“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?”