Sound though Mr. Gordon's suggestion was, Banneker after the interview did not go home to think it over. He went to a telephone booth and called up the Avon Theater. Was the curtain down? It was, just. Could he speak to Miss Raleigh? The affair was managed.

"Hello, Bettina."

"Hello, Ban."

"How nearly dressed are you?"

"Oh--half an hour or so."

"Go out for a bite, if I come up there?"

The telephone receiver gave a transferred effect of conscientious consideration. "No: I don't think so. I'm tired. This is my night for sleep."

To such a basis had the two young people come in the course of the police investigation and afterward, that an agreement had been formulated whereby Banneker was privileged to call up the youthful star at any reasonable hour and for any reasonable project, which she might accept or reject without the burden of excuse.

"Oh, all right!" returned Banneker amiably.

The receiver produced, in some occult manner, the manner of not being precisely pleased with this. "You don't seem much disappointed," it said.

"I'm stricken but philosophical. Don't you see me, pierced to the heart, but--"

"Ban," interrupted the instrument: "you're flippant. Have you been drinking?"

"No. Nor eating either, now that you remind me."

"Has something happened?"

"Something is always happening in this restless world."

"It has. And you want to tell me about it."

"No. I just want to forget it, in your company."

"Is it a decent night out?"

"Most respectable."

"Then you may come and walk me home. I think the air will do me good."

"It's very light diet, though," observed Banneker.

"Oh, very well," responded the telephone in tones of patient resignation. "I'll watch you eat. Good-bye."

Seated at a quiet table in the restaurant, Betty Raleigh leaned back in her chair, turning expectant eyes upon her companion.

"Now tell your aged maiden auntie all about it."

"Did I say I was going to tell you about it?"

"You said you weren't. Therefore I wish to know."

"I think I'm fired."

"Fired? From The Ledger? Do you care?"

"For the loss of the job? Not a hoot. Otherwise I wouldn't be going to fire myself."

"Oh: that's it, is it?"

"Yes. You see, it's a question of my doing my work my way or The Ledger's way. I prefer my way."

"And The Ledger prefers its way, I suppose. That's because what you call _your_ work, The Ledger considers _its_ work."

"In other words, as a working entity, I belong to The Ledger."

"Well, don't you?"

"It isn't a flattering thought. And if the paper wants me to falsify or suppress or distort, I have to do it. Is that the idea?"

"Unless you're big enough not to."

"Being big enough means getting out, doesn't it?"

"Or making yourself so indispensable that you can do things your own way."

"You're a wise child, Betty," said he. "What do you really think of the newspaper business?"

"It's a rotten business."

"That's frank, anyway."

"Now I've hurt your feelings. Haven't I?"

"Not a bit. Roused my curiosity: that's all. Why do you think it a rotten business?"

"It's so--so mean. It's petty."

"As for example?" he pressed.

"See what Gurney did to me--to the play," she replied naively. "Just to be smart."

"Whew! Talk about the feminine propensity for proving a generalization by a specific instance! Gurney is an old man reared in an old tradition. He isn't metropolitan journalism."

"He's dramatic criticism," she retorted.

"No. Only one phase of it."

"Anyway, a successful phase."

"He wants to produce his little sensation," ruminated Banneker, recalling Edmonds's bitter diagnosis. "He does it by being clever. There are worse ways, I suppose."

"He'd always rather say a clever thing than a true one."

Banneker gave her a quick look. "Is that the disease from which the newspaper business is suffering?"

"I suppose so. Anyway, it's no good for you, Ban, if it won't let you be yourself. And write as you think. This isn't new to me. I've known newspaper men before, a lot of them, and all kinds."

"Weren't any of them honest?"

"Lots. But very few of them independent. They can't be. Not even the owners, though they think they are."

"I'd like to try that."

"You'd only have a hundred thousand bosses instead of one," said she wisely.

"You're talking about the public. They're your bosses, too, aren't they?"

