“To think for yourself?”
Banneker started, at this ready application of his words to the problem which was already outlining itself by small, daily limnings in his mind.
“To write for others what you think for yourself?” pursued the editor, giving sharpness and definition to the outline.
“Or,” concluded Mr. Gaines, as his hearer preserved silence, “eventually to write for others what they think for themselves?” He smiled luminously. “It’s a problem in stress: x = the breaking-point of honesty. Your father was an absurdly honest man. Those of us who knew him best honored him.”
“Are you doubting my honesty?” inquired Banneker, without resentment or challenge.
“Why, yes. Anybody’s. But hopefully, you understand.”
“Or the honesty of the newspaper business?”
A sigh ruffled the closer tendrils of Mr. Gaines’s beard. “I have never been a journalist in the Park Row sense,” he said regretfully. “Therefore I am conscious of solutions of continuity in my views. Park Row amazes me. It also appalls me. The daily stench that arises from the printing-presses. Two clouds; morning and evening.... Perhaps it is only the odor of the fertilizing agent, stimulating the growth of ideas. Or is it sheer corruption?”
“Two stages of the same process, aren’t they?” suggested Banneker.
“Encouraging to think so. Yet labor in a fertilizing plant, though perhaps essential, is hardly conducive to higher thinking. You like it?”