Lillian did not consider that she was really in the new picture. To Nell she wrote: “I am not in it in person, but my heart runs all through it—and it seems more to belong to me than all my other work together.” As of course it did—the mother who, through the ages, rocked humanity’s cradle.

She had made a number of smaller pictures, meantime—very good pictures, if we consult the notices, which even sometimes forgot to remember that she was the “most beautiful blonde in the world.” How tired she had become of that phrase! “If they want an angel on a wire, they send for me,” she told one reporter, who managed to omit Belasco, though he did call her “a young goddess” and a “daffodil.” You couldn’t stop them.

The pictures she made at this time were important only as they were steps of development—program pictures, little remembered today. “Diane of the Follies,” in which she played a kind of vamp and wore remarkable costumes, was more memorable.

“But Diane was very easy to play,” she said afterwards. “Anybody can play a character of that sort—it plays itself. It is the part of a good woman, whose colorless life has to be made interesting, that is hard.”

Her own life could hardly be said to be exciting. There were no love affairs. Plenty of opportunities, but she was always too busy for such things, or for the social life, of which there was now a good deal. “I was not gay enough for the parties; Dorothy was sought, for those. They didn’t care much about me.” And once she wrote:

“When Dorothy goes to a party, the party becomes a party: When I go to a party, I’m afraid it very often stops being a party.... She, as I once heard a girl described in a play, is like a bright flag flying in the breeze.

“All music, even the worst, seems so beautiful to her. All people amuse her.... I have fun, too, but it is only the fun I get out of apparently never-ending work.”

It was true, though: Work was her “fun”—work and study—always a book under her arm: often a French one.

And being kind to those about her—that was fun, too. She never failed to acknowledge the smallest service—from the electricians, the stage-hands, the humblest property-boy. A friend of those days writes me:

“It was not only that Lillian was courteous to the electricians and the rest; many actors are that ... she was just another workman. She happened to be before the camera, that was all.”

The little Gish family had never lived in a house, always in an apartment: in the Brentwood Apartments, and in the La Belle. But in the autumn of 1915, they leased Denishawn, home of the dancer, Ruth St. Denis, fitted for a school, plainly furnished, with dancing-floor, horizontal bar and other equipment, all of which strongly appealed to Lillian, who had been studying with Miss St. Denis, and could continue her work there.

The owner had left the beginnings of a menagerie, which they completed. At Christmas time that year, most of Lillian’s friends gave her live things. A partial census shows an owl—one-eyed, gray—eight Japanese finches, two parakeets, love-birds, two or three canaries, one little poll-parrot; another, “John” (who, in 1932, still survives); also, squirrels, a pair of golden pheasants, and a pair of peacocks that Miss St. Denis had left.

They did not remain in Denishawn; the next paragraph explains why. Lillian to Nell:

We have moved from that huge house I told you about. We were there eight months, and during the last four, we had four burglars. One was so bold as to come in through the dining-room window, all the way upstairs into Mother’s room, at the improper hour of 2:30 in the morning.

Being an old house with many squeaks, Mother knew all about him before he made his appearance, and greeted him with two bullets, the first of which hit the ceiling (she would have been terrified if she had hit him), and the second went through the railing in the hall. However, the man ran away, and the police never did catch him. All this time I was out on the sleeping-porch, petrified—could not utter a sound or move an inch. Oh, I am very brave. Imagine, Nell, being awakened from a sound sleep by your Mother tearing through the house, shooting a gun.

So they went back to apartments, permanently, as they believed.

Mrs. Gish was not very well, and wanted only to have peace. She was something of a financier; her business experience partly accounted for that, though she was a natural economist.

“Your salaries,” she told Lillian and Dorothy, “are not income, but merely an exchange in money for your natural capital of youth and health. Salaries are capital, and all above actual needs should be invested as such. The returns you get from investment are income.”

Lillian and Dorothy were making very good salaries. The day of spectacular earnings had not yet arrived, but two hundred and fifty or three hundred dollars a week left a margin for banking. The little troupers who had received ten to fifteen dollars a week, and lived on less than half of it, began to feel themselves capitalists. This friend and that suggested wonderful “buys,” and exhibited dividend slips. Then the “olive grove” epidemic broke out. Everybody was investing in olive groves, certain that every ten dollar share of stock would be worth hundreds within a few years. Lillian considered this prospect, with prayer and palpitations. The beautiful gray-green olive groves were certainly very nice. She had a balance of three hundred dollars, and one day hesitantly subscribed for that amount of stock. The palpitations grew worse. Olive groves! Why, it would take ages, and there would be so many olives, nobody would buy them. Besides, Lillian found she needed the money. She went to the office of the olive growers, and stated her case. A stout, good-natured man there listened quietly, regarded her thoughtfully, and returned her investment. What an escape—the others did not get their money back, and to date, dividends are shy.

By and by, when the three hundred had grown to as many thousand, another epidemic was in the air. Oil! Everybody caught it, including Bobby Harron, who was terribly in love with Dorothy and anxious to make the whole Gish family rich. Mrs. Gish shook her head. There was a tract of land which she thought promising. Lillian took a look at it, and was unfavorably impressed. It was just dirt—unbeautiful with weeds, and depressing tin cans. Bobby’s oil stock looked valuable, and had an attractive name, something patriotic, like “Uncle Sam,” or “Union Jack.” There is a superstition that any such name is a hoodoo, but Lillian and Bobby did not know this—not then. When Bobby pulled out his next dividend, Lillian fell.

That was about all: dividends hesitated after that, finally forgot to arrive. The stock that she had bought around 60, was quoted around 3. Bobby said it would “stage a grand come-back,” but to date it has not done so. Bobby was a sweet soul, and they thought none the less of him. “John,” the Gish parrot, to whom they had vainly tried to teach some proper things to say, acquired for himself the disconsolate wail: “Oh, dear! Oh, dear! Oh, dear!”

“Why do you suppose he does that?” Lillian asked Harry Carr, a Los Angeles newspaper man, of whom we are likely to hear again.

“That’s easy,” said Carr, “he is discussing oil stock.”

And the land? The dirt? Well, a lot of foolish people began to buy it and to cover up the weeds and things with houses, which made a lot of other foolish people want it, until its price increased ten, twenty, an-hundred-fold!