"Oh, I'm only a woman. It doesn't matter. Besides, they're not. I lead 'em by the ear--the big, red, floppy ear. Poor dears! They think I love 'em all."

"Whereas what you really love is the power within yourself to please them. You call it art, I suppose."

"Ban! What a repulsive way to put it. You're revenging yourself for what I said about the newspapers."

"Not exactly. I'm drawing the deadly parallel."

She drew down her pretty brows in thought. "I see. But, at worst, I'm interpreting in my own way. Not somebody else's."

"Not your author's?"

"Certainly not," she returned mutinously. "I know how to put a line over better than he possibly could. That's _my_ business."

"I'd hate to write a play for you, Bettina."

"Try it," she challenged. "But don't try to teach me how to play it after it's written."

"I begin to see the effect of the bill-board's printing the star's name in letters two feet high and the playwright's in one-inch type."

"The newspapers don't print yours at all, do they? Unless you shoot some one," she added maliciously.

"True enough. But I don't think I'd shine as a playwright."

"What will you do, then, if you fire yourself?"

"Fiction, perhaps. It's slow but glorious, I understand. When I'm starving in a garret, awaiting fame with the pious and cocksure confidence of genius, will you guarantee to invite me to a square meal once a fortnight? Think what it would give me to look forward to!"

She was looking him in the face with an expression of frank curiosity. "Ban, does money never trouble you?"

"Not very much," he confessed. "It comes somehow and goes every way."

"You give the effect of spending it with graceful ease. Have you got much?"

"A little dribble of an income of my own. I make, I suppose, about a quarter of what your salary is."

"One doesn't readily imagine you ever being scrimped. You give the effect of pros--no, not of prosperity; of--well--absolute ease. It's quite different."

"Much nicer."

"Do you know what they call you, around town?"

"Didn't know I had attained the pinnacle of being called anything, around town."

"They call you the best-dressed first-nighter in New York."

"Oh, damn!" said Banneker fervently.

"That's fame, though. I know plenty of men who would give half of their remaining hairs for it."

"I don't need the hairs, but they can have it."

"Then, too, you know, I'm an asset."

"An asset?"

"Yes. To you, I mean." She pursed her fingers upon the tip of her firm little chin and leaned forward. "Our being seen so much together. Of course, that's a brashly shameless thing to say. But I never have to wear a mask for you. In that way you're a comfortable person."

"You do have to furnish a diagram, though."

"Yes? You're not usually stupid. Whether you try for it or not--and I think there's a dash of the theatrical in your make-up--you're a picturesque sort of animal. And I--well, I help out the picture; make you the more conspicuous. It isn't your good looks alone--you're handsome as the devil, you know, Ban," she twinkled at him--"nor the super-tailored effect which you pretend to despise, nor your fame as a gun-man, though that helps a lot.... I'll give you a bit of tea-talk: two flappers at The Plaza. 'Who's that wonderful-looking man over by the palm?'--'Don't you know him? Why, that's Mr. Banneker.'--'Who's he; and what does he do? Have I seen him on the stage?'--'No, indeed! I don't know what he does; but he's an ex-ranchman and he held off a gang of river-pirates on a yacht, all alone, and killed eight or ten of them. Doesn't he look it!'"

"I don't go to afternoon teas," said the subject of this sprightly sketch, sulkily.

"You will! If you don't look out. Now the same scene several years hence. Same flapper, answering same question: 'Who's Banneker? Oh, a reporter or something, on one of the papers.' _Et voila tout_!"

"Suppose you were with me at the Plaza, as an asset, several years hence?"

"I shouldn't be--several years hence."

Banneker smiled radiantly. "Which I am to take as fair warning that, unless I rise above my present lowly estate, that waxing young star, Miss Raleigh, will no longer--"

"Ban! What right have you to think me a wretched little snob?"

