The incorporators of Linda Lee Inc. were not, however, long left dependent on motor-cars that plied for hire and the orange-and-black outrage on wheels which was everywhere known as "Lynn Summerlad's bus."

One of Lontaine's first acts as president of the fledgling organization was to pay out ten thousand dollars of its capital for a startling blue-and-silver car, the whim of an absent-minded motion-picture star whose sudden flitting from threats of arrest on charges of bigamy had left the car on the hands of its builders, to be picked up at what Lontaine called a bargain price. Lucinda was disposed to hold the cost immaterial, but demurred about accepting it for her personal use; and the consideration urged by Summerlad, that the more eye-arresting the colour scheme the better the advertisement for Linda Lee, failed to move her. So Lontaine felt constrained to use it himself; and Fanny demurely professed resignation, pointing out that in such a conveyance no husband would ever dare pursue any but paths of conspicuous rectitude.

For herself Lucinda eventually selected a modest landaulet of dark maroon; but it saw little service, save on shopping trips, till she began to use it for daily transportation to and from the studio.

Weeks slipped stealthily away, the rainy season waned, a Spring ensued like an Eastern Summer, with lusty vegetation, lengthening days of dry heat, and nights deliciously cooled by airs that swept through every sunless hour from the highlands to the sea; while delays on delays accumulated and still the day when "shooting" should begin lingered remotely down tomorrow's dim horizon.

Lontaine had leased studio space in the Zinn plant, which Summerlad recommended as the most modern and completely equipped on the Coast. For this the company was paying a weekly rental of fifteen hundred dollars. An expensive executive and technical staff, lacking only a director, was kicking heels of enforced idleness on full pay. A story had been selected, an old novel by a moderately popular author to which Zinn had in 1914 purchased all motion-picture rights outright for five hundred dollars and which he was now willing to part with for ten thousand as a special courtesy because he had taken such a mad fancy to Lontaine. A scenario writer, warranted by Zinn "the best in the business," had received five thousand for casting the story into continuity form, the labour of one whole week, and retired rejoicing to his hundred-and-fifty a week job in the Zinn scenario department. A reading of his bastard brain-child had persuaded Lucinda that continuity writing must be the mystery its adepts alleged; in fact, she couldn't understand the greater part of it, and what she did understand somewhat preyed upon her mind. But Lontaine seemed satisfied, Summerlad solaced her misgivings with the assurance that P. Potter Monahan simply couldn't write a poor continuity, and both agreed that Barry Nolan would know what to do to make it right when he got down to work on it.

Incidentally, he did: Nolan read it half-through, thoughtfully shied the manuscript out of a window, and dictated a continuity all his own, of which nobody but himself could make head or tail, and which at times in the course of its production seemed to puzzle even its perpetrator. But this Nolan was a resourceful lad and never hesitated to revise himself when at a loss: "That's out," he would inform his assistant; "we'll cover up the break with a subtitle. C'mon, let's shoot the close-ups;" or it might be: "Got another angle on that now. Instead of that scene where she casts him out of her life forever, I'm going to stick in some business Leslie Carter used to do in the last act of Zaza. We'll get round to that later. What's next?"

But these revelations of an unique technique, justly celebrated as such, were reserved for the indefinite future. Notwithstanding that he was under contract to Linda Lee Inc. to begin work as soon as he had finished the production he was then making, Lucinda was to be hounded through her professional dÉbut by another megaphone than Barry Nolan's.

In the engagement of that one resided the only reason for the delays. While negotiations for his services (at twice as much pay as he had ever received before) were in progress, Nolan confidently expected to be free in a fortnight. The day he signed the contract he admitted that he might possibly keep them waiting a trifle longer. It was two months later when he at length notified Lontaine that he was running up to San Francisco for a few days' rest and relaxation but would positively be "on the lot" and ready to go to work, in another week.

In the meantime Lucinda had moved to the Hollywood Hotel, the Lontaines to a furnished bungalow nearby, where they vainly pressed her to join them. She thought it wiser to decline.

"I'm far too fond of both of you to risk living with you," she explained. "It's no good deliberately placing ourselves in a position to get fed to the teeth with one another. Besides, I've got to get accustomed to shifting for myself, and it's high time I was learning to breathe in a proper motion-picture atmosphere."

