The foreign author thereupon set himself to a less fanciful theme. This time he submitted a love-story, but alas! the type was anything but censor-proof. When we called his attention to this flaw he looked at us with a pained, bewildered, almost shocked expression. “You ask me to write a love-story,” he remonstrated, “and then you object because my hero or my heroine is married. Yet how can you write about love when you have no triangle?” And I don’t think we were ever quite successful in shaking him from this Continental orthodoxy. I dare say he will always think of two parallel lines as exceedingly provincial. While he was in Hollywood M. Maeterlinck had a home with a tennis-court in the rear. To this court clings one of the most cherished memories of Hollywood, for on it frequently appeared Mme. Maeterlinck, and on Mme. Maeterlinck always appeared, not a skirt, but bloomers. She is a charming little dark thing, years younger than her husband, this Mme. Maeterlinck. The pair seemed always very happy together, but one day I heard something which opened up an inevitable vista before me. On that day the American manager of the foreign author came to Mr. Lehr and asked him if there was not some employment in the studio for Mme. Maeterlinck. “Why, no,” responded Mr. Lehr; “I can’t think of a thing she would do.” “Not some little job?--it really doesn’t matter how small,” urged the other. “But, my dear fellow, why should the wife of M. Maeterlinck be wanting any kind of a job?” questioned my associate, still untouched by this new plea for Belgian relief. “Her husband is far from poor, you know. Hasn’t he an estate and investments abroad--those and all the royalties he is getting? Besides, of course, he have given him an advance on his contract with us.” The manager shrugged and then he smiled--a sapient smile. “To be sure. But madame--well, there are times perhaps when she longs for a little money of her own so she can snap her fingers at Monsieur.” This dialogue, taken in connection with other phases of my association with Maeterlinck, persuades me that this creator of reverent prose and mystic drama is afflicted with the same economic fixation--I borrow the term from psychoanalysis--which manifests itself so often among those whom some art has enriched. Screen stars and actresses, comedians and tragedians, singers and writers--often in thinking over those whom I have met I have been struck by the number who would be capable of instructing Benjamin Franklin in the ways of thrift. I remember that once I asked a man who had long been associated with Ben Turpin, the widely known cross-eyed comedian, what sort of chap Turpin really was.