"None in the world. It's I that am the snob, for even thinking about it. Just the same, what you said about 'only a reporter or something' struck in."

"But in a few years from now you won't be a reporter."

"Shall I still be privileged to invite Miss Raleigh to supper--or was it tea?"

"You're still angry. That isn't fair of you when I'm being so frank. I'm going to be even franker. I'm feeling that way to-night. Comes of being tired, I suppose. Relaxing of the what-you-callems of inhibition. Do you know there's a lot of gossip about us, back of stage?"

"Is there? Do you mind it?"

"No. It doesn't matter. They think I'm crazy about you." Her clear, steady eyes did not change expression or direction.

"You're not; are you?"

"No; I'm not. That's the strange part of it."

"Thanks for the flattering implication. But you couldn't take any serious interest in a mere reporter, could you?" he said wickedly.

This time Betty laughed. "Couldn't I! I could take serious interest in a tumblebug, at times. Other times I wouldn't care if the whole race of men were extinct--and that's most times. I feel your charm. And I like to be with you. You rest me. You're an asset, too, in a way, Ban; because you're never seen with any woman. You're supposed not to care for them.... You've never tried to make love to me even the least little bit, Ban. I wonder why."

"That sounds like an invitation, but--"

"But you know it isn't. That's the delightful part of you; you do know things like that."

"Also I know better than to risk my peace of mind."

"Don't lie to me, my dear," she said softly. "There's some one else."

He made no reply.

"You see, you don't deny it." Had he denied it, she would have said: "Of course you'd deny it!" the methods of feminine detective logic being so devised.

"No; I don't deny it."

"But you don't want to talk about her."

"No."

"It's as bad as that?" she commiserated gently. "Poor Ban! But you're young. You'll get over it." Her brooding eyes suddenly widened. "Or perhaps you won't," she amended with deeper perceptiveness. "Have you been trying me as an anodyne?" she demanded sternly.

Banneker had the grace to blush. Instantly she rippled into laughter.

"I've never seen you at a loss before. You look as sheepish as a stage-door Johnnie when his inamorata gets into the other fellow's car. Ban, you never hung about stage-doors, did you? I think it would be good for you; tame your proud spirit and all that. Why don't you write one of your 'Eban' sketches on John H. Stage-Door?"

"I'll do better than that. Give me of your wisdom on the subject and I'll write an interview with you for Tittle-Tattle."

"Do! And make me awfully clever, please. Our press-agent hasn't put anything over for weeks. He's got a starving wife and seven drunken children, or something like that, and, as he'll take all the credit for the interview and even claim that he wrote it unless you sign it, perhaps it'll get him a raise and he can then buy the girl who plays the manicure part a bunch of orchids. _He_'d have been a stage-door Johnnie if he hadn't stubbed his toe and become a press-agent."

"All right," said Banneker. "Now: I'll ask the stupid questions and you give the cutie answers."

It was two o'clock when Miss Betty Raleigh, having seen the gist of all her witty and profound observations upon a strange species embodied in three or four scrawled notes on the back of a menu, rose and observed that, whereas acting was her favorite pastime, her real and serious business was sleep. At her door she held her face up to him as straightforwardly as a child. "Good luck to you, dear boy," she said softly. "If I ever were a fortune-teller, I would say that your star was for happiness and success."

He bent and kissed her cheek lightly. "I'll have my try at success," he said. "But the other isn't so easy."

"You'll find them one and the same," was her parting prophecy.

Inured to work at all hours, Banneker went to the small, bare room in his apartment which he kept as a study, and sat down to write the interview. Angles of dawn-light had begun to irradiate the steep canyon of the street by the time he had finished. He read it over and found it good, for its purposes. Every line of it sparkled. It had the effervescent quality which the reading public loves to associate with stage life and stage people. Beyond that, nothing. Banneker mailed it to Miss Westlake for typing, had a bath, and went to bed. At noon he was at The Ledger office, fresh, alert, ............