d 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