In snoopopathic literature, in order to get its full effect, the writer generally introduces his characters simply as “the man” and “the woman.”  He hates to admit that they have no names.  He opens out with them something after this fashion:  “The Man lifted his head.  He looked about him at the gaily bedizzled crowd that besplotched the midnight cabaret with riotous patches of colour.  He crushed his cigar against the brass of an Egyptian tray.  ‘Bah!’ he murmured, ‘Is it worth it?’ Then he let his head sink again.”

You notice it?  He lifted his head all the way up and let it sink all the way down, and you still don’t know who he is.  For The Woman the beginning is done like this:  “The Woman clenched her white hands till the diamonds that glittered upon her fingers were buried in the soft flesh.  ‘The shame of it,’ she murmured.  Then she took from the table the telegram that lay crumpled upon it and tore it into a hundred pieces.  ‘He dare not!’ she muttered through her closed teeth.  She looked about the hotel room with its garish furniture.  ’He has no right to follow me here,’ she gasped.”

All of which the reader has to take in without knowing who the woman is, or which hotel she is staying at, or who dare not follow her or why.  But the modern reader loves to get this sort of shadowy incomplete effect.  If he were told straight out that the woman’s name was Mrs. Edward Dangerfield of Brick City, Montana, and that she had left her husband three days ago and that the telegram told her that he had discovered her address and was following her, the reader would refuse to go on.

This method of introducing the characters is bad enough.  But the new snoopopathic way of describing them is still worse.  The Man is always detailed as if he were a horse.  He is said to be “tall, well set up, with straight legs.”

Great stress is always laid on his straight legs.  No magazine story is acceptable now unless The Man’s legs are absolutely straight.  Why this is, I don’t know.  All my friends have straight legs—­and yet I never hear them make it a subject of comment or boasting.  I don’t believe I have, at present, a single friend with crooked legs.

But this is not the only requirement.  Not only must The Man’s legs be straight but he must be “clean-limbed,” whatever that is; and of course he must have a “well-tubbed look about him.”  How this look is acquired, and whether it can be got with an ordinary bath and water are things on which I have no opinion.

The Man is of course “clean-shaven.”  This allows him to do such necessary things as “turning his clean-shaven face towards the speaker,” “laying his clean-shaven cheek in his hand,” and so on.  But every one is familiar with the face of the up-to-date clean-shaven snoopopathic man.  There are pictures of him by the million on magazine covers and book jackets, looking into the eyes of The Woman—­he does it from a distance of about six inches—­with that snoopy earnest expression of brainlessness that he always wears.  How one would enjoy seeing a man—­a real one with Nevada whiskers and long boots—­land him one solid kick from behind.