, stood fast by the successful method, and let
Banneker know, tactfully but unmistakably, that Severance, who had been
transferred to the regular payroll at a highly satisfactory figure, was
to have a free hand. So the ex-religious editor continued to stroll
leisurely through his unauthoritative and influential routine,
contributing his commentary upon the news as it flowed in. He would
saunter over to the make-up man's clotted desk, run his eye over the
dummy of the morrow's issue, and inquire;

"Wasn't there a shooting scrape over a woman in a big West-Side
apartment?... Being kept by the chap that was shot, wasn't she?... Oh, a
bank clerk?... Well, that's a pretty dull-looking seventh page. Why not
lift this text of the new Suburban Railways Bill and spread the shooting
across three columns? Get Sanderson to work out a diagram and do one of
his filmy line drawings of the girl lying on the couch. And let's be
sure to get the word 'Banker' into the top head."

Or he would deliver a practical lecture from a text picked out of what
to a less keen-scented news-hound might have appeared an unpromising
subject.

"Can't we round out that disappearance story a little; the suburban
woman who hasn't been seen since she went to New York three days ago?
Get Capron to fake up a picture of the home with the three children in
it grouped around Bereaved Husband, and--here, how would something like
this do for caption: '"Mamma, Mamma! Come Back!" Sob Tiny Tots.' The
human touch. Nothing like a bit of slush to catch the women. And we've
been going a little shy on sentiment lately."

The "human touch," though it became an office joke, also took its place
as an unwritten law. Severance's calm and impersonal cynicism was
transmuted into a genuine enthusiasm among the copy-readers. Headlining
took on a new interest, whetted by the establishment of a weekly prize
for the most attractive caption. Maximum of sensationalism was the
invariable test.

Despite his growing distaste for the Severance cult, Banneker was honest
enough to admit that the original stimulus dated from the day when he
himself had injected his personality and ideas into the various
departments of the daily. He had established the new policy; Severance
had done no more than inform it with the heated imaginings and
provocative pictorial quality inherent in a mind intensely if scornfully
apprehensive of the unsatiated potential depravities of public taste. It
was Bannek