me day he can save up enough from his wages
to have his eyes fixed. I'll mention it to him. And this reminds me,
speaking of the cast, there's another member who might bother some of
these fussy actors. She's the girl who will take the part of your city
sweetheart. As a matter of fact, she isn't exactly the type I'd have
picked for the part, because she's rather a large, hearty girl, if you
know what I mean. I could have found a lot who were better lookers; but
the poor thing has a bedridden father and mother and a little crippled
brother and a little sister that isn't well, and she's working hard to
send them all to school--I mean the children, not her parents; so I saw
the chance to do her a good turn, and I hope you'll feel that you can
work harmoniously with her. I know I'm too darned human to be in this
business--" Baird looked aside to conceal his emotion.

"I'm sure, Mr. Baird, I'll get along fine with the young lady, and I
think it's fine of you to give these people jobs when you could get
better folks in their places."

"Well, well, we'll say no more about that," replied Baird gruffly, as
one who had again hidden his too-impressionable heart. "Now ask in the
outer office where that Wayne film is to-day and catch it as often as
you feel you're getting any of the Edgar Wayne stuff. We'll call you up
when work begins."

He saw the Edgar Wayne film, a touching story in which the timid,
diffident country boy triumphed over difficulties and won the love of
a pure New York society girl, meantime protecting his mother from the
insulting sneers of the idle rich and being made to suffer intensely by
the apparent moral wreck of his dear little sister whom a rich scoundrel
lured to the great city with false promises that he would make a fine
lady of her. Never before had he studied the acting method of Wayne
with a definite aim in view. Now he watched until he himself became the
awkward country boy. He was primed with the Wayne manner, the appealing
ingenuousness, the simple embarrassments; the manly regard for the old
mother, when word came that Baird was ready for him in the new piece.

This drama was strikingly like the Wayne piece he had watched, at least
in its beginning. Baird, in his striving for the better things, seemed
at first to have copied his model almost too faithfully. Not only was
Merton to be the awkward country boy in the little hillside farmhouse,
but his mother and sister were like the other mother