Thereafter the innocent child grows like (and actually inside) a rosebud till, as the petals fall off, she is revealed as a buxom young woman—the familiar photographic trick of showing one thing _through_ another being here turned to something like poetic advantage. But then the film again bolts with the theme. There is running water and a boat, things which no film can resist. Away go the girl and her sweetheart on a river excursion, loosening the painter, jumping in, shoving off, performing, in short, every antic which in photography can be compassed with a stream and a boat. We have forgotten all about the prodigal wife. But here she is again, her hair in grey _bandeaux_ and her lips, as the relentless camera shows you at short range, rouged with a hard outline. She has returned to her old home as the family nurse. For there is now another innocent babe, the doctor’s grandchild, to wax and wane with the advancing and receding camera, and to have its little “nightie” blown realistically by the usual wind as it stands on the stair-head. The doctor himself is as busy as ever, making wonderful pharmacological discoveries (newspaper extracts exhibited on the screen) in a laboratory blouse and dictating the results (notes shown on the screen) to an enterprising reporter. And here there is another “rushed” elopement. “The art of drama,” said Dumas, “is the art of preparations.” But nothing has prepared us (save, perhaps, heredity) for the sudden freak of the prodigal wife’s daughter in running away with a lover so vague that you see only his hat (another hideous straw—_il ne manquait que ca_!) and the glow of his cigarette-end. Family nurse to the rescue! Tender expostulations, reminders about the innocent babe, and nick-of-time salvation of the “intending” runaway. Ultimate meeting of nurse and doctor; he is all forgiveness, but prodigal wives are not to be forgiven like that. No, she must go out into the snow, and you see her walking down the long path, dwindling, dwindling, from a full-sized nurse into a Euclidean point. To sum up. The camera would do better if it would learn self-denial and observe the law of artistic economy, keep its people consistently in one plane and out of boats and motor cars, _soigner_ its crises a little more, and avoid publishing correspondence. And it should slacken its pace a bit. You may take the Heraclitean philosophy—πάντα χωρεῖ—a little too literally. The movies would be all the more moving for moving slower.