"When I was less than five years old I was taken to see 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.' I insisted that the Little Eva was too big for the part, and felt that I could have done much better myself. This was in Toronto, where I was born. One of mother's friends was a stage-manager of a stock company. One night he happened to remark that it was difficult to find children for the plays that required them, and suggested that possibly my sister and myself could help him out. Mother was scandalized. She had the old-fashioned notions about the playerfolk, and only after he had introduced her to the ladies and gentlemen of the company would she give her consent."
"Well, I play in 'Bootle's Baby' and 'In Convict Stripes.' I was the girl in 'The Silver King' and the boy in 'East Lynne.' After a while we came to New York, where I went to school, and here the luckiest thing of all happened to me. I got into the 'movies.' Yes, that the work I like best. And why shouldn't I? You rehearse for perhaps one day, instead of four or five weeks, and there is no terrible worry about whether the play is going to succeed or fail. Then you travel about the country in automobiles, and go to California, Cuba, and all sorts of interesting places. You draw a salary fifty-two weeks in the year, and have all your evenings to yourself, so that you can go to the theater as much as you like. Do you wonder that I hope the 'talkis' won't be a success?"
"How about your future?" I inquired. "Aren't you ambitious to act some big role?"
"No, not in emotional drama," she answered. "What's the use? The public doesn't care for that sort of thing any more, and if people don't think enough of what you do to come in crowds to watch it, I can't imagine any other reason for doing it. Light comedy would please me best; but to my mind, after all, the 'movies' are the most satisfying. There is a fascination about the work that never palls.
"What, with no real audience to play to when you are posing?" I reminded her.
"Yes, indeed," came back the prompt reply. "For in the 'movies' you have something a great deal better. You can be your own audience and watch yourself act. I have not yet got over the joy of sitting out in front and seeing myself walk about the screen!"
When you recall that Mary Pickford, the heroine of "A Good Little Devil," was with the David Belasco half a dozed years ago as Betty in "The Warrens of Virginia," you may know that she isn't so young as she looks. Nevertheless, her grown-up state in teh last act of her present play marks her first appearence in other than a child's part.
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