“But to be brutally frank, I still don’t see where we get off any better.”
“You wait.... So we sell for just one particular performance––say the 8.45 one, one night a week––season tickets. Boxes, loges, and some of the orchestra seats. And it would be like opera; if they couldn’t always come, they couldn’t return their tickets, but they could give them to somebody else. And that night we’d have special music, and––”
“Confirming today’s conversation, including brutal frankness as per statement, I still don’t see––”
“Why, you silly. It’ll be Society Night! And I don’t care whether it’s movies or opera, if you make a thing fashionable, then it gets everybody––the fashionable ones, and then the ones who want to be fashionable, and finally the ones who know they haven’t a ghost of a 172 chance, and just want to go and look at the others!”
Henry laboured with his thoughts. “Well, granted that we could herd the hill crowd in there, and all that, I still don’t––”
“Why, Henry darling! Because we’d make it Monday night––that’s our worst night in the whole week, ordinarily––and have all reserved seats that night, and then of course we’d raise the prices!”
“Oh!” said Henry. “Now I get it. I thought it was just swank.”
“And it’s true––it’s true that if you get people to thinking there’s something exclusive about a shop, or a hotel, or a club, or even a theatre, they’ll pay any amount to get in. And our friends don’t care when they come, and they’ll love all sitting together in the boxes, or even in the orchestra.”
“Who was Methuselah’s wife?” asked Henry, irrelevantly.
“Why, he had several, didn’t he?”