When he reached the address she gave him, shortly before two o'clock, John's first feeling was that he had misunderstood the directions she had given him. Before him, inclosed by a high fence over the horizon of which he could see the tops of queer structures, stood the rambling studio of the Peerless Pictures, Inc., one of the largest motion picture producing concerns in the capital of filmdom. At one side of a large open gateway, near an oddly shaped sentry box, was a fat, red-faced man tilted back in a kitchen chair. The man was eyeing him as he approached the gateway. "Hey, just a minute, son, where do you think you're going?" the man shouted, turning his head to glare at the intruder. "Inside," John said. "Well, you don't say--Hey, there, just a minute!" this last as John, who had a secret delight in baiting officiousness, continued toward the gateway. "Who do you think you want to see in there?" demanded the guard. "I don't THINK I want to see anyone; Miss Carrillo sent for me," said John, wondering if this would be the password and feeling a thrill go up his backbone at the thought he might be at the wrong place. "What's your name?" "Gallant--John Gallant." "Why didn't you say so in the first place? What do you think I am, a mind reader? The clairvoyants are all east of Main street, son, all east of Main street. Keep right on going, you'll find her on stage number three." His heels crunched into the finely-graveled driveway as he walked in the direction pointed out to him by the guard, who condescended to leave his chair for the purpose of guiding him. He passed two huge barn-like structures and found the third designated in large white letters, "Stage No. 3." A superstructure of black cloth and laths was built out from the doorway at right angles to the stage building, a precaution, he later learned, against daylight. It was his first visit to a motion picture studio. He had no interest in pictures or the people who played in them. His father, from whom he inherited his love for books and the better class of spoken drama, had always regarded motion pictures as almost a profanation of art. Once he had noticed an advertising poster of a well known star referred to as a "man's man," wearing a shirt open at the neck, sleeves rolled to the elbows, riding trousers and shiny leather puttees, endeavoring desperately to appear like a combination of Sandow and a Northwest Mounted Police officer. He had had the satisfaction of hurling a rock to mar the "virile" face as it looked down defiantly at him from the billboard. He had always imagined that all motion picture scenes were photographed in the open, on roofless stages, and the idea that Southern California's perpetual sunlight gave the best service for this purpose he believed to be the reason that Los Angeles was the principal producing point of the world. It surprised him when he realized that the barn-like structures were inclosed stages.