This Marrying by Margaret Culkin Banning

The _Journal_ was making money. It was February and the hopes based on the election had already been fulfilled. Circulation had increased and with it had come modest advertisers. Two extra rooms across the hall, one boldly labelled Circulation Department and one Advertising, were in charge of efficient looking young men, and the original editorial rooms were crowded by desks for two new reporters. Bob Brotherton talked boastingly of soon doing their own printing, and though _The Journal_ was still an undersized little sheet, comparing queerly in size with the other dailies, its editorials were more often quoted in other cities than were those of other local papers.

Langley was trying his skill as a writer to its utmost in those editorials. There were no serious political issues in the city and he turned his comment with a great pleasure to national affairs and the larger political and industrial situation. What he said, being actuated by no partisanship, was really the product of deep thought and experience and keen and true. Men began to read his comments and finding good thinking and conclusive evidence kept on reading them. At first they did it warily, expecting at any moment to be plunged into Bolshevism, but though Langley refused to fear that current bogie he recognized it in such a way that the potency and sting went out of it. He began to reassure his public by the method of assuring them that issues were not too terrible to be faced. There was a new note in his writing which took him out of the rank of merely caviling radical and put him with the constructionists.