“Marrineal? Ah, I don’t know how far Marrineal interferes. And I don’t know Marrineal.”
“Upright, too; that one?” The sneer in Masters’s heavy voice was palpable.
“You consider that no newspaper can be upright,” the lawyer interpreted.
“I’ve bought ’em and bluffed ’em and stood ’em in a corner to be good,” returned the other simply. “What would you expect my opinion to be?”
“The Sphere, among them?” queried the lawyer.
“Damn The Sphere!” exploded the other. “A dirty, muck-grubbing, lying, crooked rag.”
“Your actual grudge against it is not for those latter qualities, though,” pointed out Enderby. “On questions where it conflicts with your enterprises, it’s straight enough. That’s it’s defect. Upright equals dangerous. You perceive?”
Masters shrugged the problem away with a thick and ponderous jerk of his shoulders. “What’s young Banneker after?” he demanded.
“You ought to know him as well as I. He’s a sort of protégé of yours, isn’t he?”
“At The Retreat, you mean? I put him in because he looked to be polo stuff. Now the young squirt won’t practice enough to be certain team material.”