing that touched less than one per-cent of the population. There were no more than thirty such minor institutions in the city and more than two-thirds of these were as sound as the banks under government supervision. His statistics had revealed this. Nevertheless in some mysterious way the phrase "private bank" had become synonymous with ogre, villainy, menace, calamity. His original denunciations published rather casually by the press had been a species of newspaper feelers. The public had responded. Realizing then that the subject was a live one, the papers had cut loose. The idea of a trusted public institution being a danger and a menace to the community was quick in awaking a sense of alarm. A sense of fear inspired by no facts but by the reiterative rhetoric of the press swept the city. Basine for several days sought futilely to understand the phenomenon of this fear. It seemed almost as if people were filled with constant though innate fear of the things they trusted. A man named Levine whom he had met at Doris' explained it that way. He had listened to the man talk: ... "The reason people turn on their trusted institutions with such fury is simple. When a platitude they have blindly upheld seems about to betray them they fall on it and tear it to pieces. This is because a platitude is kept alive blindly and it must be destroyed blindly. When a platitude commits the offense of becoming obviously, too obviously, a lie or an incipient danger, people are of course overcome with the horrible doubt that all platitudes are lies and dangers. This general suspicion which overcomes them, this wholesale fear or panic which sweeps over them, they let out, of course, on the one platitude. By viciously denouncing the one platitude they manage to assure themselves that all the others are all right. They sort of lose their general terror in an unnatural but specific hysteria. And they always turn themselves into an overfed elephant jumping furiously up and down and trumpeting terribly--at a mouse."