rs 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the outdated art editor and was in receipt of a larger salary than the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_.

Sensationalism of other kinds was