"Honey, we're all starvationed."
"Lester'll be here any minute now."
"Lester Spencer coming for dinner, Bleema?"
"Surely. I dropped him just now at the Lions' Club to change his clothes. Now, don't get excited, dads; he's leaving right after dinner to catch his train for Horseshoe Bend."
"I must tell Williams to lay another—"
"I've already told him, mamma. Here he is now! Come on in, Lester; you're holding up the family. You've never met Mr. Feist, have you, the film king? You two ought to get acquainted—one makes the films and the other makes them famous."
There was a round of greetings, Mr. Spencer passing a hand that had emerged white and slim through the ordeal of thousands of feet of heroics.
"How do you do, Mrs. Pelz? Boss! Mr. Feist, glad to know you!"
What hundreds of thousands of men, seeming to despise, had secretly, in the organ-reverberating darkness of the motion-picture theater, yearned over Mr. Lester Spencer's chest expansion, hair pomade, and bulgeless front and shirt-front! When Lester Spencer, in a very slow fade-out, drew the exceedingly large-of-eye and heaving-of-bosom one unto his own immaculate bosom, whole rows of ladies, with the slightly open-mouthed, adenoidal expression of vicarious romance, sat forward in their chairs. Men appraised silently the pliant lay of shirt, the uncrawling coat-back, and the absence of that fatal divorce of trousers and waistcoat.
"I was telling my husband, Lester, my manicurist just raved to-day about you and Norma Beautiful in 'The Lure of Silk.'"