“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 90 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 91 to her consciousness, “that this whole outfit is run philanthropically.”