"I don't care who he is, I'm not afraid of him," she declared stoutly. "Is that so?" said the director severely. "But remember you are afraid of _me_! And don't try to tell me you are not!" "I----" "Don't ever open your mouth like that when speaking! You are a heroine--not a walrus! Now then--the tender scene--giving the flower to Rinaldo--shush, I didn't mean to let that much out as to the story but--well, you might as well know right now that the hero is Rinaldo Ringrose--that's Mr. Arbuckle's name in the picture. "Now then, advance--hip, hip, hip--that's better--a little better--except that you still look like a boy in skirts, one of those damn pretty ones and a damn silly one at that." Verbeena gasped. Through her thick lashes she regarded this man of the gyratory wealth of gestures whose dominating spirit it was manifest was to be seen. She feared--began to fear--almost started to be afraid that the Verbeena of old was dead or nearly corpsical. Her old doughty self, she grovelingly began to consider, was starting to decline. Her fighting stamina she felt would soon be selling for date seeds on the Sahara Exchange. And yet how noble he was! His manner of using a cigarette case was so much more graceful than her own. And he seemed to know everything. Certainly he thought he did. And all his men gave him such blind obedience. He had a trick of flashing the sun in their eyes from his cigarette case that probably caused them to do this, she deducted. Two days passed before he finally decided she had given the hero the rose properly. That, doubtless, was why they used artificial roses. A real one couldn't last out a rehearsal. But somehow, in the depths of her harrowed, deeply embittered, astonished young soul, she was humbly glad that at last she had given the hero the rose properly. "That's that," said the High Mandarin of the Movies, "and although worse than bad eggs, in other things you may stand a chance of realizing my genius for me in the soul-stirring, magnificent, marvelous, magnitudinous work of art I am on the brink of creating. Come--come--a little loud and prolonged applause--everybody please. I thank you. "The next scene will call for you saying a tender farewell--keep remembering your sex, madame--with your lover under a tree. An apple tree in full bloom." "There aren't apple trees on the desert," Verbeena with simply idiotic indiscretion observed. The director flung his hat on the sand, kicked it in the air, ran around the desert on all fours for a mile, then arose majestically. "How dare you! Can't you see that under one of those tall palm trees the shadows wouldn't fall right on the picture? No blossoming apple trees on the desert, eh? I guess you don't know _me_! Billy, an apple tree, full blossom!" The man addressed obeyed swiftly. In a jiffy he had brought one from the property aeroplane and raised it in place.