it was because he felt no need of them

Life was broadening out before Banneker into new and golden persuasions. He had become a person of consequence, a force to be reckoned with, in the great, unheeding city. By sheer resolute thinking and planning, expressed and fulfilled in unsparing labor, he had made opportunity lead to opportunity until his position was won. He was courted, sought after, accepted by representative people of every sort, their interest and liking answering to his broad but fine catholicity of taste in human relationships. If he had no intimates other than Russell Edmonds, it was because he felt no need of them. He had found Io again. Prophecies had all failed in the matter of his rise. He thought, with pardonable exultation, of how he had confuted them, one after another. Cressey had doubted that one could be at the same time a successful journalist and a gentleman; Horace Vanney had deemed individuality inconsistent with newspaper writing; Tommy Burt and other jejune pessimists of the craft had declared genuine honesty incompatible with the higher and more authoritative phases of the profession. Almost without set plan and by an inevitable progress, as it now seemed to him, he had risen to the most conspicuous, if not yet the most important, position on Park Row, and had suffered no conscious compromise of standards, whether of self-respect, self-assertion, or honor. Had he ever allowed monetary considerations seriously to concern him, he might have been troubled by an untoward and not easily explicable phenomenon. His bank account consistently failed to increase in ratio to his earnings. In fact, what with tempting investments, the importunities of a highly luxurious taste in life hitherto unsuspected, and an occasional gambling flyer, his balance was precarious, so to speak. With the happy optimism of one to whom the rosy present casts an intensified glow upon the future, he confidently anticipated a greatly and steadily augmented income, since the circulation of The Patriot was now the terror of its rivals. That any radical alteration could be made in his method of recompense did not occur to him. So completely had he identified himself with The Patriot that he subconsciously regarded himself as essential to its prosperity if not to its actual existence. Therein he was supported by all the expert opinion of Park Row. Already he had accepted one modification of his contract, and his takings for new circulation were now twenty-five cents per unit per year instead of fifty cents as formerly.