Some of the youngsters of The Ledger said that he was climbing.

He was not climbing. To climb one must be conscious of an ascent to be
surmounted. Banneker was serenely unaware of anything above him, in that
sense. Eminent psychiatrists were, about that time, working upon the
beginning of a theory of the soul, later to be imposed upon an
impressionable and faddish world, which dealt with a profound psychical
deficit known as a "complex of inferiority." In Banneker they would have
found sterile soil. He had no complex of inferiority, nor, for that
matter, of superiority; mental attitudes which, applied to social
status, breed respectively the toady and the snob. He had no complex at
all. He had, or would have had, if the soul-analysts had invented such a
thing, a simplex. Relative status was a matter to which he gave little
thought. He maintained personal standards not because of what others
might think of him, but because he chose to think well of himself.

Sherry's and a fifth-row-center seat at opening nights meant to him
something more than refreshment and amusement; they were an assertion of
his right to certain things, a right of which, whether others recognized
or ignored it, he felt absolutely assured. These were the readily
attainable places where successful people resorted. Serenely determined
upon success, he felt himself in place amidst the outward and visible
symbols of it. Let the price be high for his modest means; this was an
investment which he could not afford to defer. He was but anticipating
his position a little, and in such wise that nobody could take exception
to it, because his self-promotion demanded no aid or favor from any
other living person. His interest was in the environment, not in the
people, as such, who were hardly more than, "walking ladies and
gentlemen" in a _mise-en-scène_. Indeed, where minor opportunities