en," Nancy mused, "if it's
masquerading as self-respecting and self-supporting. I--I've never
approved of things like that."

"Why quarrel with a scheme so beneficent?"

"Don't you care?" Nancy asked with a catch in her voice that was very
like an appeal.

He shook his head.

"Why should I?" he smiled.

"Then I don't care, either," she decided with an emphasis that was
entirely lost on the man on the other side of the table.

CHAPTER VII

CAVE-MAN STUFF

"Cave-man stuff," Billy said to Dick, pointing a thumb over his
shoulder toward the interior of the Broadway moving-picture palace at
the exit of which they had just met accidentally. "It always goes big,
doesn't it?"

"It does," Dick agreed thoughtfully, "in the movies anyhow."

"Caroline says that the modern woman has her response to that kind of
thing refined all out of her." Billy intended his tone to be entirely
jocular, but there was a note of anxiety in it that was not lost on
his friend.

Dick paused under the shelter of a lurid poster--displaying a fierce
gentleman in crude blue, showing all his teeth, and in the act of
strangling an early Victorian ingenue with a dimple,--and lit a
cigarette with his first match.

"Caroline may have," he said, puffing to keep his light against the
breeze, "but I doubt it."

"Rough stuff doesn't seem to appeal to her," Billy said, quite
humorously this time.

"She's healthy," Dick mused, "rides horseback, plays tennis and all
that. Wouldn't she have liked the guy that swung himself on the roof
between the two poles?" He indicated again the direction of the
theater from which they had just emerged.

"She would have liked him," Billy said gloomily, "but the show
would have started her arguing about this whole moving-picture
proposition,--its crudity, and its tremendous sacrifice of artistic
values, and so on and so on."

"Sure, she's a highbrow. Highbrows always cerebrate about the movies
in one way or another. Nancy doesn't get it at just that angle, of
course. She hasn't got Caroline's intellectual appetite. She's not
interested in the movies because she hasn't got a moving-picture house
of her own. The world is not Nancy's oyster--it's her lump of putty."

"I don't know which is the worst," Billy said. "Caroline won't listen
to anything you say to her,--but then neither will Nancy."

"Women never listen to anything," Dick said profoundly, "unless
they're doing it on purpose, or they happen to