ve been my ideal, etc."

And now Harrietta Fuller, in black velvet, was the least important
person on the lot. No one was rude to her. Everyone was most kind, in
fact. Kind! To Harrietta Fuller! She found that her face felt stiff and
expressionless after long hours of waiting, waiting, and an elderly
woman who was playing a minor part showed her how to overcome this by
stretching her face, feature for feature, as a dancer goes through
limbering exercises in the wings. The woman had been a trouper in the
old days of one-night stands. Just before she stepped in front of the
camera you saw her drawing down her face grotesquely, stretching her
mouth to form an oval, dropping her jaw, twisting her lips to the right,
to the left, rolling her eyes round and round. It was a perfect lesson
in facial calisthenics, and Harrietta was thankful for it. Harrietta was
interested in such things--interested in them, and grateful for what
they taught her.

She told herself that she didn't mind the stir that Lydia Lissome made
when she was driven up in the morning in her great blue limousine with
the two Japs sitting so straight and immobile in front, like twin
Nipponese gods. But she did. She told herself she didn't mind when the
director said: "Miss Fuller, if you'll just watch Miss Lissome work. She
has perfect picture tempo." But she did. The director was the
new-fashioned kind, who spoke softly, rehearsed you almost privately,
never bawled through a megaphone. A slim young man in a white shirt and
flannel trousers and a pair of Harvard-looking glasses. Everybody was
young. That was it! Not thirty, or thirty-two, or thirty-four, or
thirty-seven, but young. Terribly, horribly, actually young. That was
it.

Harrietta Fuller was too honest not to face this fact squarely. When she
went to a Thursday-night dance at the Hollywood Hotel she found herself
in a ballroom full of slim, pliant, corsetless young things of
eighteen, nineteen, twenty. The men, with marcelled hair and slim feet
and sunburnt faces, were mere boys. As juveniles on the stage they might
have been earning seventy-five or one hundred or one hundred and fifty
dollars a week. Here they owned estates, motor cars in fleets, power
boats; had secretaries, valets, trainers. Their technique was perfect
and simple. They knew their work. When they kissed a girl, or entered a
room, or gazed after a woman, or killed a man in the presence of a woman
(while working) they took off thei