ave 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.

"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 painte