I called Ma Pettengill’s attention to this engaging modesty.  I said it must be an affair of some delicacy to rebuff ardent and not too reticent fair ones in a public print, and that I considered J. Harold Armytage to have come out of it with a display of taste that could be called unusual.  The woman replied, with her occasional irrelevance, that if the parties that hired him should read this stuff they probably wouldn’t even then take him out on the lot and have him bitterly kicked by a succession of ten large labouring men who would take kindly to the task.  She then once more said that the movies was sure one great business, and turned in the magazine to pleasanter pages on which one Vida Sommers, also a screen idol, it seemed, gave warning and advice to young girls who contemplated a moving-picture career.

Portraits of Vida Sommers in her best-known roles embellished these pages.  In all of the portraits she wept.  In some the tears were visible; in others they had to be guessed, the face being drawn by anguish.  Her feminine correspondents wished particularly to be told of the snares and temptations besetting the path of the young girl who enters this perilous career.  Many of them seemed rather vague except upon this point.  They all seemed to be sure that snares and temptations would await them, and would Vida Sommers please say how these could be avoided by young and impressionable girls of good figure and appearance who were now waiting on table at the American House in Centralia, Illinois, or accepting temporary employment in mercantile establishments in Chicago, or merely living at home in Zanesville, Ohio, amid conditions unbearably cramping to their aspirations?

And Vida Sommers told every one of them not to consider the pictures but as a final refuge from penury.  She warned them that they would find the life one of hard work and full of disappointments.  It seemed that even the snares and temptations were disappointing, being more easily evaded than many of her correspondents appeared to suspect.  She advised them all to marry some good, true man and make a home for him.  And surely none of them could have believed the life to be a joyous one after studying these sorrowful portraits of Vida Sommers.

“That’s my little actress friend,” said Ma Pettengill.  “Doesn’t she cry something grand!”

“You’ve been cheating me,” I answered.  “I never knew you had a little actress friend.  How did you get her?  And doesn’t she ever play anything cheerful?”

“Of course not!  She only plays mothers, and you know what that means in moving pictures.  Ever see a moving-picture mother that had a chance to be happy for more than the first ten feet of film?  You certainly got to cry to hold down that job.  Ain’t she always jolted quick in the first reel by the husband getting all ruined up in Wall Street, or the child getting stole, or the daughter that’s just budding into womanhood running off with a polished shoe-drummer with city ways, or the only son robbing a bank, or husband taking up with a lady adventuress that lives across the hall in the same flat and outdresses mother?