"By Jove, yes," said the editor, deeply impressed.
"I could arrange for someone to be taken just leaving the shop," the applicant went on; "and I would put underneath something about the straits to which the War has brought shoppers."
"Capital!" said the editor. "Go on."
"Then I have noticed," said the youth, "that people are interested in photographs of musical-comedy and revue actresses."
"I believe you may be right," the editor remarked pensively.
"So I would arrange for a steady series of these ladies, which not only would delight the public but might be profitable to the advertisement revenue of the paper if properly managed; for I should state what plays they were in, and where."
"A great idea," said the editor.
"But I should not," the young man continued, "merely give that information beneath. I should add something topical, such as 'who has just received an admiring letter from a stranger at the Front'; 'who spends her spare time knitting for our brave lads'; 'whose latest song is whistled in trench and camp'; 'who confesses to a great admiration for Khaki,' and so on. In this way you get a War interest, and every one is the better for looking at some pictures. Nothing is so elevating as the constant spectacle of young women with insufficient noses."
"Marvellous!" exclaimed the editor. "But what of the War itself?"
"Ah, yes, I was coming to that," the young man went on. "I have a strong conviction—I may be wrong, but I think not—that war-pictures are popular, and I have noticed that one soldier astonishingly resembles another. This is a priceless discovery, as I will show. I would therefore get all the groups of soldiers that I could take in open country wherever it was most convenient to my operator, and I would label them according to recent events. For example, I would call one group—and understand that they would all have non-committal backgrounds—'A wayside chat near Salonica'; another, 'A Tommy narrating the story of his escape from a Jack Johnson'; a third, 'A hurried lunch somewhere in France'; a fourth, 'How the new group of Lord Derby's men will look after a few weeks'; a fifth, 'Our brave lads leaving Flanders on short leave'; and so on."