There had been regular gangs of them in the Bible, Ryan recalled: roving bands of halt and maimed, who collected wherever there was a crowd, and were always good for a parable or two … They used to hang around Christ, in those days; now they haunted the cripple-care agencies or (if they were properly handled, and could fix the police) the busier sidewalks.

One could not blame the victims themselves, when they cashed in on their handicaps. The world owed them something for playing such crude jokes upon them … Esther Costello, for example, could not be blamed for her blind eyes, her hideous voice which was now being trained to ape human tones; and she was entitled to extract from the world, which had thus punished her, the reward of free upkeep. But there were bad characters involved, and they were the people who had elected themselves as the showmen: the barkers who pointed to the crippled legs, and told the passers-by to look at the noses, and held the sores up to the light, while they rattled the tin cup with the other hand.

Such, to his mind, was Mrs Bannister, who rode to glory on triple chargers: Esther Costello’s inhuman squeaks, stunning good looks, and immensely talented silence.

But the public liked it that way, and the Star-Telegram had to be sold to the public. It would have been fine to let Harry Grant write the kind of piece he wanted; but that wouldn’t have fitted the formula, and the formula sold the paper, and the paper paid the salary list … With newspapers, nothing operated in a vacuum – least of all, Truth. In the background of all Ryan’s thinking, there was an editor, self-modelled on Napoleon, who enjoyed giving orders and dictating policy; and at his back was a proprietor, like God at the time of Creation, who surveyed the whole thing as an eagle and occasionally snatched it up in his beak and shook it. Ryan himself had an ulcer, and a wife who saw herself, inaccurately, as a spur to greatness. He would never be an editor: he just had a job to keep, a good job. Grant might be an editor. Esther Costello was undoubtedly a racket … Ryan turned back to his desk again, leaving the ethics for someone else to pick up.

Harry Grant, being a good newspaperman, did his best with the assignment, using the method of attack laid down in the manual of instruction – that was, to dig out what was new about it, and then to send as much of that as the paper was likely to print. It was waste of time, he knew, to write what he really thought about the ‘streamlining’ of Esther Costello, the slick presentation of her which never took a false public step. He couldn’t describe, for example, Jack Lett’s particular part in the promotion. He could write that Esther seemed to be more popular and successful than ever, and that she and Mrs Bannister had evolved a completely new technique: Esther could now ‘hear’ Mrs Bannister’s voice, by placing her hand on the other woman’s mouth, and she could produce in return an approximation of human tones – a kind of high-pitched, monotone gabble which Mrs Bannister then translated verbatim to the audience.