"I say, Cosimo, I'll have another cutlet if I may.--Why not 'vieillards?' Quite obvious. Men aren't the interest. I've tried men, and you can ask Laura how the bookings went.--But 'vieilles' and I've got 'em. Really, Amory, you're getting quite dull if you don't see that! I'll explain. You see, I've already got the younger ones, like Brit here--shove the claret along, Brit--but the others, of forty or fifty say, well, they've all had their affairs--or if they haven't better still--and it's merely a question of touching the right chord. Regrets, time they've lost, fatal words 'Too late' and so on--it's simply _made_ for me! Touch the chord and they do the rest for themselves. They probably won't hear half of it for sobbing.--Of course I shall probably have to modify my style a bit--not quite so--what shall I say----" "Jaunty," his wife suggested, "--in the best sense, I mean----" "Hm--that's not quite the word--but never mind. It's a great field. Certainly women, not men, are the draw." Amory made a rather petulant objection, and the argument lasted some minutes. In the end Walter triumphantly gained his first point, that women and not men were the "draw" in the box-office sense, and also his second one, namely, that not the Britomarts, but the older women, who would put their hearts into his hands and pay him for exploiting their helplessness and ache and tenderness and regret, and never suspect that they were being practised upon, were "simply made for him...." "What do you think of my title?" he asked. And the title was discussed. Amory was beginning to find Walter just a little grasping. She wished that after all she had not asked the Wyrons to stay to supper. Formerly she had thought that marriage-escapade of theirs big and heroic (that too, by the way, had been in the Latin Quarter, and probably on seven francs a day); but now she was less sure about that. Quite apart from the inapplicability of the Wyrons' experience to her own case, she now wondered whether theirs had in fact been experience at all. Now that she came to think of it, they had taken no risks. They _had_ been married, and in the last event could always turn round on their critics and silence them with that fact.... Nor was she quite so ready now to lay even the souls of Britomart and Cosimo on the dissecting-table for the sake of seeing Walter exercise his professional skill upon them. This was not so much that she wanted to spare Cosimo and Britomart as that she did not want to give Walter a gratification. She was inclined to think that if Walter couldn't be a little more careful about contradicting her he might find his advertisement omitted from the "Novum" one week, as Katie Deedes' had been omitted, and where would he be then? The way in which he had just said that she was "getting quite dull" had been next door to a rudeness....