We ate a dinner where the talk was all dedicated to pictures. Then as soon as it was over Mary turned to me. “I’d like you to see my new picture this evening,” she announced. “I’m awfully anxious to know what you think of it and to find out if you have any suggestions to make.” I smiled a little as I was led into the projection-room, where almost every evening the star and her husband turn on their consistent diet of amusement, for I realised that in this clever way Mary was going on with her work under cover of entertaining me. This incident is typical of the whole-souled concentration which I am trying to point out. Every night after dinner the star and her husband see some picture--either one of their own or that of somebody else. In order to accomplish this they have installed in their home a machine and, just as in the ordinary household you turn on the phonograph, one of their men servants tunes up the silver-sheet. This home, by the way, presents in its luxury a very different setting from the little room where the star first entertained me, for since her marriage to Douglas Fairbanks there has been a marked expansion in her mode of living. At eight o’clock in the morning Miss Pickford appears in the studio. It is often late in the evening when she leaves it. As to her working environment, this has been so often reproduced that I shall pass over the uproar, the glaring lights, the heat, the long waits, the monotonous repetitions of every scene--all those features which make a motion-picture day the most wearing in the world. Nor is the work less exacting when she is not engaged in actual reproduction. For, after the careful sifting of hundreds of stories, her final choice demands innumerable preliminaries of costume, lighting, directing, scenario-writing, and casting. And always, always she is thinking up bits of business for her next play. But, the reader may protest, you have given us Mary Pickford chiefly in the terms of work. Can this be all? Is it merely a captain of industry who, in the guise of the wistful, appealing, dark-eyed slip of a girl, has played upon the heart-strings of the world? Decidedly not! On the screen you can not humbug any of the people any of the time. The camera shows, as the speaking stage does not, the fundamental quality of the human soul. It has not deceived you, therefore, when you exclaim involuntarily, “Isn’t she sweet?” the minute you see Mary’s face on the screen. [Illustration: MR. GOLDWYN, DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS AND MARY PICKFORD AT THE STUDIO] [Illustration: BARBARA LA MARR Whose work in “The Eternal City” stamped her as an actress of stellar size.]