“Should Our Girls Become Artists’ Models” was one of their early and inspired collaborations, a series begun with a line of “beauty pictures” and spun out by interviews with well or less known painters and illustrators, giving rich opportunity for displays of nudity, the moral being pointed by equally lavish interviews with sociologists and prominent Mothers in Israel.  Although at least ninety-nine per cent of all professional posing is such as would not be out of place at a church sociable, the casual reader of the Capron-Severance presentation would have supposed that a lace veil was the extent of the protection allowed to a female model between sheer nakedness and the outer artistic world.  Following this came a department devoted (ostensibly) to physical culture for women.  It was conducted by the proprietress of a fashionable reducing gymnasium, who was allowed, as this was a comparatively unimportant feature, to supply the text subject to Severance’s touching-up ingenuity; but the models were devised and posed by Capron.  They were extremely shapely and increasingly expressive in posture and arrangement until they attained a point where the post-office authorities evinced symptoms of rising excitement—­though not the type of excitement at which the Art Expert was aiming—­when the series took a turn for the milder, and more purely athletic, and, by the same token, less appetizing; and presently faded away in a burst of semi-editorial self-laudation over The Patriot’s altruistic endeavors to improve the physical status of the “future mothers of the nation.”

Failing any other excuse for their careful lubricities, the team could always conjure up an enticing special feature from an imaginary foreign correspondent, aimed direct at the family circle and warning against the “Moral Pitfalls of Paris,” or the “Vampires of High Life in Vienna.”  The invariable rule was that all sex-stuff must have a moral and virtuous slant.  Thus was afforded to the appreciative reader a double satisfaction, physical and ethical, pruriency and piety.

It was Capron who devised the simple but effective legend which afterward became, in a thousand variants, a stock part of every news item interesting enough to merit graphic treatment, “The X Marks the Spot Where the Body Was Found.”  He, too, adapted, from a design in a drug-store window picturing a sponge fisherman in action, the cross-section illustration for news.  Within a few weeks he had displaced the outdated art editor and was in receipt of a larger salary than the city editor, who dealt primarily in news, not sensations, panem not circenses.