“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.”
“Sure, she’s a highbrow. Highbrows always cerebrate about the movies in one way or another. Nancy doesn’t get it at just that angle, of course. She hasn’t got Caroline’s intellectual appetite. She’s not interested in the movies because she hasn’t got a moving-picture house of her own. The world is not Nancy’s oyster—it’s her lump of putty.”
“I don’t know which is the worst,” Billy said. “Caroline won’t listen to anything you say to her,—but then neither will Nancy.”