This the Hollywood provided to admiration. Summerlad assured Lucinda, and on her own observation she could well believe, that at one stage or another of their careers almost every motion-picture player of consequence in the country must have registered at this hotel. Many continued to reside there, though no reason existed why they should not observe the custom of other happy holders of long-term contracts and move into homes of their own. Aside from such fixtures—and a non-professional element composed mainly of middle-aged folk with set incomes who had contracted the habit of spending their Winters and not much else in California—the hotel boasted a restless movement of birds of passage: stars of the legitimate stage brought on from New York to play in a single picture, lesser lights coming West at their own risk to solicit a "try-out;" playwrights and novelists with reputations in two continents declining to profit by the experience of innumerable predecessors, fatuously assuming that imagination, intelligence and honest workmanship had a dog's chance in the studios; directors enjoying their favorite pastime of hopping from Coast to Coast with everything paid; overlords of the cinema visiting the West Coast to look after their own or their rivals' fences and filch actors and directors from one another. These came and went by every trans-continental train. Remained the incurable addicts with yet another element, hardly less habituÉ but humbler, maintaining precarious residence in the hotel on meagre means, on remittances from home or God knew how (and, knowing, wept) hanging on desperately to hope of happier tomorrows, when they, too, would have their own cars call to take them to their daily toil, instead of trudging or trolleying from studio to studio in pursuit of the elusive day's work as an extra: a class largely feminine and insistently youthful.

With most of these Lucinda became acquainted by sight, with many she grew accustomed to exchange smiles and the time of day. They were a friendly lot, indomitably cheerful and brisk. If sheer joy of living didn't keep their eyes bright, belladonna did; their hand-painted smiles were unfailing; their slender, silken legs twinkled in vivacious by-play on veranda steps and in the public rooms; by every sign they were ever on the wing and jolly glad. Lucinda liked them all involuntarily, and wished them well; and when she came to know some of them better her heart ached for them.

This was inevitable. The most glacial reserve must have melted to the warmth of such gayly casual overtures. It was good business to know Miss Linda Lee, and they made it their business without undue delay. She had not been twenty-four hours a sister-guest before all these young things knew an astonishing lot about her that wasn't so, and a deal that was.

Lucinda was a raw tenderfoot who was going to finance her own company, a prominent stage favorite trying her luck under an assumed name, a Baltimore society beauty with the motion-picture bee in her bonnet, nobody at all except the dear friend of this or that nationally known man, who was paying to put her into pictures to get rid of her. It didn't matter who or what she was, more than what was irrefutably established: that she was Linda Lee, she had simply sloughs of coin, she was to star in her own productions, Barry Nolan had been engaged to direct her, Lynn Summerlad had gone nutty about her; all of which summed up to this, that Lucinda was in a position to utter words of power whose fruit might be days and days of work at ten or fifteen per—who knew?—perhaps the miracle of a steady job!

They made up to her saucily or shyly, according to the style they believed became them best, with assurance or with humility, with ostensible indifference, and some in open desperation. But on one point they were all agreed: they wanted work. Lucinda spoke about two or three of them to Lontaine, who laughed and advised her to recommend them to Barry Nolan's assistant, when that far day dawned on which the question of casting subordinate rÔles would be in order. She spoke to Lynn Summerlad, and was rewarded with a worried frown, the first sign of care she had ever detected in him, together with some well-chosen thoughts on the dangers of contracting haphazard hotel acquaintanceships. Lucinda explained that she hadn't sought them, they had been practically forced upon her; she could see no merit in being rude and "upstage." Summerlad retorted darkly that one never could tell; the motion-picture colony harboured any number of queer birds; it wouldn't do for her of all women to pick up with a wrong one.

"First thing you know, they'll be trying to borrow money from you."

Lucinda was silent for want of a conscience that would sanction an indignant rejoinder.

"I was afraid of this when you moved into the hotel. But then I told myself not to be a fool, you weren't the sort to encourage total strangers."

With malice, Lucinda enquired absurdly: "Are you reproaching me with relaxing from the conventions of my former milieu, Mr. Summerlad?"

"You know very well what I mean, Linda."

"You think, perhaps, I'm growing to be a shade too free and easy?"

"If you must know, I do."

"But this is, after all, Hollywood."

"No excuse for doing as the Hollywoodenheads do."

"Then, I take it, you think it might be more discreet of me to stop going about with you alone."

Since the same roof no longer sheltered them, the Lontaines had ceased invariably to include Lucinda in their plans and gaddings, as when social courtesies were extended them by people whom Lontaine met in the way of business and to whom Lucinda was not known at all. So she was enjoying some little time to herself, when Summerlad's attentions permitted; and when they didn't, felt free to follow her inclination and dispense with chaperonage on occasion, irrespective of the looks of the thing. (If anything could be held to have any particular "looks" where principles of laissez-faire and assiduous attention to one's own concerns were so generally vogue.) Linda Lee, furthermore, could do as she pleased when her pleasure must have been taboo to Mrs. Bellamy Druce.

"O Lord!" Summerlad groaned. "I might've known better than to start an argument with a woman."

"I don't relish being reproached by you for lack of decorum."

"Decorum! I'm only anxious you shan't get in with the wrong sort, be victimized or worse."

"Touching thoughtfulness on my behalf.... But Lynn: what do you mean by 'worse'?"

