where J. Harold Armytage began to print a choice
few of the letters he daily received from admirers of the reputedly
frailer sex. She now read me one of these with lamentable efforts of
voice to satirize its wooing note: "My darling! I saw that dear face of
yours again to-night in All For Love! So noble and manly you were in the
sawmill scene where first you turn upon the scoundrelly millionaire
father of the girl you love, then save him from the dynamite bomb of the
strikers at the risk of your own. Oh, my dearest! Something tells me your
heart is as pure and sweet as your acting, that your dear face could not
mask an evil thought. Oh, my man of all the world! If only you and I
together might--"

It seemed enough. Ma Pettengill thought so too. The others were not
unlike it. The woman then read me a few of the replies of J. Harold
Armytage to his unknown worshippers. The famous star was invariably
modest and dignified in these. Tactfully, as a gentleman must in any
magazine of wide circulation, he deprecated the worship of these adoring
ones and kindly sought to persuade them that he was but a man--not a god,
even if he did chance to receive one of the largest salaries in the
business. The rogue! No god--with the glorious lines of his face there
on the cover to controvert this awkward disclaimer! His beauty flaunted
to famished hearts, what avail to protest weakly that they should put
away his image or even to hint, as now and again he was stern enough to
do, that their frankness bordered on the unmaidenly?

I called Ma Pettengill's attention to this engaging modesty. I said it
must be an affair of some delicacy to rebuff ardent and not too reticent
fair ones in a public print, and that I considered J. Harold Armytage to
have come out of it with a display of taste that could be called unusual.
The woman replied, with her occasional irrelevance, that if the parties
that hired him should read this stuff they probably wouldn't even then
take him out on the lot and have him bitterly kicked by a succession of
ten large labouring men who would take kindly to the task. She then once
more said that the movies was sure one great business, and turned in the
magazine to pleasanter pages on which one Vida Sommers, also a screen
idol, it seemed, gave warning and advice to young girls who contemplated
a moving-picture career.

Portraits of Vida Sommers in her best-known roles embellished these
pages. In all of the portraits she we