ary's reason for leaving Harrietta was a good one. It would have
to be, for she was of that almost extinct species, the devoted retainer.
Irish Mary wasn't the kind of maid one usually encounters back stage. No
dapper, slim, black-and-white pert miss, with a wisp of apron and a
knowledgeous eye. An ample, big-hipped, broad-bosomed woman with an
apron like a drop curtain and a needle knack that kept Harrietta mended,
be-ribboned, beruffled, and exquisite from her garters to her coat
hangers. She had been around the theatre for twenty-five years, and her
thick, deft fingers had served a long line of illustrious
ladies--Corinne Foster, Gertrude Bennett, Lucille Varney. She knew all
the shades of grease paint from Flesh to Sallow Old Age, and if you
gained an ounce she warned you.

Her last name was Lesom, but nobody remembered it until she brought
forward a daughter of fifteen with the request that she be given a job;
anything--walk-on, extra, chorus. Lyddy, she called her. The girl seldom
spoke. She was extremely stupid, but a marvellous mimic, and pretty
beyond belief; fragile, and yet with something common about her even in
her fragility. Her wrists had a certain flat angularity that bespoke a
peasant ancestry, but she had a singular freshness and youthful bloom.
The line of her side face from the eye socket to the chin was a
delicious thing that curved with the grace of a wing. The high cheekbone
sloped down so that the outline was heart-shaped. There were little
indentations at the corners of her mouth. She had eyes singularly clear,
like a child's, and a voice so nasal, so strident, so dreadful that when
she parted her pretty lips and spoke, the sound shocked you like a
peacock's raucous screech.

Harrietta had managed to get a bit for her here, a bit for her there,
until by the time she was eighteen she was giving a fairly creditable
performance in practically speechless parts. It was dangerous to trust
her even with an "Ah, there you are!" line. The audience, startled, was
so likely to laugh.

At about this point she vanished, bound for Hollywood and the movies.
"She's the little fool, just," said Irish Mary. "What'll she be wantin'
with the movies, then, an' her mother connected with the theayter for
years an' all, and her you might say brought up in it?"

But she hadn't been out there a year before the world knew her as Lydia
Lissome. Starting as an extra girl earning twenty-five a week or less,
she had manag