They were erected, as the name implies, for those without the leisure to attend longer performances, and were found very beneficial to brokers and such, who, hurrying from their offices to snatch their midday meal, could pause for the declared number of seconds, and gain, without waste of time, a modicum of ‘organised emotion,’ as Ierne called it; and this was often a great relief to them. For when we are too much troubled by our affairs we may usefully go to art for escape or refreshment. There were a few booths in the more fashionable parts, for errand boys, journalists, and taxi-drivers, while it was found that those in the dentists’ quarter were much patronised: for in going to have our teeth seen to, if we do not like to be late, yet we shrink from entering the place until the last moment, although the waiting rooms are made homely and cheerful with time-tables, comic papers, and copies of Academy pictures. These theatres were also agreeable to those who had arranged to meet friends at a certain spot and were kept waiting, and some had even, in the early days, gained a notoriety as rendezvous. The camera through which one looked was simply a stereoscopic glass directed on a double film screen, and the pads were the telephone receivers through which one heard the voices of the actors, which seemed to come from their mouths. The plays themselves were most dramatic in character, since their object was to endue the spectator with a highly disturbing emotion in a minimum of time. They were therefore very allusive, and I should have found it hard to understand many of them if the gestures and tones of the actors had not been profoundly striking. I grew to be fond of them and, indeed, with weakly emotional men, they readily become a vice; for when thrills are as easily obtained as cocktails, and as rapidly swallowed, if I may use the term, they form a tonic as difficult to resist as any digestive, and are perhaps as harmful. It would be useless for me to write down a typical drama, for the reader of to-day would not follow it, nor, for that matter, relish it more than he does those quaint old seventeenth-century plays where women dress up as men, and blood so freely flows. There were, indeed, a few from our own era, known as ‘classics,’ and sometimes acted as curiosities in the neighbourhood of museums, but the earliest of these must date, I think, from at least 1940, and was a comedy with the strange title _The Psycho-Fans_. A young man wishing to make a girl his bride, she puts him through a number of scientific, but comical tests, to prove his worth and his affection: she was afraid, I gathered, that he might turn out to be an ‘introvert,’ and not at all a suitable mate for an ‘extravert’ such as she was. All I remember of the words is the opening of a sort of epilogue he spoke: Oh had I wist Before I kissed, That you were a Behaviourist....