n't ask her. He told her.

Vida is kind of took off her feet, but mumbles "Yes, sir!" and puts his
card in her bag. Me? I was too mad to talk, seeing the girl get into the
mill again when I'd tried so hard to get her out. But I swore to myself
I'd stick round and try to get some sense into the cup-custard she called
her brain.

So the next morning I took her out to this moving-picture joint that they
call a studio--not a bit like Metta Bigler's studio in Red Gap--and sure
enough here's the grouch ready to put Vida on a job. The job is in a room
about ninety feet long filled with boxes and sewing machines and shelves
full of costumes, and Vida is to be assistant wardrobe mistress. Yes,
sir; a regular title for the job. And the pay is twenty-five a week,
which is thirteen more than she'd ever dreamed of making before. The
grouch is very decent to her and tells everybody she's a friend of his,
and they all pay polite attention to him because he's someone important
in the works. It seems he's a director. He stands round and yells at the
actors how to act, which I had always supposed they knew already but it
seems not. Anyway, I left Vida there to get on to her new duties.

She was full of good reports that night about how well she'd got along,
and how interesting the work was, and how she'd helped doctor up another
boy. She said he was one of the world's greatest actors, because if they
give him four or five stiff drinks first he would fall off a forty-foot
cliff backwards into the ocean. She'd helped bandage a sprained wrist for
him that he got by jumping out of a second-story window in a gripping
drama replete with punch and not landing quite right.

I said to myself it must be a crazy joint and she'd soon give up and
let me get her a nice little place on the edge of town that I'd already
looked over. So I let her go three days more, but still she stuck
there with great enthusiasm. Then I had to be leaving for home, so the
afternoon of the fourth day I went out to see for myself how things
looked.

Vida is tickled to see me and takes me right in where they're beginning
to act a gripping feature production. Old Bill Grouch is there in front
of a three-legged camera barking at the actors that are waiting round
in their disguises--with more paint on 'em than even a young girl will
use if her mother don't watch her. The grouch is very polite to Vida and
me and shows us where to stand so we won't get knocked over by other