"What's amusing you, Kate?" her hostess enquired, coming in with her hair over her shoulders and her Cambridge accent.
"Nothing, Anne," replied Kitty, after a meditative pause, "that I can possibly ever tell you. Merely my own low thoughts. They always were low, as you'll remember."
This chapter, as will by this time have been observed, deals with the simple human emotions, their development and growth. But it will not be necessary to enter into tedious detail concerning them. They did develop; they did grow; and to indicate this it will only be necessary to select a few outstanding scenes of different dates.
On September 2nd, which was the Thursday after the week-end above described, Kitty dined with Chester, and afterwards they went to a picture palace to see "The Secret of Success," one of their own propaganda dramas. It had been composed by the bright spirits in the Propaganda Department of the Ministry, and was filmed and produced at government expense. The cinematograph, the stage, and the Press were now used extensively as organs to express governmental points of view; after all, if you have to have such things, why not make them useful? Chester smiled sourly over it, but acquiesced. The chief of such organs were of course the new State Theatre (anticipated with such hope by earnest drama-lovers for so many years) and the various State cinemas, and the _Hidden Hand_, the government daily paper; but even over the unofficial stage and film the shadow of the State lay black.
The Secret of Success depicted lurid episodes in the careers of two young men; the contrast was not, as in other drama, between virtue and vice, but between Intelligence and the Reverse. Everywhere Intelligence triumphed, and the Reverse was shamed and defeated. Intelligence found the hidden treasure, covered itself with glory, emerged triumphant from yawning chasms, flaming buildings, and the most suspicious situations, rose from obscure beginnings to titles, honours and position, and finally won the love of a pure and wealthy girl, who jilted the brainless youth of her own social rank to whom she had previously engaged herself but who had, in every encounter of wits with his intelligent rival, proved himself of no account, and who was finally revealed in a convict's cell, landed there by his conspicuous lack of his rival's skill in disengaging himself from compromising situations. Intelligence, with his bride on his arm, visited him in his cell, and gazed on him with a pitying shake of the head, observing, "But for the Government Mind Training Course, I might be in your shoes to-day." Finally, their two faces were thrown on the screen, immense and remarkable, the one wearing over his ethereal eyes the bar of Michael Angelo, the other with a foolish, vacant eye and a rabbit mouth that was ever agape.
