“We were with Looey James five years,” confided Mrs. Montague to her neighbours. “A hall show, of course--hadn’t heard of movies then--doing Virginius and Julius Caesar and such classics, and then starting out with The Two Orphans for a short season. We were a knock-out, I’ll say that. I’ll never forget the night we opened the new opera house at Akron. They had to put the orchestra under the stage.” “And the so-called art of the moving picture robs us of our little meed of applause,” broke in her husband. “I shall never forget a remark of the late Lawrence Barrett to me after a performance of Richelieu in which he had fairly outdone himself. ‘Montague, my lad,’ said he ‘we may work for the money, but we play for the applause.’ But now our finest bits must go in silence, or perhaps be interrupted by a so-called director who arrogates to himself the right to instill into us the rudiments of a profession in which we had grounded ourselves ere yet he was out of leading strings. Too often, naturally, the results are discouraging.” The unabashed girl was meantime having sprightly talk with the casting director, whom she had hailed through the window as Countess. Merton, somewhat startled, wondered if the little woman could indeed be of the nobility. “Hello, Countess! Say, listen, can you give the camera a little peek at me to-day, or at pa or ma? ‘No, nothing to-day, dear.’” She had imitated the little woman’s voice in her accustomed reply. “Well, I didn’t think there would be. I just thought I’d ask. You ain’t mad, are you? I could have gone on in a harem tank scene over at the Bigart place, but they wanted me to dress the same as a fish, and a young girl’s got to draw the line somewhere. Besides, I don’t like that Hugo over there so much. He hates to part with anything like money, and he’ll gyp you if he can. Say, I’ll bet he couldn’t play an honest game of solitaire. How’d you like my hair this way? Like it, eh? That’s good. And me having the only freckles left in all Hollywood. Ain’t I the little prairie flower, growing wilder every hour? “Say, on the level, pa needs work. These days when he’s idle he mostly sticks home and tries out new ways to make prime old Kentucky sour mash in eight hours. If he don’t quit he is going to find himself seeing some moving pictures that no one else can. And he’s all worried up about his hair going off on top, and trying new hair restorers. You know his latest? Well, he goes over to the Selig place one day and watches horse meat fed to the lions and says to himself that horses have plenty of hair, and it must be the fat under the skin that makes it grow, so he begs for a hunk of horse from just under the mane and he’s rubbing that on. You can’t tell what he’ll bring home next. The old boy still believes you can raise hair from the dead. Do you want some new stills of me? I got a new one yesterday that shows my other expression. Well, so long, Countess.” The creature turned to her parents.