After which he goes to sleep.

Vida moves over and asks what I meant by saying I’d only have to put in a few dollars when I must of known it would take a few thousand, and didn’t I realize that Clyde would be hurt to the quick if he come back and found she hadn’t been independent?  She indignantly said she’d have to give up the country place and work till she had enough to start another home for paying guests.

I was so mad at this truthful grouch for butting in on my game that I up and told her flat she could never run a boarding house and make it pay; that no woman could who hadn’t learned to say “No!” and she was too much of a mush-head for that.  She was quite offended by this and says firmness has always been considered a strong point in her personality.  A first-class palmist had told her this only two weeks before.  While we are squabbling back and forth the grouch wakes up again and says that he’s in the moving-picture business and will give her a good job in the wardrobe department of the company he’s with, so she must show up there at eight o’clock the next morning.  Just like that!  He didn’t ask her.  He told her.

Vida is kind of took off her feet, but mumbles “Yes, sir!” and puts his card in her bag.  Me?  I was too mad to talk, seeing the girl get into the mill again when I’d tried so hard to get her out.  But I swore to myself I’d stick round and try to get some sense into the cup-custard she called her brain.

So the next morning I took her out to this moving-picture joint that they call a studio—­not a bit like Metta Bigler’s studio in Red Gap—­and sure enough here’s the grouch ready to put Vida on a job.  The job is in a room about ninety feet long filled with boxes and sewing machines and shelves full of costumes, and Vida is to be assistant wardrobe mistress.  Yes, sir; a regular title for the job.  And the pay is twenty-five a week, which is thirteen more than she’d ever dreamed of making before.  The grouch is very decent to her and tells everybody she’s a friend of his, and they all pay polite attention to him because he’s someone important in the works.  It seems he’s a director.  He stands round and yells at the actors how to act, which I had always supposed they knew already but it seems not.  Anyway, I left Vida there to get on to her new duties.

She was full of good reports that night about how well she’d got along, and how interesting the work was, and how she’d helped doctor up another boy.  She said he was one of the world’s greatest actors, because if they give him four or five stiff drinks first he would fall off a forty-foot cliff backwards into the ocean.  She’d helped bandage a sprained wrist for him that he got by jumping out of a second-story window in a gripping drama replete with punch and not landing quite right.

I said to myself it must be a crazy joint and she’d soon give up and let me get her a nice little place on the edge of town that I’d already looked over.  So I let her go three days more, but still she stuck there with great enthusiasm.  Then I had to be leaving for home, so the afternoon of the fourth day I went out to see for myself how things looked.