“Well, Miss Carberry,” he said, “I’ve brought the contracts.”
“And the advance?” Tish inquired calmly.
“And the advance. Certified check, as you requested.”
“You approve of my idea?”
“Well,” he said, “you’re right in one way. Sex has been overdone in pictures. The censors have killed it. When you’re limited to a five-foot kiss—well, you know. You can’t get it over, that’s all. We’ve had to fall back on adventure. Not even crime, at that. Would you believe it, we’ve had to change a murder scene just lately to the corpse taking an overdose of sleeping medicine by mistake. And we can’t have a woman show her figure on a chaise longue in a tea gown, while the bathing-suit people get by without any trouble. It’s criminal, that’s all. Criminal!”
“You have missed my idea,” Tish said coldly. “I wrote that picture to prove that a love interest, any love interest, is not essential to a picture.”
He agreed with what we now realize was suspicious alacrity.
“Certainly,” he said. “Certainly! After all, who pays the profits on pictures? The women, Miss Carberry. The women! Do up the dishes in a hurry—get me?—and beat it for the theater. Like to sit there and imagine themselves the heroine. And up to now we’ve never given them a heroine over seventeen years of age!”
He reflected on this, almost tearfully.
“Well,” he said, “that’s over now. There are twenty-nine million women over forty in America to-day, and every one will see this picture. That is, if we do it.”