I do not mean for a moment to convey the idea that Miss Normand is an isolated example of tardiness. Many screen favorites heave in sight as slowly as _Lohengrin’s_ swan. This is particularly true of comedians. Chaplin, for example, often keeps his associates waiting for hours--indeed, there are entire days when he is absolutely unable to work. The fact of it is that the efficiency engineer will never be able to control a picture studio. Such an expectation is as vain as the belief that you could obtain a poet’s best work by snapping your fingers over him and crying, “Come, come, we want another sonnet and a gross of couplets before lunch.” For the best screen acting is naturally inspirational. True, some performers are able to turn on their emotional faucets at any time. Mary Pickford, as I have related, rings up early every morning. But then she is a systematised human being who presents in temperament the opposite pole from Mabel Normand. The latter is a creature of impulse. She never calculates the moment ahead for fear that the moment itself might calculate something she liked better. When she works she works hard, but she can’t do it in step with the hour-hand. Mabel has a really fine talent and she knows picture-production from every angle. But the screen does not absorb all of her amazing vitality. Eagerly she turns to people, books, gaiety, strange scenes. She does not want to miss one glint of “this dome of many-colored glass.” The difference of degree in the attitude of Mary Pickford to pictures and that of Mabel Normand is indicated by their varying response to European travel. Chaplin once said to a friend of mine, “You know, I was in Paris with Mary and Doug and often they really seemed lost without their pictures.” Far from this state of mind, so familiar in the American business man temporarily implicated with a gondola or a ruined temple, is the eagerness with which Mabel Normand returned last Autumn from her first trip abroad. “Oh, how I enjoyed every minute of it!” she told me. “Pictures, music, all the funny outdoor cafés, all the funny people!” She has always been an inveterate reader. This, of course, is at present one of the fashionable claims of the screen star, and in some cases I am obliged to say that the claim rests on very flimsy foundations. Right here, indeed, I feel compelled to anticipate by telling a story illustrative of this point: One day Charlie Chaplin went with me to a Los Angeles hospital where a friend of mine was recuperating. Left alone in the corridor, he wandered into a little sitting-room. It was filled with books representing the most advanced taste in fiction, poetry, and criticism. “Whose room is this?” asked Chaplin of the nurse hovering over the scene. Quite evidently she did not recognise him, for she replied without a vestige of embarrassment, “Oh, this belongs to Mrs. Mildred Harris Chaplin.” Charlie’s face underwent a number of changes.