are like music," he declared. "They speak a universal
language. Great industry--just in its infancy--before long films will
pass from one country to another--internationalism. Why not? Love, hate,
grief, ambition, laughter--they belong to one race as much as
another--all peoples understand them. It's hard to hate people after you
know them. Pictures will let us know each other. They'll break down the
hard national lines that now make for war and suspicion."

Other things followed, for we discussed everything from cabbages to
kings, and then I plumped the question at him that I had been waiting to
ask from the first.

"How do you like the movies as compared to the speaking drama? Come now,
cross your heart and hope to die. When the night comes down and the
lights go up, isn't there a blue minute now and then?"

"Surest thing you know," he grinned. "It isn't because there's such a
radical difference between the 'talkies' and the movies, however." [He
refers to musical comedy as the "screamies."] "The play in the theatre
is largely a matter of pantomime, you know. Dialogue is employed to
advance the actual plot only when it is impossible or impracticable to
do it with dumb show. And when I think of some of the lines I've been
called upon to spout, I can't say that I regret the movies' lack of
dialogue.

"What does hurt, though," he admitted, "is the absence of response. I
don't mean applause, but the something that comes up over the footlights
to you from the audience, the big something that tells you instantly
whether you have hit it or missed, whether you are ringing true or
false. You don't get that in the pictures. Your audience is the
director, and you know that it will be weeks or months before your work
is going to get its test.

"But in everything else, the movie has the talkie skinned a mile.
Instead of mouthing somebody else's words, you are doing the thing
yourself. There's action, and life--one day you are in the forest, the
next in the desert, the next on the sea."

"Nonsense!" I exclaimed. "I understand that it's all done in a studio."

"I had the idea myself," he laughed. "But no more. When I was in the
'talkies,' I used to hear a lot about realism. Father must wash in a
real basin with real water and real soap. There had to be two hens at
least in every barnyard scene, and when Lottie came home from the cruel
city, she had to have a real baby in her arms. Lordy, I never knew what
realism was until