Page:Morley--Travels in Philadelphia.djvu/61

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MAROONED IN PHILADELPHIA
47

against) and consume sausages and griddle cakes and hot mince pie and revel in the warm human glitter round about, is as near a modest 100 per cent of interesting satisfaction as anything we know. Joyce Kilmer, a very human poet and a very stout eater, used to believe that abundant meals were a satisfactory substitute for sleep. For our own part, we are always ready to postpone bed if there is any prospect of something to eat. But we do not like to elaborate this subject any further, for it makes us hungry to do so, and we dare not leave the typewriter just yet.

Our marooned business man, after a stroll along the streets and a meal at the lunch room, may very likely drop in at the movies. Most of us nowadays worship now and then at this shrine of Professor Muybridge. The public is long suffering, and seems fairly well pleased at almost anything that appears on the screen. But the extraordinary thing at a movie is hardly ever what is on the screen, but rather the audience itself. Observe the mute, expectant, almost reverent attention. The darkened house crowded with people prayerfully and humbly anxious to be amused or thrilled! One wonders what their evenings must have been like when there were no movies if their present reaction is so passionately devout. A movie audience is a more moving spectacle than any of the flashing shadows that beam before it. If all this marvelous attention-energy, gathered every evening in every city in the land, could be focussed for a