Page:The haunted bookshop.djvu/132

 glorious, rare, receptive mood when they are clay in the artist's hand—and Lord! what miserable substitutes for joy and sorrow are put over on them! Day after day I see people streaming into theatres and movies, and I know that more than half the time they are on a blind quest, thinking they are satisfied when in truth they are fed on paltry husks. And the sad part about it is that if you let yourself think you are satisfied with husks, you'll have no appetite left for the real grain."

Titania wondered, a little panic-stricken, whether she had been permitting herself to be satisfied with husks. She remembered how greatly she had enjoyed a Dorothy Gish film a few evenings before. "But," she ventured, "you said people want to be amused. And if they laugh and look happy, surely they're amused?"

"They only think they are!" cried Mifflin. "They think they're amused because they don't know what real amusement is! Laughter and prayer are the two noblest habits of man; they mark us off from the brutes. To laugh at cheap jests is as base as to pray to cheap gods. To laugh at Fatty Arbuckle is to degrade the human spirit."

Titania thought she was getting in rather deep, but she had the tenacious logic of every healthy girl. She said: