"What rubbish!" said Miss Van Arsdale with amused scorn. "Oh, because you've nothing to ask or fear from Baal. Yet even you would use it, for your musical preachment." As he spoke, he became aware of Edmonds staring moodily and with pinched lips at Miss Van Arsdale. To the mind's eye of the old stager had flashed a sudden and astounding vision of all that pride of womanhood and purity underlying the beauty of the face, overlaid and fouled by the inky vomit of Baal of the printing-press, as would have come to pass had not he, Edmonds, obstructed the vengeance. "I can imagine nothing printed," said the woman who had loved Willis Enderby, "that could in any manner influence my life." "Fortunate you!" Edmonds wreathed his little congratulation in festoons of light vapor. "But you live in a world of your own making. Marrineal is reckoning on the world which lives and thinks largely in terms of what its neighbor thinks of it." "He once said to me," remarked Banneker, "that the desire to get into or keep out of print could be made the master-key to new and undreamed-of powers of journalism if one had the ability to find a formula for it." "I'm not sure that I understand what he means," said Miss Van Arsdale, "but it has a sinister sound." "Are Baal's other names Bribery and Blackmail?" glowered Edmonds. "There has never been a hint of any illegitimate use of the paper, so far as I can discover. Yet it's pretty plain to me that he intends to use it as an instrument." "As soon as we've made it strong enough," supplied Edmonds. "An instrument of what?" inquired Miss Van Arsdale. "Power for himself. Political, I suppose." "Does he want office?" she asked. "Perhaps. Perhaps he prefers the deeper-lying power to make and unmake politicians. We've done it already in a few cases. That's Edmonds's specialty. I'll know within a few days what Marrineal wants, if I can get a showdown. He and I are coming to a new basis of finance." "Yes; he thinks he can't afford to keep on paying you by circulation. You're putting on too much." This from Edmonds. "That's what he got me here for. However, I don't really believe he can. I'm eating up what should be the paper's legitimate profits. And yet"--he smiled radiantly--"there are times when I don't see how I'm going to get along with what I have. It's pretty absurd, isn't it, to feel pinched on fifty thousand a year, when I did so well at Manzanita on sixty a month?" "It's a fairy-tale," declared Miss Van Arsdale. "I knew that you were going to arrive sooner or later, Ban. But this isn't an arrival. It's a triumph." "Say rather it's a feat of balancing," he propounded. "A tight-rope stunt on a gilded rope. Failure on one side; debt on the other. Keep going like the devil to save yourself from falling." "What is it making of him, Mr. Edmonds?" Banneker's oldest friend turned her limpid and anxious regard upon his closest friend.