Better go in for polo. We need you." He
lumbered away, morose and growling, but turned back to call over his
shoulder: "Read your own stuff when you get up to-morrow and see if polo
isn't a better game and a cleaner."
What the Great of the city might think of his journalistic achievement
troubled Banneker but little, so long as they thought of it at all,
thereby proving its influence; the general public was his sole arbiter,
except for the opinions of the very few whose approval he really
desired, Io Eyre, Camilla Van Arsdale, and more remotely the men for
whose own standards he maintained a real respect, such as Willis Enderby
and Gaines. Determined to make Miss Van Arsdale see his point of view,
as well as to assure himself of hers, he had extracted from her a
promise that she would visit The Patriot office before she returned to
the West. Accordingly, on a set morning she arrived on her trip of
inspection, tall, serene, and, in her aloof _genre_, beautiful, an alien
figure in the midst of that fevered and delirious energy. He took her
through the plant, elucidating the mechanical processes of the daily
miracle of publication, more far-reaching than was ever any other voice
of man, more ephemeral than the day of the briefest butterfly.
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