“TOOHEY,” SAID GUY FRANCON, “ELLSWORTH TOOHEY. PRETTY decent of him, don’t you think? Read it, Peter.”

Francon leaned jovially across his desk and handed to Keating the August issue of New Frontiers. New Frontiers had a white cover with a black emblem that combined a palette, a lyre, a hammer, a screw driver and a rising sun; it had a circulation of thirty thousand and a following that described itself as the intellectual vanguard of the country; no one had ever risen to challenge the description. Keating read from an article entitled “Marble and Mortar,” by Ellsworth M. Toohey:

“... And now we come to another notable achievement of the metropolitan skyline. We call the attention of the discriminating to the new Melton Building by Francon & Heyer. It stands in white serenity as an eloquent witness to the triumph of Classical purity and common sense. The discipline of an immortal tradition has served here as a cohesive factor in evolving a structure whose beauty can reach, simply and lucidly, the heart of every man in the street. There is no freak exhibitionism here, no perverted striving for novelty, no orgy of unbridled egotism. Guy Francon, its designer, has known how to subordinate himself to the mandatory canons which generations of craftsmen behind him have proved inviolate, and at the same time how to display his own creative originality, not in spite of, but precisely because of the classical dogma he has accepted with the humility of a true artist. It may be worth mentioning, in passing, that dogmatic discipline is the only thing which makes true originality possible....

“More important, however, is the symbolic significance of a building such as this rising in our imperial city. As one stands before its southern façade, one is stricken with the realization that the stringcourses, repeated with deliberate and gracious monotony from the third to the eighteenth story, these long, straight, horizontal lines are the moderating, leveling principle, the lines of equality. They seem to bring the towering structure down to the humble level of the observer. They are the lines of the earth, of the people, of the great masses. They seem to tell us that none may rise too high above the restraint of the common human level, that all is held and shall be checked, even as this proud edifice, by the stringcourses of men’s brotherhood....”

There was more. Keating read it all, then raised his head. “Gee!” he said, awed.

Francon smiled happily.

“Pretty good, eh? And from Toohey, no less. Not many people might have heard the name, but they will, mark my word, they will. I know the signs.... So he doesn’t think I’m so bad? And he’s got a tongue like an icepick, when he feels like using it. You should see what he says about others, more often than not. You know Durkin’s latest mousetrap? Well, I was at a party where Toohey said—” Francon chuckled—“he said: ‘If Mr. Durkin suffers under the delusion