sabe?”

Through the gloomy charade Jim watched Pamela; in front of him the party of five leaned together and whispered after her scenes. Was she good? Jim had no notion—he should have taken someone along, or brought in his chauffeur. What with pictures drawing upon half the world for talent there was scarcely such a phenomenon as a “natural”. There were only possibilities—and luck. He was luck. He was maybe this girl’s luck—if he felt that her pull at his insides was universal.

Stars were no longer created by one man’s casual desire as in the silent days, but stock girls were, tests were, chances were. When the curtain finally dropped, domestically as a Venetian blind, he went backstage by the simple process of walking through a door on the side. She was waiting for him.

“I was hoping you wouldn’t come tonight,” she said. “We’ve flopped. But the first night it was full and I looked for you.”

“You were fine,” he said stiffly.

“Oh, no. You should have seen me then.”

“I saw enough,” he said suddenly. “I can give you a little part. Will you come to the studio tomorrow?”

He watched her expression. Once more it surprised him. Out of her eyes, out of the curve of her mouth gleamed a sudden and overwhelming pity.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, I’m terribly sorry. Joe brought some people over and next day I signed up with Bernie Wise.”

“You did?”

“I knew you wanted me and at first I didn’t realize you were just a sort of supervisor. I thought you had more power—you know?” She could not have chosen sharper words out of delib­erate mischief. “Oh, I like you better personally,” she assured him. “You’re much more civilized than Bernie Wise.”

All right then he was civilized. He could at least pull out gracefully. “Can I drive you back to Hollywood?”

They rode through an October night soft as April. When they crossed a bridge, its walls topped with wire screens, he gestured toward it and she nodded.

“I know what it is,” she said. “But how stupid! English people don’t commit suicide when they don’t get what they want.”

“I know. They come to America.”

She laughed and looked at him appraisingly. Oh, she could do something with him all right. She let her hand rest upon his.

“Kiss tonight?” he suggested after a while.

Pamela glanced at the chauffeur insulated in his com­partment. “Kiss tonight,” she said…

He flew East next day, looking for a young actress just like Pamela Knighton. He looked so hard that any eyes with an aspect of lovely melancholy, any bright English voice, pre­disposed him; he wandered as far afield as a stock company in Erie and a student play at Wellesley—it came to seem a desper­ate matter that he should find someone exactly like this girl. Then when a telegram called him impatiently back to Holly­wood, he found Pamela dumped in his lap.

“You got a second chance, Jim,” said Joe Becker. “Don’t miss it again.”

“What was the matter over there?”

“They had no part for her. They’re in a mess—change of management. So we tore up the contract.”

Mike Harris, the studio head, investigated the matter. Why was Bernie Wise, a shrewd picture man, willing to let her go?

“Bernie says she can’t act,” he reported to Jim. “And what’s more she makes trouble. I keep thinking of Simone and those two Austrian girls.”

“I’ve seen her act,” insisted Jim. “And I’ve got a place for her. I don’t even want to build her up yet. I want to spot her in this little part and let you see.”

VI

A week later Jim pushed open the padded door of Stage III and walked in. Extras in dress clothes turned toward him in the semidarkness; eyes widened.

“Where’s Bob Griffin?”

“In that bungalow with Miss Knighton.”

They were sitting side by side on a couch in the glare of the make-up light, and from the resistance in Pamela’s face Jim knew the trouble was serious.

“It’s nothing,” Bob insisted heartily. “We get along like a couple of kittens, don’t we, Pam? Sometimes I roll over her but she doesn’t mind.”

“You smell of onions,” said Pamela.

Griffin tried again. “There’s an English way and an American way. We’re looking for the happy mean—that’s all.”

“There’s a nice way and a silly way,” Pamela said shortly. “I don’t want to begin by looking like a fool.”

“Leave us alone, will you, Bob?” Jim said.

“Sure. All the time in the world.”

Jim had not seen her in this busy week of tests and fittings and rehearsals, and he thought now how little he knew about her and she of them.

“Bob seems to be in your hair,” he said.

“He wants me to say things no sane person would say.”

“All right — maybe so,” he agreed. “Pamela, since you’ve been working here have you ever blown up in your lines?”

“Why—everybody does sometimes.”

