Then Pippa goes on her way dancing and singing. The quarreling family hears her, and forgets its dissension. The taproom brawlers cease their carouse and so on, with the pictures alternately showing Pippa on her way, and then the effect of her “passing” on the various groups in the Browning poem. The contrast between the tired business man at a roof garden and the sweatshop worker applauding Pippa is certainly striking. That this demand for the classics is genuine is indicated by the fact that the adventurous producers who inaugurated these expensive departures from cheap melodrama are being overwhelmed by offers from renting agents. Not only the nickelodeons of New York but those of many less pretentious cities and towns are demanding Browning and the other “high-brow” effects. There certainly was a decided change in the general attitude toward us after this wonderful publicity. Directly we had ’phone calls from friends saying they would like to go to the movies with us; and they would just love to come down to the studio and watch a picture being made. Even our one erudite friend, a Greek scholar, inquired where he could see “Pippa Passes.” As the picture was shown for only one night, we thought it might be rather nice to invite the dead-language person and his wife to the studio. They came and found it intensely interesting: met Mary Pickford and thought her “sweet.” Besides the Greek professor, another friend, one of the big men of the Old Guard--an old newspaper man, and president and editor of _Leslie’s Weekly_ and _Judge_ at this time--began making inquiries. The night the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in New York City opened, David thought it wouldn’t be a bad idea to splurge a bit and invite Mr. Sleicher to dinner, he being the editor who had paid him six dollars for his poem, “The Wild Duck.” He’d surely think we had come a long pace ahead in the movies, dining at the Ritz, and doing it so casual-like. Talk there was at the dinner about newspapers and magazines, and then we got around to the movies, and the money they were making. Mr. Sleicher said: “Well, there’s more money in them than in my business, but I like my business better. Now in my game, twenty-four hours or even less, after a thing happens you can see a picture of it and read about it in the paper, and you can’t do that in your movies.” (I understand that even before the time of this dinner, events of special interest occasionally found their way to the screen on the day they happened. In London, in 1906, the Urbanora people showed the boat race between Cambridge and Harvard Universities on the evening of the day they were held, but we did not know about that.)