“Very good indeed,” was Stokely’s comment.
“Another quarter like this,” said Howard, “and I’m going to ask you to let me increase expenses a thousand dollars a week to illustrate the paper.”
“We’ll talk that over with Coulter. Personally I like this ‘yellow-journalism’—when it’s done intelligently. I always told Coulter we’d have to come to it. It’s only common sense to make a paper easy reading. Then, too, we can have a great deal more influence—in fact, we have already. I’m getting what I want up at Albany this winter much cheaper.”
Howard winced. “He made me feel like a blackmailer,” he said to himself when Stokely had gone. “And I suppose these fellows do look on me as a new Malcolm with up-to-date tricks. Well, they will see, they will see.”
He tried to go on with his work, but Stokely’s cynical words persistently interrupted him. Why had he not squarely challenged Stokely then and there? Why had he only winced where a year ago he would have demanded an explanation?
He hated to confess it to himself, he made every effort to smother it, but the thought still stared him in the face—“I am not so strong in my ideals of personal character as I was a year ago.”
The fact that his present course was profitable gave him, he felt, more pleasure than the fact that it was right. If the alternative of wealth and power with self-abasement or poverty, obscurity with self-respect were put to him now, what would he decide? Would he give up his prospects, his hopes of Marian and of an easy career? He was afraid to answer. He contented himself with one of his habitual evasions—“I will settle that when the time comes. No, Stokely’s remark did not make a crisis. If the crisis ever does come, surely I will act like a man. I’ll be securer then, more necessary to this pair of plunderers, able to make better terms for myself. In practical life, it is necessary to sacrifice something in order to succeed.”
But Stokely’s words and his own silence and the real reasons for his changing ideals and for his cowardice continued to annoy him.
Every day he came down town planning for a better newspaper the next morning than they had ever made before. And his vigour, his enthusiasm permeated the entire office. He went from one news department to another, suggesting, asking for suggestions, praising, criticising judiciously and with the greatest consideration for vanity. He talked with the reporters, urging them on by showing keen interest in them and their work, and intimate knowledge of what they were doing. And he dictated every day telegrams to correspondents, thanking them for any conspicuously good stories they had telegraphed in, adding something to the compensation of those who were paid by space and made little.
If his work had not been his amusement the long hours, the constant application, would have broken him down. But he had no interests outside the office and he got his mental recreation by shifting his mind from one department to another.