spurred to keep pace with the sex
appeal. The news columns became constantly more lurid. They shrieked,
yelled, blared, shrilled, and boomed the scandals and horrors of the
moment in multivocal, multigraphic clamor, tainting the peaceful air
breathed by everyday people going about their everyday business, with
incredible blatancies which would be forgotten on the morrow in the
excitement of fresh percussions, though the cumulative effect upon the
public mind and appetite might be ineradicable. "Murderer Dabbles Name
in Bloody Print." "Wronged Wife Mars Rival's Beauty." "Society Woman
Gives Hundred-Dollar-Plate Dinner." "Scientist Claims Life Flickers in
Mummy." "Cocktails, Wine, Drug, Ruin for Lovely Girl of Sixteen."
"Financier Resigns After Sprightly Scene at Long Beach." Severance
developed a literary genius for excitant and provocative
word-combinations in the headings; "Love-Slave," "Girl-Slasher,"
"Passion-Victim," "Death-Hand," "Vengeance-Oath," "Lust-Fiend." The
articles chosen for special display were such as lent themselves, first,
to his formula for illustration, and next to captions which thrilled
with the sensations of crime, mystery, envy of the rich and conspicuous,
or lechery, half concealed or unconcealed. For facts as such he cared
nothing. His conception of news was as a peg upon which to hang a
sensation. "Love and luxury for the women: money and power for the men,"
was his broad working scheme for the special interest of the paper,
with, of course, crime and the allure of the flesh for general interest.
A jungle man, perusing one day's issue (supposing him to have been
competent to assimilate it), would have judged the civilization pictured
therein too grisly for his unaccustomed nerves and fled in horror back
to the direct, natural, and uncomplicated raids and homicides of the
decent wilds.

The Great Gaines, descending for once from the habitual classicism of
his phraseology, described The Patriot of Severance's production in two
terse and sufficient words.

"It itches."

That itch irked Banneker almost unendurably at times. He longed to be
relieved of it; to scratch the irritant Severance clean off the skin of
The Patriot. But Severance was too evidently valuable. Banneker did go
so far as to protest.

"Aren't you rather overdoing this thing, Severance?"

"Which thing? We're overdoing everything; hence the growth of the
paper."

Banneker fell back upon banality. "Well, we've got to draw t