"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.