candidates
to be a motion-picture star. She starred some. At the beginning she
played in romantic comedy films with woodland scenery and rustic
bridges and pools where she tickled for trout. She tickled so well
that one could almost hear the trout laugh. Later she played in
"crook" melodrama, where somebody was always peeping through the door
when the secret patent was being taken out of the office safe, and
where men always kept arriving in motor-cars and going up flights of
steps with their faces turned to the audience and going down flights
of steps with their faces turned to the audience and getting into
motor-cars again. They never missed a step. There is something about
this feat which holds a cinema audience spellbound.

Later she rode on untamed mustangs and fell over cliffs gagged and
bound, and sometimes she was even promoted to slide or twirl into a
bakehouse and tumble with a talented cast of actors and actresses into
a large trough of dough. When they had wiped the dough off they all
came back into the bakehouse one after another and tumbled into the
dough-trough again. Repetition is the soul of wit.

One day Viviana met Ignatius Vavasour, the poet. For two years he had
worshipped her afar on the screen. He had seen her in so many reels
that she made him giddy. He had seen her in _Youth's Yodelling
May-tide Hour_, length five reels, and in _Hate's Hideous Hand of
Crime_, length six reels, and in _Gertie Flips the Flap-jack over_,
length seven reels and a half. He had never heard her speak, but he
had seen her beautiful lips ripple into a thousand artless expressions
of grief and joy. He did not know whether he loved her most when she
was tripping through a silvan glade, with meadow-sweet in her hand,
or when she was gliding gracefully over Niagara Falls in a tar-barrel;
when she was cracking the door of a strong room with a jemmy or when
she was getting the dough out of her hair with a rake. But as soon as
he had seen her out of the pictures he knew that he loved her best as
she was. He knew that he could not live without her. He told her so.

"But, Mr. Vavasour," she protested.

"Call me Iggie," he cried.

"But you have only known me such a short time," she said. "You have
seen me, you say, a hundred times on the films, and I daresay you
admired me immensely, but tell me this, Iggie, Is it my real character
that you love?"

"No, no! A thousand times no!" he exclaimed.

"Then I cannot marry you," s