So the next morning I took her out to this moving-picture joint that they call a studio--not a bit like Metta Bigler's studio in Red Gap--and sure enough here's the grouch ready to put Vida on a job. The job is in a room about ninety feet long filled with boxes and sewing machines and shelves full of costumes, and Vida is to be assistant wardrobe mistress. Yes, sir; a regular title for the job. And the pay is twenty-five a week, which is thirteen more than she'd ever dreamed of making before. The grouch is very decent to her and tells everybody she's a friend of his, and they all pay polite attention to him because he's someone important in the works. It seems he's a director. He stands round and yells at the actors how to act, which I had always supposed they knew already but it seems not. Anyway, I left Vida there to get on to her new duties. She was full of good reports that night about how well she'd got along, and how interesting the work was, and how she'd helped doctor up another boy. She said he was one of the world's greatest actors, because if they give him four or five stiff drinks first he would fall off a forty-foot cliff backwards into the ocean. She'd helped bandage a sprained wrist for him that he got by jumping out of a second-story window in a gripping drama replete with punch and not landing quite right. I said to myself it must be a crazy joint and she'd soon give up and let me get her a nice little place on the edge of town that I'd already looked over. So I let her go three days more, but still she stuck there with great enthusiasm. Then I had to be leaving for home, so the afternoon of the fourth day I went out to see for myself how things looked. Vida is tickled to see me and takes me right in where they're beginning to act a gripping feature production. Old Bill Grouch is there in front of a three-legged camera barking at the actors that are waiting round in their disguises--with more paint on 'em than even a young girl will use if her mother don't watch her. The grouch is very polite to Vida and me and shows us where to stand so we won't get knocked over by other actors that are carrying round furniture and electric light stands and things. They got a parlour in a humble home where the first scene is to be. There's a mother and a fair-haired boy of twenty and a cop that's come to pinch him for a crime. The play at this point is that the mother has to plead with the cop not to drag her boy off to a prison cell, and she has to do it with streaming eyes. It was darned interesting. The boy is standing with bowed head and the cop is looking sympathetic but firm, and mother is putting something into her eyes out of a medicine dropper. I whisper to Vida and she says it's glycerine for the tears. She holds her head back when she puts 'em in and they run down her cheeks very lifelike when she straightens up.