"Exactly. The whole point is that the cooking here is civilized. Oh! you ought to come here to dinner, my friend. I don't know what the luncheons and teas are like--" "They're very good," Nancy said. "But not like the dinners, I'll wager. The dinners are the very last word! I don't know why this place isn't famous. Of course, I do my best to keep it a secret from the artistic rabble I know. It would be overrun with them in a week, and its character utterly ruined." "I wonder if it would." "Oh! I'm sure of it." "What is your discovery?" Nancy asked. Collier Pratt leaned dramatically closer to her, and Nancy instinctively bent forward across the tiny table until her face was very near to his. "Do you know anything about the price of foodstuffs?" he demanded. "A little," Nancy admitted. "You know then that the price of every commodity has soared unthinkably high, that the mere problem of providing the ordinary commonplace meal at the ordinary commonplace restaurant has become almost unsolvable to the proprietors? Most of the eating places in New York are run at a loss, while the management is marking time and praying for a change in conditions. Well, here we have a restaurant opening at the most crucial period in the history of such enterprises, offering its patrons the delicacies of the season most exquisitely cooked, at what is practically the minimum price for a respectable meal." "That's true, isn't it?" "More than that, there are people who come here, who order one thing and get another, and the thing they get is always a much more elaborate and extravagant dish than the one they asked for. I've seen that happen again and again." "Have you?" Nancy asked faintly, shrinking a little beneath the intentness of his look. "How--how do you account for it?" "There's only one way to account for it." "Do you think that there is an--an unlimited amount of capital behind it?" "I think that goes without saying," he said; "there must be an unlimited amount of capital behind it, or it wouldn't continue to flourish like a green bay tree; but that's not in the nature of a discovery. Anybody with any power of observation at all would have come to that conclusion long since." "Then, what is it you have found out?" Nancy asked, quaking. "My discovery is--" Collier Pratt paused for the whole effect of his revelation to penetrate to her consciousness, "that this whole outfit is run _philanthropically_." "Philanthropically?" "Don't you see? There can't be any other explanation of it. It's an eleemosynary institution. That's what it is." Nancy met his expectant eyes with a trifle of wildness in her own, but he continued to hold her gaze triumphantly.