“And so the old trouper had to start out Monday morning to peddle the brush. Took him three days to land anything at all, and then it’s nothing but a sleeping souse in a Western bar-room scene. In here now he is--something the Acme people are doing. He’s had three days, just lying down with his back against a barrel sleeping. He’s not to wake up even when the fight starts, but sleep right on through it, which they say will be a good gag. Well, maybe. But it’s tough on his home. He gets all his rest daytimes and keeps us restless all night making a new kind of beer and tending his still, and so on. You bet Ma and I, the minute he’s through with this piece, are going pronto to get that face of his as naked as the day he was born. Pa’s so temperamental--like that time he was playing a Bishop and never touched a drop for five weeks, and in bed every night at nine-thirty. Me? Oh, I’m having a bit of my own in this Acme piece--God’s Great Outdoors, I think it is--anyway, I’m to be a little blonde hussy in the bar-room, sitting on the miners’ knees and all like that, so they’ll order more drinks. It certainly takes all kinds of art to make an artist. And next week I got some shipwreck stuff for Baxter, and me with bronchial pneumonia right this minute, and hating tank stuff, anyway. Well, Countess, don’t take any counterfeit money. So long.” She danced through a doorway and was gone--she was one who seldom descended to plain walking. She would manage a dance step even in the short distance from the casting--office door to the window. It was not of such material, Merton Gill was sure, that creative artists were moulded. And there was no question now of his own utter seriousness. The situation hourly grew more desperate. For a week he had foregone the drug-store pie, so that now he recalled it as very wonderful pie indeed, but he dared no longer indulge in this luxury. An occasional small bag of candy and as much sugar as he could juggle into his coffee must satisfy his craving for sweets. Stoically he awaited the end--some end. The moving-picture business seemed to be still on the rocks, but things must take a turn. He went over the talk of the Montague girl. Her father had perhaps been unfairly treated, but at least he was working again. And there were other actors who would go unshaven for even a sleeping part in the bar-room scene of God’s Great Outdoors. Merton Gill knew one, and rubbed his shaven chin. He thought, too, of the girl’s warning about counterfeit money. He had not known that the casting director’s duties required her to handle money, but probably he had overlooked this item in her routine. And was counterfeit money about? He drew out his own remaining bill and scrutinized it anxiously. It seemed to be genuine. He hoped it was, for Mrs. Patterson’s sake, and was relieved when she accepted it without question that night.