"Human nature.... Now you just think it all over from the beginning. All our friends come to the Orpheum _some_ night, don't they? They'd go to _some_ picture, anyway, but they come to the Orpheum for two reasons--one's because it's a nice house now, and the other's because it's ours. And sometimes they're in time to get good seats, and sometimes they aren't. Well, we aren't asking any special favour of them; we're just making sure that if they all come the same night, they'll have the same seats, time after time. And they'll like it, Henry." "But to be brutally frank, I still don't see where _we_ get off any better." "You wait.... So we sell for just one particular performance--say the 8.45 one, one night a week--season tickets. Boxes, loges, and some of the orchestra seats. And it would be like opera; if they couldn't always come, they couldn't return their tickets, but they could give them to somebody else. And that night we'd have special music, and--" "Confirming today's conversation, including brutal frankness as per statement, I still don't see--" "Why, you silly. It'll be _Society Night_! And I don't care whether it's movies or opera, if you make a thing fashionable, then it gets _every_body--the fashionable ones, and then the ones who _want_ to be fashionable, and finally the ones who know they haven't a ghost of a chance, and just want to go and look at the others!" Henry laboured with his thoughts. "Well, granted that we could herd the hill crowd in there, and all that, I _still_ don't--" "Why, Henry darling! Because we'd make it _Monday_ night--that's our worst night in the whole week, ordinarily--and have _all_ reserved seats that night, and then of course we'd raise the prices!" "Oh!" said Henry. "Now I get it. I thought it was just swank." "And it's true--it's _true_ that if you get people to thinking there's something exclusive about a shop, or a hotel, or a club, or even a theatre, they'll pay _any_ amount to get in. And _our_ friends don't care when they come, and they'll _love_ all sitting together in the boxes, or even in the orchestra." "Who was Methuselah's wife?" asked Henry, irrelevantly. "Why, he had several, didn't he?" "Cleopatra, Portia, Minerva, Nemesis, and the Queen of Sheba," said Henry, "and you're all five in one package. I retract everything I said. And if I may be permitted to kiss the hem of your garment, to show I'm properly humbled, why--in plain English, that idea has a full set of molars!"