's suit relined,
even if it is smart enough to be good this year. I'm sick of having the
critics call me an intelligent comedienne who is unfortunate in her
choice of plays. Some day"--a little flash of fright was there--"I'll
pick up the _Times_ and see myself referred to as 'that sterling
actress.' Then I'll know I'm through."

"You!"

"Tell me I'm young, Ken. Tell me I'm young and beautiful and
bewitching."

"You're young and beautiful and bewitching."

"Ugh! And yet they say the Irish have the golden tongues."

Two months later Harrietta had an offer to go into pictures. It wasn't
her first, but it undeniably was the best. The sum offered per week was
what she might usually expect to get per month in a successful stage
play. To accept the offer meant the Coast. She found herself having a
test picture taken and trying to believe the director who said it was
good; found herself expatiating on the brightness, quietness, and
general desirability of the eleventh-floor apartment in Fifty-sixth
Street to an acquaintance who was seeking a six months' city haven for
the summer.

"She'll probably ruin my enamel dressing table with toilet water and
ring my piano top with wet glasses and spatter grease on the kitchenette
wall. But I'll be earning a million," Harrietta announced, recklessly,
"or thereabouts. Why should I care?"

She did care, though, as a naturally neat and thrifty woman cares for
her household goods which have, through years of care of them and
association with them, become her household gods. The clock on the
mantel wasn't a clock, but a plump friend with a white smiling face and
a soothing tongue; the low, ample davenport wasn't a davenport only, but
a soft bosom that pillowed her; that which lay spread shimmering beneath
her window was not New York alone--it was her View. To a woman like
this, letting her apartment furnished is like farming out her child to
strangers.

She had told her lessee about her laundress and her cleaning woman and
how to handle the balky faucet that controlled the shower. She had said
good-bye to Ken entirely surrounded by his books, magazines, fruit, and
flowers. She was occupying a Pullman drawing room paid for by the
free-handed filmers. She was crossing farm lands, plains, desert. She
was wondering if all those pink sweaters and white flannel trousers
outside the Hollywood Hotel were there for the same reason that she was.
She was surveying a rather warm little room sh