"Yes, all the rest is only a machine. I can change every bolt in twenty-four hours and it will go on just the same. I pay a cartoonist twenty thousand dollars a year, and he thinks he's indispensable; but I can take another and make him famous in a month. I give him the ideas! Yes, they are lieutenants here--editors of Sunday supplements, special writers, women's columns, sporting experts. I can change 'em all, take a handful of boys, and whip them into shape in six weeks! That's not journalism. What is? I'll tell you. Others have copied me; I found it out--_emotions_ and _ideas_! You don't get it? Listen! They're two heads: the news column and the editorial page." He paused at the table, and taking up a paper, struck it disdainfully. "Trash! I know it! News? No! That's not what the public wants--not my public! It wants fiction, it wants emotions! You don't know what the multitude is; I do! A great sunken city, a million stifling, starved existences, hurried through, railroaded through life. News? Bah! They want a taste of dreams! I make their dreams live in my paper. It's everything to them, melodrama, society, romance; it's a peep-hole into the worlds they can't touch. I show 'em millionaires moving behind their house-walls, rolling in wealth, fighting one another, battling for one another's wives, flinging a billion against a billion, ruining thousands for a whim. 'Monte Cristo'? It's tame to what I serve 'em. 'Mr. X Gives a Hundred Thousand Dollar Lunch'--'Secret Drama of Oil Trust's Home'--'Deserts Millionaire Husband for Chauffeur'--'Ten Millions in Five Years'! That's life--that's emotion! That's what makes 'em go on! Look here, did you ever stop to think what does make the five million slaves go on, day in and day out, driven, groaning? Hope! the belief that in some miraculous way life is going to change." He stopped, and with a drop to cold analysis, laying his hand on the editorial sheet, said: "This is what does count. This is real--ideas! The other is just tom-tom-beating to get the crowd around--yes, just that: the band outside the circus. But this is different; this is true. America, the future--the glorious future when I've stirred up their imagination and taught them to think! There! Now do you understand what kind of man I am?" She had understood one thing clearly, in this stupendous flurry of egotism--that, as Sassoon had sought to tempt her with the lure of his wealth, Harrigan Blood was seeking to overwhelm her with the brilliancy of his mind. She did not oppose him, seeking flattery, needing fresh proofs of her power, thinking: "If he wants me, Massingale--Massingale, who is so clever and strong--will want me too." "You lunch with me," he said confidently. She shook her head. "Previous engagement." "Where?" "Tenafly's at one." "Sassoon?" he said, sitting up with a jerk. "Yes," she answered, with malice aforethought. "What--you're going to be caught by that whited sepulcher?"