you can hardly imagine a Philadelphia flapper
writing an effective companion to Bacon's Essays. But never mind, if
the stuff's amusing, it has its place. The human yearning for innocent
pastime is a pathetic thing, come to think about it. It shows what a
desperately grim thing life has become. One of the most significant
things I know is that breathless, expectant, adoring hush that falls
over a theatre at a Saturday matinee, when the house goes dark and the
footlights set the bottom of the curtain in a glow, and the latecomers
tank over your feet climbing into their seats----"

"Isn't it an adorable moment!" cried Titania.

"Yes, it is," said Roger; "but it makes me sad to see what tosh is
handed out to that eager, expectant audience, most of the time. There
they all are, ready to be thrilled, eager to be worked upon,
deliberately putting themselves into that glorious, rare, receptive
mood when they are clay in the artist's hand--and Lord! what miserable
substitutes for joy and sorrow are put over on them! Day after day I
see people streaming into theatres and movies, and I know that more
than half the time they are on a blind quest, thinking they are
satisfied when in truth they are fed on paltry husks. And the sad part
about it is that if you let yourself think you are satisfied with
husks, you'll have no appetite left for the real grain."

Titania wondered, a little panic-stricken, whether she had been
permitting herself to be satisfied with husks. She remembered how
greatly she had enjoyed a Dorothy Gish film a few evenings before.
"But," she ventured, "you said people want to be amused. And if they
laugh and look happy, surely they're amused?"

"They only think they are!" cried Mifflin. "They think they're amused
because they don't know what real amusement is! Laughter and prayer
are the two noblest habits of man; they mark us off from the brutes.
To laugh at cheap jests is as base as to pray to cheap gods. To laugh
at Fatty Arbuckle is to degrade the human spirit."

Titania thought she was getting in rather deep, but she had the
tenacious logic of every healthy girl. She said:

"But a joke that seems cheap to you doesn't seem cheap to the person
who laughs at it, or he wouldn't laugh."

Her face brightened as a fresh idea flooded her mind:

"The wooden image a savage prays to may seem cheap to you, but it's the
best god he knows, and it's all right for him to pray to it."

"Bully for you,