In a moment it bridges over for you the gap between youth and age, as in _Sweethearts_. But there is another way of playing tricks with the clock, by making it stand still for some of your personages, while it ticks regularly for the rest. A. E. W. Mason, in one of his stories, gave an extra quarter of an hour now and then to one of the characters—that is to say, the clock stopped for them during that period, but not for him—and while _outside_ time, so to speak, he could do all sorts of things (if I remember rightly he committed a murder) without risk of detection. But the great magician of this kind is Barrie. The heroine of his _Truth about the Russian Dancers_ had a sudden desire for an infant, and within a half-hour was delivered of one; a remarkably rapid case of _parthenogenesis_. The infant was carried out and returned the next moment a child of ten. “He grows apace,” said somebody. These were cases of the clock galloping. With the heroine of _Mary Rose_ on the island it stands still, so that she returns twenty-five years later to her family precisely the same girl as she left them. We all know what pathetic effects Barrie gets out of this trick with the clock. But he has, of course, to assume supernatural intervention to warrant them. And there you have the contrast with the film. In the “spoken drama,” poor, decrepit old thing, they appeal to that silly faculty, the human imagination; whereas the film has only to turn some wheels quicker or slower and it is all done for you, under your nose, without any imagination at all. Elephants are scuttling about like antelopes and divers plunging into the water at a snail’s pace. No wonder that, according to our New York advices, “film magnates have made so much money that they have been able to buy chains of theatres throughout the country,” and that “everybody talks films in the United States.” FUTURIST DANCING