adful
buffooneries. One subtitle read: "I hate to kill him--murder is so hard
to explain."

This sort of thing, he felt more than ever, degraded an art where
earnest people were suffering and sacrificing in order to give the
public something better and finer. Had he not, himself, that very day,
completed a perilous ordeal of suffering and sacrifice? And he was asked
to laugh at a cross--eyed man posing before a camera that fell to pieces
when the lens was exposed, shattered, presumably, by the impact of the
afflicted creature's image! This, surely, was not art such as Clifford
Armytage was rapidly fitting himself, by trial and hardship, to confer
upon the public.

It was with curiously conflicting emotions that he watched the ensuing
Hazards of Hortense. He had to remind himself that the slim little
girl with the wistful eyes was not only not performing certain feats of
daring that the film exposed, but that she was Mrs. Sigmund Rosenblatt
and crazy about her husband. Yet the magic had not wholly departed from
this wronged heroine. He thought perhaps this might be because he now
knew, and actually liked, that talkative Montague girl who would be
doing the choice bits of this drama. Certainly he was loyal to the hand
that fed him.

Black Steve and his base crew, hirelings of the scoundrelly guardian who
was "a Power in Wall Street," again and again seemed to have encompassed
the ruin, body and soul, of the persecuted Hortense. They had her
prisoner in a foul den of Chinatown, whence she escaped to balance
precariously upon the narrow cornice of a skyscraper, hundreds of
feet above a crowded thoroughfare. They had her, as the screen said,
"Depressed by the Grim Menace of Tragedy that Impended in the Shadows."
They gave her a brief respite in one of those gilded resorts "Where the
Clink of Coin Opens Wide the Portals of Pleasure, Where Wealth Beckons
with Golden Fingers," but this was only a trap for the unsuspecting
girl, who was presently, sewed in a plain sack, tossed from the stern
of an ocean liner far out at sea by creatures who would do anything for
money--who, so it was said, were Remorseless in the Mad Pursuit of Gain.

At certain gripping moments it became apparent to one of the audience
that Mrs. Sigmund Rosenblatt herself was no longer in jeopardy. He knew
the girl who was, and profoundly admired her artistry as she fled along
the narrow cornice of the skyscraper. For all purposes she was Beulah
Baxter. He