arroom
frolics, or where daughter has won back her womanhood and made a name for
herself by dancing the Nature dance in the Red Eye Saloon for rough but
tender-hearted miners that shower their gold on her when stewed. Only, in
this glad time of the last ten feet she still has to cry a-plenty because
the clouds have passed and she's Oh, so happy at last! Yes, sir; they
get mother going and coming. And when she ain't weeping she has to be
scared or mad or something that keeps her face busy. Here--I got some
programmes of new pieces Vida just sent me. You can see she's a great
actress; look at that one: 'Why Did You Make My Mamma Cry?' And these
other two."

I looked and believed. The dramas were variously and pithily described
as The Picture with the Punch Powerful--The Smashing Five-Reel
Masterpiece--A Play of Peculiar Problems and Tense Situations--Six
Gripping Reels, 7,000 Feet and Every Foot a Punch! Vida Sommers, in
the scenes reproduced from these plays, had indeed a busy face. In the
picture captioned "Why Did You Make My Mamma Cry?" the tiny golden-haired
girl is reproaching her father in evening dress. I read the opening lines
of the synopsis: "A young business man, who has been made successful
through his wife's money, is led to neglect her through pressure of
affairs, falls into the toils of a dancer in a public place and becomes
a victim of her habit, that of drinking perfume in her tea--"

But I had not the heart to follow this tragedy. In another, "The Woman
Pays--Powerful and Picturesque, a Virile Masterpiece of Red-Blooded
Hearts," Vida Sommers is powerfully hating her husband whom she has
confronted in the den of a sneering and superbly gowned adventuress
who declares that the husband must choose between them. Of course there
can be no doubt about the husband's choice. No sane movie actor would
hesitate a second. The caption says of Vida Sommers: "Her Love Has Turned
to Hate." It may be good acting, but it would never get her chosen by the
male of her species--the adventuress being what is known in some circles
as a pippin.

I studied still another of these documents--"Hearts Asunder." Vida
Sommers has sent her beautiful daughter to the spring for a pail of
water, though everyone in the audience must know that Gordon Balch, the
detestable villain, is lurking outside for precisely this to occur. The
synopsis beautiful says: "The mother now goes in search of her darling,
only to find her struggling in th