Lee did, and told her so with a growing pleasure in the rightness of her perceptions. “Peyton is altogether different from the men of the stage,” he developed her observation; “and it is a capital thing he did play football; for, in the next year or so, until he grows used to your life, he'll have a collection of men to knock down. I'd like to tell you whatever I have discovered about him, for your own consideration, and Peyton is a snob. That isn't necessarily a term of contempt; with him it simply means that he is impatient, doubtful, at what he doesn't know. And first under that head come the arts; they have no existence for him or his friends. A play or a book pleases him or it doesn't, he approves of its limiting conventional morals, or violently condemns what he thinks is looseness, and that's the extent of his interest.” Mina Raff gazed at him blankly, this time from under the scallops of the veil. “That is hard to believe,” she objected; “he talks to me beautifully about my pictures and a future on the stage. He says that I am going to revolutionize moving pictures--” “I don't question that,” he put in; “but did Peyton show you how it would be done?” She hesitated, gracefully lowering her potent gaze. “Probably,” Lee Randon added keenly, “it was to happen because you were so excessively beautiful.” There was no reply to this. “I don't need to tell you,” he admitted, “that I did my best to discourage him; and I pointed out that the time must come when you would fancy, no, need, someone else.” “Oh, that was cruel!” she cried softly; “and it isn't, it won't be true. Do you think, just because I happen to be an actress, that I can't be faithful?” “It is all a question of degree,” he instructed her, “of talent or genius. Talent may be faithful to a number of things--a man or a country or even an ideal; but the only fidelity of genius is to itself.” “I hadn't thought of that,” she reflected, sadly. “Why should you?” he demanded; “you are being natural; I am the disturbance, the conventional voice sentimentally reading from the call book. But you don't have those in moving pictures: it would be a sentimentally stupid director. You must believe me: your acting will always be incomprehensible to Peyton: he will approve of the results and raise hell--for the comparatively short time he will last--with the means. Tell me this: together with his conviction that you'd carry the stage up into heaven, didn't he speak of your retiring?” The faint smile about her lips was a sufficient answer. That smile, he recognized, pensive and unlingering, served a wide and practical variety of purposes. “In the end,” he insisted, “Peyton will want to take you to a home in a correct suburb; that conception he'll never get away from.” She answered: “And what if I liked that, wanted it? You mustn't think my life is entirely joyful.”