Nell wrote that she was to become a mother. Lillian, awe-struck, replied:

I can’t talk to anyone about it, not now. I want it all to myself for just a little while....

I am with the Biograph, but none of my pictures have been released as yet; will let you know the names of them. I have signed with David Belasco for next season, and we open here in New York on Christmas Eve at Belasco Theatre. Although it is a good company, I have a very small part. I am going to do pictures on the side, so that is some help.... Well, I must get supper.

But she could not carry the Biograph work with her rehearsing. In November she wrote:

I was worked to death my last days at the Biograph, and then I was so excited when I started to rehearse in this new play that I couldn’t even eat. The name of the play is “The Good Little Devil.” It is a fairy play, and we open December 10, in Phila. and Xmas night in N. Y. I play Morgane, a fairy....

Lillian enjoyed rehearsing when it did not last too long. There were some half-a-dozen of the fairies, and they flew—flew wonderfully, suspended on wires, pulled from somewhere below by eighteen strong Germans. She loved the flying sensation—so much that she would go before rehearsal-time and rehearse a little on her own account. She tried all the wires, and the big Germans delighted in sending her soaring into the air. In the play, she was the “Gold Fairy,” that flew highest. And there was one scene where she rested on a wall. Belasco, watching the rehearsals one day, was asked by a reporter what he thought of her looks. Belasco sent a glance at the slender figure on the wall, at the unearthly face surrounded by a tumbling mass of gold.

“Most beautiful blonde in the world,” he said, and next day that label found its way into print and general circulation.

Not long ago—a month or two before he died—Belasco qualified—a little: He had not then, he said, seen all the beautiful blondes in the world. Perhaps he should have said: “One of the most beautiful.” But as Belasco had seen a very great number of beautiful blondes—probably the pick of them—the verdict will be allowed to stand as reported, especially as it was never questioned. Lillian’s beauty was not then what it became later:—as revealed in “The White Sister,” for instance, in “Romola,” in “La BohÊme,” and more recently in “Uncle Vanya.”

“The Good Little Devil” did not follow any of the announced dates. It opened successfully in Washington, or Philadelphia, and was in Baltimore for Christmas. They gave two performances that day, during the second of which there was an accident—serious enough, though it might have been worse.

In the act where she landed on the wall, she left it with a step-down of six feet. The wire, of course, lifted her down, but in this performance something was wrong, and she literally stepped into space. The sickening, helpless feeling of expecting support and finding none! The fall made her quite ill; her understudy had to finish the play.

“I cried all night,” she wrote Nell, “I was so lonely and broken-hearted.”

She was apparently not injured, but terribly shaken; and then, the audience had laughed. Mr. Belasco hurried to her dressing-room to comfort her. The audience was not laughing at her, he said, but at the incident. She must not mind that; everything was going to be all right. It was, but the shock had weakened her.

Back in New York, with another hard siege of rehearsing, before the opening there. Griffith, as was his custom each winter, had taken his company to Los Angeles, Dorothy with them. Lillian, to save money, lived in a tiny room at the Marlton Hotel, in 8th Street, and with a Sterno lamp, cooked her food, which consisted of tinned things and tea. Weakened as she undoubtedly was by her fall, this was but poor nourishment on which to meet Belasco’s strenuous rehearsals. January 8 (1913), she wrote:

It is now 3:30 in the morning of Wednesday, and I have just returned from a dress rehearsal. We open tonight, and everything has to be just so; we rehearsed until 4:30 yesterday morning.

Nell, I don’t know how to thank you for what you have offered me. You both can’t know how wonderful it is to have someone offer me a home, and how I would love to follow the desire of my heart and come to you. But I can’t. I can’t, because I have to make my way in this world from now on. Mother has worked all her life; surely, it’s my turn, now....

The picture you painted for me in your letter made me cry, because I was reading it in my dressing-room, and I happened to glance up at a mirror, and there I sat, all false, with paint and cosmetics covering my face, and it came to me what a distance it was from my life to yours.

Mary was getting a good salary, and had bought her mother a car. Lillian said to her, one day: “How happy you must be, Mary, to be able to give your mother so much.” Her own weekly twenty-five dollars went such a little way. The room—one had to have a decent address—took so much of it ... and clothes—one must make a decent appearance—and the extras! A new coat ... a mistake ... it looked well, but was not warm enough.

She was far from well, and knew it. Mrs. Pickford and Mary insisted on her seeing a doctor, who told them that she was threatened with pernicious anemia, and would die if she did not change her mode of living. They spoke about it to Belasco, who offered to send her to Florida at his own expense. When he learned that Griffith had offered her work on the coast, at double her present salary, he at once agreed to pay her fare to Los Angeles.

She hung on until the end of January—postponed until she was warned that unless she went at once, it would be too late. They did not tell her, but they were by no means certain that it was not too late already. So she surrendered. Belasco bought her ticket to Los Angeles; her mother was already on the way out there. Dorothy wrote of glorious California sunshine. It made her better to think of it.

And then, at the end, a tragedy: The eighteen strong Germans who pulled the wires, and adored her, went to the train with their own little brass band, to say good-bye. Ah, me, she had somehow told them the wrong station ... a heartbreak ... one that could not be mended.

She traveled by the Los Angeles Limited, and for the first time in her life, knew the full luxury of a Pullman. On the way, she wrote:

I am going on and on, with miles upon miles separating us, it seems, but it is not so, dear, as we are just as near to one another now as we were in the old days, when we used to take “John Halifax” and go to your room, and read. Can you ever forget those days, and will they ever come back again?

... I am going to work hard out there, and next summer or fall, I am going back to Mr. Belasco.

But she would never go back—either to Nell, or Belasco. Four days later, she was in Los Angeles, earning a salary of fifty dollars weekly. The hard days were over.