e. I was just about ready to go on when in rushed Goldringer,
all breathless with a cablegram in his hand.

"Its all right about Olivette Twist!" he puffed at me. "We'll begin
making that fillum Tuesday!" and he threw the message down on my
dressing table. It was signed by our London manager and it read:--

"Present location of Charles Dickens uncertain but material is
uncopyrighted, shoot."

And so immediately after the show, myself and Ma went back to New York
to get a twenty-four hour rest before commencing work again.

V

NOW IS THE TIME

I

BELIEVE you me, the world to-day is just about as settled as a green
passenger on a trip to Bermuda. There is that same awful feeling of not
knowing is something going to happen or not--do you get me? You do! And
it can't help but strike even a mere womanly woman and lady like I, that
unless the captain and officers keep a firm hand on the crew until we
get a little ballast in the hold, we are likely to get in Dutch. Not
meaning the Germans necessarily, but the Russians, or something just as
bad. And perhaps it may seem strange for me to know about them
nautchical terms, but anybody which has once been to Bermuda learns what
ballast is on account of their not having hardly any on them boats
because of the water not being deep enough, and believe you me, nothing
I had to do in the fillum we made after what was left of us arrived
there, and it was some fillum at that--$1000. for bathing costumes alone
and me as "The Sea King's Conquest" in silver scales, although hardly
knowing how to swim--was a patch on the treatment which that unballasted
boat handed me on the trip down.

Well anyways, even when sitting in the security of my flat on the Drive,
which Gawd knows it aught to be secure what with the salary I get and
moving-pictures will be the last thing the common people will give
up;--even with this security and the handsomest furniture any
installment house could provide, and every other equipment which is
necessary to one so prominent in my line as myself, still even in the
scarcity of the home, as the poet says, I am conscious that the world
is, or could quite easily be, on the blink.

And ain't it the truth? Even the simplest soul, buried in the wilds of
Broadway and wholly absorbed in their own small life must feel the
unrest. No use kidding ourselves about it. It's time for all good
Americans to quit fighting among theirselves and come to the aid of the