The art of sound pictures (1930)

1 76 THE ART OF SOUND PICTURES chorus girls and the audience. Failing to attract her attention in this way, he leaves his seat between the acts, goes around to the stage door, and sends the girl his card with a note scribbled upon it. No results. During the second act, the boy is more excited than ever, and manages to catch the eye of the girl who is exciting him. He believes she is smiling at him. He rushes out of the theater and sends her flowers, with a note begging her to have supper with him after the show. This type of behavior goes on perhaps for several weeks, until finally the girl consents to meet him. During the entire period which intervened between his first sight of the girl and his final meeting with her, the boy’s passion for her mounted steadily and he devoted more and more of his time and attention to the task of winning her consent to see him. Throughout the progress of this affair, we see actions expressing both inducement and submission, with submission gradually increasing and replacing inducement. The girl’s control over his action, when she first attracted him, was very slight. He p>erhaps smiled at her and spoke admiringly of her beauty to his friends. But, for the most part, the boy felt in the superior position of controlling the girl. She was a performer on the stage, whose duty it was to dance and entertain him. Under these circumstances, men feel themselves superior to chorus girls, since they are actually controlling the girls’ actions much more than the girls control the behavior of the men. When, however, a man attempts to apply this general inducement superiority to a particular girl, he quickly finds that their relationships begin to be reversed. The girl becomes more and more a controlling power between them. More and more of the man’s actions are governed by his submission to the girl, and she becomes less and less subject to his commands as she realizes her own attractive power over him. Eventually, if the passionate response is carried far enough, the man is walling to throw himself and everything he has at the girl’s feet in passionate self-surrender. At this point, submission has reached its climax, and inducement has diminished almost to the vanishing point in the man’s behavior. This is the climax of passion. A. Gross Behavior I. Illustrations a. King Louis XV of France, during his first infatuation for Du Barry, devoted more and more of his time and attention to his fair inamorata. At the height of his infatuation, he is said to have neglected affairs