dramatic work. The trouble is, Pete, that girl always does as
she darn pleases! If I put her opposite Lee in a scene and tell her to
act like she is in love with him, and that he's to kiss her and she's
to kiss back,--" he flung out his hands expressively. "You must know
the rest, as well as I do. She'd turn around and give me a call-down,
and get on her horse and ride off; and I and my picture could go to
thunder, for all of her. That's the point; she ain't been through the
mill. She don't know anything about taking orders--from me or anybody
else." It is a pity that Lite did not hear that! He might have amended
the statement a little. Jean had been taking orders enough; she knew a
great deal about receiving ultimatums. The trouble was that she seldom
paid any attention to them. Lite was accustomed to that, but Robert
Grant Burns was not, and it irked him sore.

"Well, she's sure got the screen personality," Pete defended. "I've
said it all along. That girl don't have to act. Put her in the part,
and she is the part! She's got something better than technique, Burns.
She's got imagination. She puts herself in a character and lives it."

"Put her on a horse and she does," Burns conceded gloomily. "But will
you tell me what kind of work she'll make of interior scenes, and love
scenes, and all that? You've got to have it, to pad out your story.
You can't let your leading character do a whole two--or three-reel
picture on horseback. There wouldn't be any contrast. Dewitt don't
know that girl the way I do. If he'd had to side-step and scheme and
give in the way I've done to keep her working, he wouldn't put her
playing straight leads, not until she'd had a year or two of training--"

"Taming is a better word," Pete suggested drily. "There'll be fun when
she gets to playing love scenes opposite Lee. You better let him take
the heavies, and put Gil in for leads, Burns."

Robert Grant Burns was so cast down by the prospect that he made no
attempt to reply, beyond grunting something about preferring to drive a
team of balky mules to making Jean do something she did not want to do.
But, such is the mind trained to a profession, insensibly he drifted
away into the world of his imagination, and began to draw therefrom the
first tenuous threads of a plot wherein Jean's peculiar accomplishments
were to be featured. Robert Grant Burns had long ago learned to adjust
himself to circumstances which in themselves we