In manner she is perfectly simple and unaffected. Unlike many other screen actresses whom I have known, she does not act after working hours. And when she is in the studio she is always courteous and considerate. There on the set, where the soul-meter registers so true, Mary Pickford never indulges in the spasms of ego which the afflicted themselves are wont to call their temperament. Methodically as if she were Mary Jones arriving in the office for dictation, she appears on the Fairbanks lot. There is absolutely no swank about her. An illustration of the quality which has so endeared her to many other members of her profession is found in a benefit performance given last year at Hollywood. Space was limited and when the dressing-rooms were assigned no such poignant cry of outraged property rights has been uttered since the little bear whimpered, “Who’s been sitting in my chair?” “What!” cried one of the motion-picture duchesses only just recently elevated to the peerage. “Do you mean to say that I have to dress in a room with three other people?” Miss Pickford, however, whose audiences number twenty-five to this other star’s one, sat down good-humoredly in a room with several other performers. “How jolly!” said she, according to report. “This reminds me of the old days at the Biograph when I was getting twenty-five a week.” If Miss Pickford has, indeed, any vanity, it is focussed more upon her sense of being a good business woman than it is upon her ability as an actress. All of her friends realise this, and Charlie Chaplin, upon whose warm personal friendship with Douglas Fairbanks and his wife I shall dwell in a later chapter, is very fond of teasing her upon this one vulnerable point. “Where do you get this idea that you’re such a fine business woman, Mary,” Charlie asked her laughingly one evening. “Why, I am,” she retorted indignantly. “Everybody knows it.” “I can’t see it,” announced Charlie. “You have something the public wants and you get the market price for it. “And then,” recounts Charlie gleefully, “I wish you had seen Doug. He looked as if he were going to hit me.” A year or so ago I was at one of the big hotels in Hollywood with an author making his first visit to the place. He looked around at the dining-room with the faces of so many famous motion-picture folks, and then he turned to me. “I don’t see Mary and Doug,” he remarked. “Where are they?” “No,” said I, “and if you live in Hollywood for a year you’ll probably never see them--unless you go to their home.” Poor chap! If he had gone to Switzerland and been told that the Alps never came out he could not have looked more disappointed. One evening I was invited to dinner at the beautiful home of Mary and Doug in Beverly Hills. The idol of the screen, arrayed in a beautiful evening gown, met me with a manuscript in her hand. “Well, well, what are you doing?” I asked her. “Oh,” she said, “I’m working on my story.”