e! You soon get used to it. They've got to get all the
daylight they can, an' times the fog's low earlier, or they'd likely
start at seven or eight. You look a little beat, dearie. Lay down. I'll
have you unpacked while we're eatin'."

But Harrietta did not lie down. She went to the window. Below a small
army of pigmy gardeners were doing expert things to flower beds and
bushes that already seemed almost shamelessly prolific. Harrietta
thought, suddenly, of her green-painted flower boxes outside the
eleventh-story south window in the New York flat. Outside her window
here a great scarlet hibiscus stuck its tongue out at her. Harrietta
stuck her tongue out at it, childishly, and turned away. She liked a
certain reticence in flowers, as in everything else. She sat down at the
desk, took up a sheet of lavender and gold paper and the great lavender
plumed pen. The note she wrote to Ken was the kind of note that only Ken
would understand, unless you've got into the way of reading it once a
year or so, too:

Ken, dear, I almost wish I hadn't gone down that rabbit hole, and
yet--and yet--it's rather curious, you know, this sort of life.

Two weeks later, when she had begun to get used to her new work, her new
life, the strange hours, people, jargon, she wrote him another cryptic
note:

Alice--"Well, in our country you'd generally get to somewhere
else--if you ran very fast for a long time, as I've been doing."

Red Queen--"Here it takes all the running you can do to keep in the
same place."

In those two weeks things had happened rather breathlessly. Harrietta
had moved from the splendours of The Place to her own rose-embowered
bungalow. Here, had she wanted to do any casement work with a white
rose, like that earlier heroine, she could easily have managed it had
not the early morning been so feverishly occupied in reaching the lot in
time to be made up by nine. She soon learned the jargon. "The lot" meant
the studio in which she was working, and its environs. "We're going to
shoot you this morning," meant that she would be needed in to-day's
scenes. Often she was in bed by eight at night, so tired that she could
not sleep. She wondered what the picture was about. She couldn't make
head or tail of it.

They were filming J. N. Gardner's novel, Romance of Arcady, but they had
renamed it Let's Get a Husband. The heroine in the novel was the young
wife of twenty-seven who had been married five