"Don't you see," he repeated, "doesn't everything point to that as the only possible explanation? It's some rich woman's plaything. That accounts for the food, the setting,--everything in fact that has puzzled us. Amateur,--that's the word; effective, delightful but inexperienced. It sticks out all over the place." "The food isn't amateur," Nancy said, a little resentfully. "Nothing is amateur but the spirit behind it, through which we profit. Don't you see?" "I'm beginning to see," Nancy admitted, "perhaps you are right. I guess the place is run philanthropically. I--I hadn't quite realized it before." "What did you think?" "I knew that the--one who was running it wasn't quite sure where she was coming out, but I didn't think of it is an eleemosynary institution." "Of course, it is." "It's an unscrupulous sort of charity, then," Nancy mused, "if it's masquerading as self-respecting and self-supporting. I--I've never approved of things like that." "Why quarrel with a scheme so beneficent?" "Don't you care?" Nancy asked with a catch in her voice that was very like an appeal. He shook his head. "Why should I?" he smiled. "Then I don't care, either," she decided with an emphasis that was entirely lost on the man on the other side of the table. CHAPTER VII CAVE-MAN STUFF "Cave-man stuff," Billy said to Dick, pointing a thumb over his shoulder toward the interior of the Broadway moving-picture palace at the exit of which they had just met accidentally. "It always goes big, doesn't it?" "It does," Dick agreed thoughtfully, "in the movies anyhow." "Caroline says that the modern woman has her response to that kind of thing refined all out of her." Billy intended his tone to be entirely jocular, but there was a note of anxiety in it that was not lost on his friend. Dick paused under the shelter of a lurid poster--displaying a fierce gentleman in crude blue, showing all his teeth, and in the act of strangling an early Victorian ingenue with a dimple,--and lit a cigarette with his first match. "Caroline may have," he said, puffing to keep his light against the breeze, "but I doubt it." "Rough stuff doesn't seem to appeal to her," Billy said, quite humorously this time. "She's healthy," Dick mused, "rides horseback, plays tennis and all that. Wouldn't she have liked the guy that swung himself on the roof between the two poles?" He indicated again the direction of the theater from which they had just emerged. "She would have liked him," Billy said gloomily, "but the show would have started her arguing about this whole moving-picture proposition,--its crudity, and its tremendous sacrifice of artistic values, and so on and so on."