“Call him my representative in the news department.  I’ll pay his salary myself.  If he makes good, I’ll more than get it back.”

Mr. Severance’s first concern appeared to be to make himself popular.  In the anomalous position which he occupied as representative between two mutually jealous departments, this was no easy matter.  But his quiet, contained courtesy, his tentative, almost timid, way of offering suggestions or throwing out hints which subsequently proved to have definite and often surprising value, his retiring willingness to waive any credit in favor of whosoever might choose to claim it, soon gave him an assured if inconspicuous position.  His advice was widely sought.  As an immediate corollary a new impress made itself felt in the daily columns.  With his quick sensitiveness Banneker apprehended the change.  It seemed to him that the paper was becoming feminized in a curious manner.

“Is it a play for the women?” he asked Severance in the early days of the development.

“No.”

“You’re certainly specializing on femaleness.”

“For the men.  Not the women.  It’s an old lure.”

Banneker frowned.  “And not a pretty one.”

“Effective, though.  I bagged it from the Police Gazette.  Have you ever had occasion to note the almost unvarying cover appeal of that justly popular weekly?”

“Half-dressed women,” said Banneker, whose early researches had extended even to those levels.

“Exactly.  With all they connote.  Thereby attracting the crude and roving male eye.  Of course, we must do the trick more artistically and less obviously.  But the pictured effect is the thing.  I’m satisfied of that.  By the way, I am having a little difficulty with your art department.  Your man doesn’t adapt himself to new ideas.”

“I’ve thought him rather old-fashioned.  What do you want to do?”

“Bring in a young chap named Capron whom I’ve run upon.  He used to be an itinerant photographer, and afterward had a try at the movies, but he’s essentially a news man.  Let him read the papers for pictures.”

Capron came on the staff as an insignificant member with an insignificant salary.  Personally a man of blameless domesticity, he was intellectually and professionally a sex-monger.  He conceived the business of a news art department to be to furnish pictured Susannahs for the delectation of the elders of the reading public.  His flair for femininity he transferred to The Patriot’s pages, according to a simple and direct formula; the greater the display of woman, the surer the appeal and therefore the sale.  Legs and bosoms he specialized for in illustrations.  Bathing-suits and boudoir scenes were his particular aim, although any picture with a scandal attachment in the accompanying news would serve, the latter, however, to be handled in such manner as invariably to point a moral.  Herein his team work with Severance was applied in high perfection.