pt. In some the tears were visible;
in others they had to be guessed, the face being drawn by anguish. Her
feminine correspondents wished particularly to be told of the snares
and temptations besetting the path of the young girl who enters this
perilous career. Many of them seemed rather vague except upon this point.
They all seemed to be sure that snares and temptations would await them,
and would Vida Sommers please say how these could be avoided by young and
impressionable girls of good figure and appearance who were now waiting
on table at the American House in Centralia, Illinois, or accepting
temporary employment in mercantile establishments in Chicago, or merely
living at home in Zanesville, Ohio, amid conditions unbearably cramping
to their aspirations?

And Vida Sommers told every one of them not to consider the pictures but
as a final refuge from penury. She warned them that they would find the
life one of hard work and full of disappointments. It seemed that even
the snares and temptations were disappointing, being more easily evaded
than many of her correspondents appeared to suspect. She advised them all
to marry some good, true man and make a home for him. And surely none of
them could have believed the life to be a joyous one after studying these
sorrowful portraits of Vida Sommers.

"That's my little actress friend," said Ma Pettengill. "Doesn't she cry
something grand!"

"You've been cheating me," I answered. "I never knew you had a little
actress friend. How did you get her? And doesn't she ever play anything
cheerful?"

"Of course not! She only plays mothers, and you know what that means in
moving pictures. Ever see a moving-picture mother that had a chance to be
happy for more than the first ten feet of film? You certainly got to cry
to hold down that job. Ain't she always jolted quick in the first reel by
the husband getting all ruined up in Wall Street, or the child getting
stole, or the daughter that's just budding into womanhood running off
with a polished shoe-drummer with city ways, or the only son robbing a
bank, or husband taking up with a lady adventuress that lives across the
hall in the same flat and outdresses mother?

"Then it's one jolt after another for her till the last ten feet of the
last reel, when everything comes right somewhere on a ranch out in the
great clean West where husband or son has got to be a man again by
mingling with the honest-hearted drunken cowboys in their b