It all came about in this way: We were out marketing—my better half and I—and we got mixed up with the crowd of swell people pouring into the main entrance of the opera-house, and, as we passed under the brilliantly lighted portico, my wife stopped a moment and peered in to catch the name of Melba on the billboard.
“We never go to see anything nowadays,” she said, a little regretfully, as we moved on. Then we crossed the street and joined the shopping crowd, pushing and elbowing in opposing streams on the other pavement, and presenting an entirely different appearance to the radiant throng about the opera-house. “Oh, well,” I answered, “you can’t expect literature to prosper in a year of financial panics, depreciated dollars and war scares. We must be content to just grub along.” “But I should like to hear Melba and Calve—and I’ve not been to a single Symphony this winter. Then, too, we’ve only seen one play, and that was stupid. And we couldn’t even afford to go up in the gods to see Irving or Beerbohm Tree. It’s a shame the way the speculators run the prices up for everything good!”
“Well, you saw Otis Skinner in ‘Villon the Vagabond,’ and that was a good bit of romantic acting.” “Oh, I know, but I do wish we didn’t always have to go up in the gods.” “Get more performances for your money.”
“If I could turn dramatic critic now—and, ’pon my soul, I don’t see why not! The trick’s comparatively easy. My father remembers the great Edmund Kean, and I remember what he says of him; and then there is theatrical literature in abundance.” “Oh, no; there’s no fun in seeing a play if you’ve got to go home and write about it. You know that. But there is no reason why we shouldn’t go to the opera and sit in the best seats, if you only put all your energy and lots of good things into what you call your organ of civilization. Of course it should succeed—and once the book lovers and reading public know what it really is, it must succeed.”
“And then—why, what shall we do with all our money? I can’t think how we shall spend it.”
“We shan’t get too rich in a hurry. This is the one direction in which you women have a fine sweep of imagination—but it is not so easy to make money as it is to spend it in imagination. People don’t care for simply good stuff in periodical literature, nowadays. It must intoxicate them with the odor of blood, and I can’t do that—I can’t do Jack the Giant Killer stories. I abominate anachronisms of mood in literature. Fancy an old friar writing on modern sex problems! But refined literary taste craves gore, and plenty of it, and gore is sent by the shipload from over the sea. The British make the best literary butchers—it comes natural to them to hack and chop and stab. The renaissance of blood and thunder in fiction is the wonder of our age. We cure any tendency to thinking by letting blood, just as the old surgeons did all forms of virulent disease a generation or so ago.”
“Oh, but surely, there is just a big enough public for good wit and good humor to make our venture a success—and then with a million readers we can hear Melba in the orchestra chairs.”
“A million—what an imagination you’ve got! That would be a ten-strike!”
“Well, why shouldn’t you have a ten-strike? I’m sure you deserve it.” “All moralists do—but ten-strikes do not go to the deserving. Providence does not reward virtue in this fashion.” “Then Providence should. I’m sure you ought to succeed—and I’ve made up my mind about it. We’ll do lots of things with our million. I think we’ll begin by ceasing to buy our tea where they give the crockery with it. But tonight I want a little pitcher.
“Then—just think!—I wouldn’t have to go to the butcher’s and watch the scale to see whether I get fair weight or not. I wouldn’t care—I’d order by telephone, and I’d get the very best parts of the meat instead of the good parts, and you could eat the fillet of beef all the time to build you up and make blood and brain. You must hurry up and get that million.”