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 years. This was Harrietta's part. In the book there had been a young girl, too--a saccharine miss of seventeen who was the minor love interest. This was Lydia Lissome's part. Slowly it dawned on Harrietta that things had been nightmarishly tampered with in the film version, and that the change in name was the least of the indignities to which the novel had been subjected.

It took Harrietta some time to realize this because they were not taking the book scenes in their sequence. They took them according to light, convenience, location. Indoor scenes were taken in one group, so that the end of the story might often be the first to be filmed.

For a week Harrietta was dressed, made up, and ready for work at nine o'clock, and for a week she wasn't used in a single scene. The hours of waiting made her frantic. The sun was white hot. Her little dressing room was stifling. She hated her face with its dead-white mask and blue-lidded eyes. When, finally, her time came she found that after being dressed and ready from nine until five-thirty daily she was required, at 4:56 on the sixth day, to cross the set, open a door, stop, turn, appear to be listening, and recross the set to meet someone entering from the opposite side. This scene, trivial as it appeared, was rehearsed seven times before the director was satisfied with it.

The person for whom she had paused, turned, and crossed was Lydia Lissome. And Lydia Lissome, it soon became evident, had the lead in this film. In the process of changing from novel to scenario, the Young Wife had become a rather middle-aged wife, and the Flapper of seventeen had become the heroine. And Harrietta Fuller, erstwhile actress of youthful comedy parts for the stage, found herself moving about in black velvet and pearls and a large plumed fan as a background for the white ruffles and golden curls and sunny scenes in which Lydia Lissome held the camera's eye.

For years Harrietta Fuller's entrance during a rehearsal always had created a little stir among the company. This one rose to give her a seat; that one made her a compliment; Sam Klein, the veteran director, patted her cheek and said: "You're going to like this part, Miss Fuller.

And they're going to eat it up. _You_ see." The author bent over her in mingled nervousness and deference and admiration. The Young Thing who was to play the ingenue part said shyly: "Oh, Miss Fuller, may I tell you how happy I am to be playing with you? You'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 their hats. Turned slowly, and took off their hats. They were mannerly, too, outside working hours. They treated Harrietta with boyish politeness--when they noticed her at all.

"Oh, won't you have this chair, Miss Fuller? I didn't notice you were standing."

They didn't notice she was standing!

"What are you doing, Miss--ah--Fuller? Yes, you did say Fuller.

Names---- Are you doing a dowager bit?"

"Dowager bit?"

"I see. You're new to the game, aren't you? I saw you working to-day. We always speak of these black-velvet parts as dowager bits. Just excuse me. I see a friend of mine----" The friend of mine would be a willow wand with golden curls, and what Harrietta rather waspishly called a Gunga Din costume. She referred to that Kipling description in which:

The uniform 'e wore Was nothin' much before, An' rather less than 'arf o' that be'ind.

"They're wearing them that way here in Hollywood," she wrote Ken. She wrote Ken a good many things. But there were, too, a good many things she did not write him.

At the end of the week she would look at her check--and take small comfort. "You've got everything you really want right here," Ken had said, "if you only knew it."

If only she had known it.

Well, she knew it now. Now, frightened, bewildered, resentful.

Thirty-seven. Why, thirty-seven was old in Hollywood. Not middle-aged, or getting on, or well preserved, but old. Even Lydia Lissome, at twenty, always made them put one thickness of chiffon over the camera's lens before she would let them take the close-ups. Harrietta thought of that camera now as a cruel Cyclops from whose hungry eye nothing escaped--wrinkles, crow's-feet--nothing.

They had been working two months on the picture. It was almost finished.

Midsummer. Harrietta's little bungalow garden was ablaze with roses, dahlias, poppies, asters, strange voluptuous flowers whose names she did not know. The roses, plucked and placed in water, fell apart, petal by petal, two hours afterward. From her veranda she saw the Sierra Madre range and the foothills. She thought of her "unexcelled view of Park"

which could be had by flattening one ear and the side of your face against the window jamb.

The sun came up, hard and bright and white, day after day. Hard and white and hot and dry. "Like a woman," Harrietta thought, "who wears a red satin gown all the time. You'd wish she'd put on gingham just once, for a change." She told herself that she was parched for a walk up Riverside Drive in a misty summer rain, the water sloshing in her shoes.

"Happy, my ducky?" Irish Mary would say, beaming upon her.

"Perfectly," from Harrietta.

"It's time, too. Real money you're pullin' down here. And a paradise if ever there was one."

"I notice, though, that as soon as they've completed a picture they take the Overland back to New York and make dates with each other for lunch at the Claridge, like matinee girls."

Irish Mary flapped a negligent palm. "Ah, well, change is what we all want, now and then." She looked at Harrietta sharply. "You're not wantin' to go back, are ye?"

"N-no," faltered Harrietta. Then, brazenly, hotly: "Yes, yes!" ending, miserably, with: "But my contract. Six months."

"You can break it, if you're fool enough, when they've finished this picture, though why you should want to----" Irish Mary looked as belligerent as her kindly Celtic face could manage.

But it was not until the last week of the filming of Let's get a Husband that Harrietta came to her and said passionately: "I do! I do!"

"Do what?" Irish Mary asked, blankly.

"Do want to break my contract. You said I could after this picture."

"Sure you can. They hired you because I put Lyddy up to askin' them to.

I'd thought you'd be pleased for the big money an' all. There's no pleasin' some."

"It isn't that. You don't understand. To-day----"

"Well, what's happened to-day that's so turrible, then?"

But how could Harrietta tell her? "To-day----" she began again, faltered, stopped. To-day, you must know, this had happened: It was the Big Scene of the film. Lydia Lissome, in black lace nightgown and ermine negligee, her hair in marcel waves, had just been "shot" for it.

"Now then, Miss Fuller," said young Garvey, the director, "you come into the garden, see? You've noticed Joyce go out through the French window and you suspect she's gone to meet Talbot. We show just a flash of you looking out of the drawing-room windows into the garden. Then you just glance over your shoulder to where your husband is sitting in the library, reading, and you slip away, see? Then we jump to where you find them in the garden. Wait a minute"--He consulted the sheaf of typewritten sheets in his hand--"yeh--here it says: 'Joyce is keeping her tryst under the great oak in the garden with her lover.' Yeh. Wait a minute ... 'tryst under tree with'--well, you come quickly forward--down to about here--and you say: 'Ah, _there_ you are!'"

Harrietta looked at him for a long, long minute. Her lips were parted.

Her breath came quickly. She spoke: "I say--_what?_"

"You say: 'Ah, _there_ you are.'"

"Never!" said Harrietta Fuller, and brought her closed fist down on her open palm for emphasis. "Never!"

It was August when she again was crossing desert, plains, and farmlands.

It was the tail-end of a dusty, hot, humid August in New York when Ken stood at the station, waiting. As he came forward, raising one arm, her own arm shot forward in quick protest, even while her glad eyes held his.

"Don't take it off!"

"What off?"

"Your hat. Don't take it off. Kiss me--but leave your hat on."

She clutched his arm. She looked up at him. They were in the taxi bound for Fifty-sixth Street. "She moved? She's out? She's gone? You told her I'd pay her anything--a bonus----" Then, as he nodded, she leaned back, relaxed. Something in her face prompted him.

"You're young and beautiful and bewitching," said Ken.

"Keep on saying it," pleaded Harrietta. "Make a chant of it." ...