As Brainard took her in his arms she threw back her head, and, holding him away, said:
“And you’ll have to take the Melody mine along with Melody. I said I’d make you keep the old thing!”
XIX
“And what shall we do with the theater?” Brainard asked, in a lucid interval, early in June. “Shall we sell it to Einstein & Flukeheimer for vaudeville? Or shall we keep it for a certain American actress when she wearies of matrimony? Or shall we try to put new life into the great Idea, and keep on giving the dear Public what bores it, because it’s good for the dear Public to be bored?”
“I never thought much of your great Idea,” Melody confessed candidly. “The trouble with it is that it doesn’t do any good to give people what they aren’t willing to work for. You’ve got to earn your bread, so to speak, in order to digest it properly. The Public’s got to want good plays and good acting enough to pay the proper price for ’em. You can’t get people interested in an art they don’t understand and don’t want enough to work for. Let ’em give themselves the best they can understand and like until they kick for better!”
“That even I have begun to comprehend, O Minerva and Melody in one! Still, there are exceptions to your philosophical principle—for example, yourself, goddess, and me, who digest with an excellent appetite our heaven-sent cake.”
“Didn’t you earn it—and me? As few men ever earned the love they take! And I reckon I earned you, too.”
There followed an unlucid interval.
“But what, then,” Brainard resumed, after the interval, “shall we do with one large, commodious theater building; also one great Idea with a hole punched in it, through which the gas has escaped?”
“I’ve been thinking of that problem, too. We might turn it into a coöperative company, and let the players own it and run it to suit themselves.”