This photograph, it should be said, was taken some time ago.] [Illustration: THEDA BARA Original screen vampire, now retired as the wife of Charles Brabin] When she arrived in Hollywood she didn’t know, of course, a single thing about making a film. “What,” she exclaimed on her first day, “why, I didn’t realize you had to make a single scene over four times.” This freshness of view-point placed her in a situation ideal for observation of the mental eagerness of which I have spoken. She asked questions of everybody in the studio from De Mille to “Grips.” It was wonderful to see the zest of her application to this new task, to watch that perfect implement of a brain cut and thresh and assort its selected subject. There is no doubt about it. Geraldine Farrar enjoyed every minute of those first eight weeks spent in the movies. She loved the atmosphere of the motion-pictures. She liked the people in the cast. She told me she thought De Mille was great. I can hardly express what this wide area of satisfaction meant to me after eighteen months that had been instructive chiefly in the hardship of pleasing any star, at any given point. So eager was Miss Farrar for her film day to begin that she used to arrive at the studio every morning at eight o’clock. She was then all made up for the set, and as this process is so much more exacting than the average woman’s dab of powder and rouge, one knew she had risen not later than six. “H’m, where’s Mr. de Mille? Where’s everybody?” she used to ask. Her manner was exactly that of a war-horse sniffing, “Here am I. Where’s the war?” And when she began to work nothing seemed to tire her. At four o’clock in the afternoon, that hour when the average screen performer begins to wonder if she’ll melt before she takes root or take root before she melts, the great prima donna was as radiant with energy as she was at eight o’clock in the morning. The explanation of this sustained vitality lay deeper than her undoubted physical strength. She herself voiced it one day during her second engagement with the Lasky Company. She was then making “Joan the Woman.” It was during the most intense heat of the California Summer. During this particular set she wore a suit of armor which must have been about as soothing to her feelings as wrist-warmers to a resident of Bombay. The set, which had been called for one hour, was not actually taken until more than four hours’ later. This wait, so characteristic of a studio day, was rendered more oppressive by the thud of adjacent carpentry work and by experimentation with the glaring electric lights.