On the whole, in spite of “Annie Laurie’s” burdensome velvets, in spite of Mojave’s sulphur blasts and blistering sands, it had been—or, but for her mother’s illness, might have been—a happy as well as a profitable two years. Mimi and Hester Prynne had been worth while. “Wind” had been an artistic triumph.

Miss Moir, very close to Lillian during all this period, has left a series of impressions and incidents not directly connected with her work:

I remember the first time I saw her at the Ambassador Hotel, New York, she struck me as a person of perfect poise and great charm of manner in which there was something almost childishly appealing. In many ways she is a paradox. She gives the impression of helplessness when she is really the most resourceful person I know. You think sometimes that she is weak and easily led, and then you suddenly come up against an inflexible will and an iron determination to do what she has set her mind on doing.

Then another picture comes into my mind as I often saw her at parties, sitting uncomfortably in the quietest corner she could find, talking generally to some elderly person until the time came to go home, where she always went as soon as possible.

Her hands are expressive of her whole personality, delicately modelled, yet with a look of latent strength and capability about them. She uses them beautifully.

She has no fidgety movements. She is one of the few women I know who have learned the art of perfect stillness.

She loves fortune tellers, though she doesn’t take them seriously and generally forgets what they have told her, five minutes after leaving them.

Our entire life in California on looking back, seems to have its centre in the room where poor Mrs. Gish sat, patient and speechless, looking forward to the moment when Lillian would get back from the studio. On her Birthday morning her room was so crowded with presents it looked like a giftshop. She was delighted with everything, and seemed to take a turn for the better from that day. Until then she had seemed to be losing interest in life—slipping away from us. Having once aroused her from this lethargy Lillian’s whole endeavor was spent on keeping her mother amused. She was constantly coming home with some lovely thing for her—a pretty bed-jacket, a taffeta quilt for her bed, an exquisite set of china for her breakfast tray.

Mr. Mencken came for dinner one Sunday night. I remember we were all a little bit worried about entertaining such a distinguished guest, but we needn’t have been because he seemed to enjoy everything with the zest of a schoolboy.

I have somewhat different memories of the night Mr. Hergesheimer came to dine. Dinner was set for 7:30; Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks arrived, but no Mr. Hergesheimer. Half an hour and then three-quarters of an hour went by—still he did not appear. Finally the telephone rang and a desperate voice called over the wire. It was Mr. Hergesheimer: somehow or other he had gone to the house which Lillian had rented the previous year, and had been unable sooner to locate her present abode. He arrived quite out of breath, an hour late, and considerably disturbed.

One of the pleasantest recollections I have of California is the evening Lillian and I went to a “bowl” concert just a week or so before coming East for good. It was a night of brilliant moonlight, unusually warm for that climate and perfect for a concert in the open air. I remember as we drove homeward after it was all over, that we talked of our years together in California, of all the drama and comedy we had shared there, and agreed that it hadn’t been such an unpleasant time after all.

Then, presently, they were off for New York; Lillian, her Mother; the nurse, Miss Davies; Miss Moir; John, the poll-parrot, which they had got twelve years before at Denishawn; two dogs; three canary-birds, and a bus-load of hand luggage.

As usual, Lillian had worked up to the last minute, had made one or more scenes of “The Enemy” the morning of her departure. Little she guessed, when she walked out of the studio, that those were the last scenes in silent pictures she would ever make, that all unsuspected, another beautiful craft was about to be relegated to that limbo of outworn things which holds the painted panorama and the wood engraving. During fifteen years, she had been a unique figure in an industry which she had watched grow, almost from infancy, to a mighty maturity, and which was now at the moment of dissolution. That Lillian did not see this is not surprising, but that the great producers, with ears supposedly close to the ground, their research departments always alert, should have taken so little account of the warning voices (literally that), is astonishing.

Of Lillian’s pictures, I believe there are three on which her screen fame rests. In many there are distinguished scenes: in “The White Sister,” for instance; in “Romola,” in “Wind,” and in “Way Down East.” But of those which were consistently good, I should name, in order, “Broken Blossoms,” “La BohÊme” and “The Scarlet Letter” as those for which she will be longest remembered: and this because of their exquisite beauty and their suitability to her special gifts.

As to what Lillian did for the picture world, I am troubled by a lack of knowledge. There are moments when it would seem that very little has been done for it, by anybody. I suspect, however, that she did more than now appears. She had a wide following among the picture players, to whom, through example alone, she must have taught restraint, delicacy—in a word, good manners. In a hundred pages I could not say more, or wish to.