“Listen, Pamela—Bob Griffin gets almost ten times as much money as you do—for a particular reason. Not because he’s the most brilliant director in Hollywood—he isn’t—but because he never blows up in his lines.”

“He’s not an actor,” she said, puzzled.

“I mean his lines in real life. I picked him for this picture because once in a while I blow up. But not Bob. He signed a contract for an unholy amount of money—which he doesn’t deserve, which nobody deserves. But smoothness is the fourth dimension of this business and Bob has forgotten the word «I». People of three times his talent—producers and troupers and directors—go down the sink because they can’t forget it.”

“I know I’m being lectured to,” she said uncertainly. “But I don’t seem to understand. An actress has her own—per­sonality—”

He nodded. “And we pay her five times what she could get for it anywhere else—if she’ll only keep it off the floor where it trips the rest of us up. You’re tripping us all up, Pamela.”

I thought you were my friend, her eyes said.

He talked to her a few minutes more. Everything he said he believed with all his heart, but because he had twice kissed those lips, he saw that it was support and protection they wanted from him. All he had done was to make her a little shocked that he was not on her side. Feeling rather baffled and sorry for her loneliness he went to the door of the bungalow and called: “Hey, Bob!”

Jim went about other business. He got back to his office to find Mike Harris waiting.

“Again that girl’s making trouble.”

“I’ve been over there.”

“I mean in the last five minutes!” cried Harris. “Since you left she’s made trouble! Bob Griffin had to stop shooting for the day. He’s on his way over.”

Bob came in. “There’s one type you can’t seem to get at—can’t find what makes them that way. I’m afraid it’s either Pamela or me.”

There was a moment’s silence. Mike Harris, upset by the whole situation, suspected that Jim was having an affair with the girl.

“Give me till tomorrow morning,” said Jim. “I think I can find what’s back of this.”

Griffin hesitated but there was a personal appeal in Jim’s eyes—an appeal to associations of a decade. “All right, Jim,” he agreed.

When they had gone Jim called Pamela’s number. What he had almost expected happened, but his heart sank none the less when a man’s voice answered the phone…

Excepting a trained nurse, an actress is the easiest prey for the unscrupulous male. Jim had learned that in the back­ground of their troubles or their failures there was often some plausible confidence man, some soured musician, who asserted his masculinity by way of interference, midnight nagging, bad advice. The technique of the man was to belittle the woman’s job and to question endlessly the motives and intelligence of those for whom she worked.

Jim was thinking of all this when he reached the bungalow hotel in Beverly Hills where Pamela had moved. It was after six. In the court a cold fountain splashed senselessly against the December fog and he heard Major Bowes’s voice loud from three radios.

When the door of the apartment opened Jim stared. The man was old—a bent and withered Englishman with ruddy winter color dying in his face. He wore an old dressing gown and slippers and he asked Jim to sit down with an air of being at home. Pamela would be in shortly.

“Are you a relative?” Jim asked wonderingly.

“No, Pamela and I met here in Hollywood. We were strangers in a strange land. Are you employed in pictures, Mr—Mr——”

“Leonard,” said Jim. “Yes. At present I’m Pamela’s boss.”

A change came into the man’s eyes—the watery blink became conspicuous, there was a stiffening of the old lids. The lips curled down and backward and Jim was gazing into an expression of utter malignancy. Then the features became old and bland again.

“I hope Pamela is being handled properly?”

“You’ve been in pictures?” Jim asked.

“Till my health broke down. But I am still on the rolls at Central Casting and I know everything about this business and the souls of those who own it—” He broke off.

VII

The door opened and Pamela came in. “Well, hello.” she said in surprise. “You’ve met? The Honorable Chauncey Ward—Mr. Leonard.”

Her glowing beauty, borne in from outside like something snatched from wind and weather, made Jim breathless for a moment.

“I thought you told me my sins this afternoon,” she said with a touch of defiance.

“I wanted to talk to you away from the studio.”

“Don’t accept a salary cut,” the old man said. “That’s an old trick.”

“It’s not that, Mr. Ward,” said Pamela. “Mr. Leonard has been my friend up to now. But today the director tried to make a fool of me, and Mr. Leonard backed him up.”

“They all hang together,” said