he would get paid seventy-five dollars a week. A week, mind
you, to a girl that had been thinking herself lucky to get twelve in New
York.

She was very let down and happy, and cried a little bit out of working
hours for me because it was all so wonderful, and her drowned boy might
be resting on some river bottom at that very moment. I said it was a safe
bet he was resting, wherever he was; but she didn't get it and I didn't
say it twice.

And such was the beginning of Vida Sommers' glittering sob career in
the movies. She's never had but one failure and they turned that into a
success. It seems they tried her in one of these "Should a Wife Forgive?"
pieces in which the wife did not forgive, for a wonder, and she made a
horrible mess of it. She was fine in the suffering part, of course, only
when it come to not forgiving at the end--well, she just didn't know how
to not forgive. They worked with her one whole day, then had to change
the ending. She's said to be very noble and womanly in it.

I went home next day, leaving her in pursuit of her art. But I got
glowing letters from her about every week, she doing new pictures and her
salary jumping because other film parties was naturally after so good
a weeper. And the next year I run down to see her. She was a changed
woman all right. She had a home or bungalow, a car, a fashionable dog, a
Jap cook, a maid and real gowns for the first time in her life. But the
changes was all outside. She was still the same Vida that wanted to
mother every male human on earth. She never seemed to worry about girls
and women; her idea is that they're able to look out for themselves, but
that men are babies needing a mother's protection as long as they live.

And of course one of these men she had mothered down there had took a
base advantage of her--this same ugly old grouch of a director. She
locked the bedroom door and told me about it in horrified whispers the
first night I got there. She said it might of been her fault, that he
might of misunderstood something she had said about Clyde. And anyway
she'd ought to of remembered that some men are beasts at heart.

Anyway, this infamous brute had come to the house one night and insulted
her in the grossest manner, and it was all true about moving-picture
directors having designs on unprotected females that work for 'em.
Yielding to his lowest brute instincts he had thrown decency to the winds
and made her such an evil proposition that s