ter face. I
believe we could manage her all right, for what little she would have
to do, don't you?"

Jean having poured out her inspiration with a fluency born of her first
enthusiasm, began to feel that she had been somewhat presumptuous in
thus offering advice wholesale to the highest paid director of the
Great Western Film Company. She blushed and laughed a little, and
shrugged her shoulders.

"That's just a suggestion," she said with forced lightness. "I'm
subject to attacks of acute imagination, sometimes. Don't mind me, Mr.
Burns. Your scenario is a very nice scenario, I'm sure. Do you want
me to be a braid-down-the-back girl in this? Or a
curls-around-the-face girl?"

Robert Grant Burns stood absent-mindedly tapping his left palm with the
folded scenario which Jean had just damned by calling it a very nice
scenario. Nice was not the adjective one would apply to it in sincere
admiration. Robert Grant Burns himself had mentally called it a
hummer. He did not reply to Jean's tentative apology for her own
plot-idea. He was thinking about the idea itself.

Robert Grant Burns was not what one would call petty. He would not,
for instance, stick to his own story if he considered that Jean's was a
better one. And, after all, Jean was now his leading woman, and it is
not unusual for a leading woman to manufacture her own plots,
especially when she is being featured by her company. There was no
question of hurt pride to be debated within the mind of him, therefore.
He was just weighing the idea itself for what it was worth.

"Seems to me your plot-idea isn't so much tamer than mine, after all."
He tested her shrewdly after a prolonged pause. "You've got a killing
in the first five hundred feet, and outlaws and rustling--"

"Oh, but don't you see, it isn't the skeleton that makes the
difference; it's the kind of meat you put on the bones! Paradise Lost
would be a howling melodrama, if some of you picture-people tried to
make it. You'd take this plot of mine and make it just like these
pictures I've been working in, Mr. Burns: Exciting and all that, but
not the real West after all; spectacular without being probable. What
I mean,--I can't explain it to you, I'm afraid; but I have it in my
head." She looked at him with that lightening of the eyes which was not
a smile, really, but rather the amusement which might grow into
laughter later on.

"You'd better fine me for insubordination," she drawled wh