The veteran grunted. "Not to be found on Park Row."

"Probably not. Park Row is too deadly conventional."

One might suppose that the environment of religious journalism would be equally conventional. Yet it was from this department that the "find"

eventually came, conducted by Edmonds. Edgar Severance, ten years older than Banneker, impressed the guiding spirit of The Patriot at first sight with a sense of inner certitude and serenity not in the least impaired by his shabbiness which had the redeeming merit of being clean.

"You're not a newspaper man?" said Banneker after the introduction.

"What are you?"

"I'm a prostitute," answered the other equably.

Banneker smiled. "Where have you practiced your profession?"

"As assistant editor of Guidance. I write the blasphemous editorials which are so highly regarded by the sweetly simple souls that make up our _clientele_; the ones which weekly give gratuitous advice to God."

"Did Mr. Edmonds find you there?"

"No," put in the veteran; "I traced him down through some popular scientific stuff in the Boston Sunday Star."

"Fake, all of it," proffered Severance. "Otherwise it wouldn't be popular."

"Is that your creed of journalism?" asked Banneker curiously.

"Largely."

"Why come to The Patriot, then? It isn't ours."

Severance raised his fine eyebrows, but contented himself with saying: "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 gave 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."