“Sometimes,” admitted the most famous of magazine editors, “I could dispense with some of the pep.”
“I like the pep, too, Ban.” Betty Raleigh, looking up from a seat where she sat talking to a squat and sensual-looking man, a dweller in the high places and cool serenities of advanced mathematics whom jocular-minded Nature had misdowered with the face of a satyr, interposed the suave candor of her voice. “I actually lick my lips over your editorials even where I least agree with them. But the rest of the paper—Oh, dear! It screeches.”
“Modern life is such a din that one has to screech to be heard above it,” said Banneker pleasantly.
“Isn’t it the newspapers which make most of the din, though?” suggested the mathematician.
“Shouting against each other,” said Gaines.
“Like Coney Island barkers for rival shows,” put in Junior Masters.
“Just for variety how would it do to try the other tack and practice a careful but significant restraint?” inquired Betty.
“Wouldn’t sell a ticket,” declared Banneker.
“Still, if we all keep on yelling in the biggest type and hottest words we can find,” pointed out Edmonds, “the effect will pall.”
“Perhaps the measure of success is in finding something constantly more strident and startling than the other fellow’s war whoop,” surmised Masters.