:
"Isn't it? However, I didn't come. I was brought." He indicated Edmonds.

"He gave me more ideas on news-dressing," said the veteran, "than I'd
pick up in a century on the Row."

"Ideas are what we're after. Where do you get yours, Mr. Severance,
since you are not a practical newspaper man?"

"From talking with people, and seeing what the newspapers fail to do."

"Where were you before you went on Guidance?"

"Instructor at Harvard."

"And you practiced your--er--specified profession there, too?"

"Oh, no. I was partly respectable then.

"Why did you leave?"

"Drink."

"Ah? You don't build up much of a character for yourself as prospective
employee."

"If I join The Patriot staff I shall probably disappear once a month or
so on a spree."

"Why should you join The Patriot staff? That is what you fail to make
clear to me."

"Reference, Mr. Russell Edmonds," returned the other negligently.

"You two aren't getting anywhere with all this chatter," growled the
reference. "Come, Severance; talk turkey, as you did to me."

"I don't want to talk," objected the other in his gentle, scholarly
accents. "I want to look about: to diagnose the trouble in the news
department."

"What do you suspect the trouble to be?" asked Banneker.

"Oh, the universal difficulty. Lack of brains."

Banneker laughed, but without relish. "We pay enough for what we've got.
It ought to be good quality."

"You pay not wisely but too well. My own princely emolument as a prop of
piety is thirty-five dollars a week."

"Would you come here at that figure?"

"I should prefer forty. For a period of six weeks, on trial."

"As Mr. Edmonds seems to think it worth the gamble, I'll take you on.
From to-day, if you wish. Go out and look around."

"Wait a minute," interposed Edmonds. "What's his title? How is his job
to be defined?"

"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 g