wished, with a quite
seemly curiosity, to view his own acting on the screen. It occurred to
him that he had been acting a long time without a glimpse of himself.
But Baird had been singularly firm in this matter, and the Montague girl
had sided with him. It was best, they said, for a beginning actor not
to see himself at first. It might affect his method before this had
crystallized; make them self-conscious, artificial.

He was obliged to believe that these well-wishers of his knew best. He
must not, then, trifle with a screen success that seemed assured. He
tried to be content with this decision. But always the misgivings would
return. He would not be really content until he had watched his own
triumph. Soon this would be so securely his privilege that not even
Baird could deny it, for the first piece in which he had worked was
about to be shown. He looked forward to that.

It was toward the end of the picture that his intimacy with the Montague
girl grew to a point where, returning from location to the studio late,
they would dine together. "Hurry and get ungreased, Son," she would
say, "and you can take an actress out to dinner." Sometimes they
would patronize the cafeteria on the lot, but oftener, in a spirit of
adventure, they would search out exotic restaurants. A picture might
follow, after which by street-car he would escort her to the Montague
home in a remote, flat region of palm-lined avenues sparsely set with
new bungalows.

She would disquiet him at these times by insisting that she pay her
share of the expense, and she proved to have no mean talent for petty
finance, for she remembered every item down to the street-car fares.
Even to Merton Gill she seemed very much a child once she stepped from
the domain of her trade. She would stare into shop windows wonderingly,
and never failed to evince the most childish delight when they ventured
to dine at an establishment other than a cafeteria.

At times when they waited for a car after these dissipations he suffered
a not unpleasant alarm at sight of a large-worded advertisement along
the back of a bench on which they would sit. "You furnish the Girl,
We furnish the House," screamed the bench to him above the name of an
enterprising tradesman that came in time to bite itself deeply into his
memory.

Of course it would be absurd, but stranger things, he thought, had
happened. He wondered if the girl was as afraid of him as of other men.
She seemed not to b