"Not sure I know, myself. I don't want anything to happen to worry you."

"What could?"

"Oh, I don't know. If I did, I could take measures to prevent its happening. But not so long as you insist on living here. A hotel's no place for a woman alone. People all the time coming and going.... Who knows who and what they are? You might be recognized."

"So that's what's on your mind?"

"I don't like to think of any outside influences working on you just now."

"Just now?"

"Distracting your attention from really important matters, like me and what you're going to do about me. I'm so desperately in love with you, Linda."

Lucinda said nothing for a little. She had been expecting this for days. Now that it came it found her, of course, unprepared. Nothing to complain of in that; a declaration of love always finds a woman unprepared, no matter how long she may have been preparing for it. The primitive instinct of flight from the male is deathless, though it manifest only as in that one brief moment of panic that Lucinda knew.

She was glad of the darkness of that section of the hotel veranda where they had been sitting for a quarter of an hour after returning from dÎner À deux in the city. It had seemed early to part, as people interested in each other reckon the age of an evening together—not much after ten—and since no one was visible on the veranda, Lucinda had suggested that Summerlad stop and chat a while. Now she wished she hadn't.

Not that it made much difference. This had been bound to come before long. One knew the signs in a man who had held his peace about as long as he could. Five weeks since that night when, in the Beverly Hills bungalow, she had concluded that Summerlad's interest in her was neither impersonal nor of a transitory nature....

An amazingly long time for him to wait, had she but known, a tribute to the sincerity of the passion she had inspired, to the respect in which he held her whose training had not been such as to encourage much respect for women in general. Almost anybody in Hollywood would have told her that Lynn Summerlad was "a fast worker." That no one had done so was probably due in most part to an impression that to carry such information were work of supererogation....

The worst of it was, she was glad.

How strange (and what proof of her heart's unique intricacy!) that she should be affected by such paradoxical displeasure in the pleasure it gave her to hear Lynn profess a passion of which she had been so long and well aware; as if it grated upon some slumbering sense of what was fitting; as if any reason today existed why Lynn shouldn't be in love with her and, for the matter of that, she with him (only, of course, she wasn't) or why he need hesitate to speak and she be loath to listen....

"Well, Linda?"

She put away her pensiveness, smiling softly in the darkness that enfolded them, smiling to see Summerlad bending forward in his chair, whose arm just failed to touch the arm of hers, anxiously searching her face for a clue to her mind, but with the anxiety of impatience more than the anxiety of doubt. He wanted to have her in his arms. A pleasant place to be, perhaps; but she wasn't ready yet, she was not yet sure....

"Well, my friend!" she said in amused indulgence—"so it seems you love me."

"How long have you known it?"

"Quite as long as you have loved me."

"And you——?"

"I don't know yet."

He ventured too confidently: "I don't want to hurry you——"

"You couldn't, Lynn. And—you won't be wise if you count on me."

"You don't mind my loving you, Linda?"

"No. I think it makes me happy."

"Then I'm going to count on you—unless you want me to think you're merely amusing yourself."

"But you don't think that. So be patient."

"I'm not at all sure patience and love are even related."

"Then I'm afraid the only kind of love you know is not the kind that lasts."

"If so, I'm glad I've known none that lasted; that leaves me free to be truly in love with you."

"That's rather clever of you, Lynn, almost too clever."

"I've got to be clever, I guess, to make you love me."

"Lynn, I'm afraid you're artful. Yes—and much too experienced! You'd better go now before you talk me into something that isn't real and.... If you do love me, you aren't wanting anything else."

"You'd really like to get rid of me?"

"For tonight, yes. I need to be alone to think—about you."

"Fair enough—if that's a promise."

"It's a promise."

Lucinda stood up, a maneuvre that lifted Summerlad unwillingly out of his chair. He took her hand and sketched an intention of using it to draw her to him. But she laughed quietly, shaking her head.

"Good night, my dear."

"I've never tried to kiss you, Linda...."

"And won't, I know, till I want you to."

"Confound you! That's what I get for giving you an opening to put me on my honour."

"It's more than you'd have got—or deserved—if you hadn't."

His lips barely failed to find her hand; Lucinda had drawn away in the nick of time.

"Don't go before you've answered my question, Lynn."

"Question?"

"What I'm to do about these unlucky young women?"

"Hoped you'd forgotten them."

"I can't."

"You've got too soft a heart, I'm afraid, Linda. I don't see why you always let it rule your head—except about me."

"Perhaps it's a good sign, though."

"I'm sure I don't know how to advise you. Obviously you can't turn Linda Lee Inc. into a refuge for misguided females."

"There's one girl in especial I'm worried about, Lynn. She seems so ill and wretched. And even so, she's pretty. I'm sure a little happiness would make her radiant. Why can't we find or make a chance for her somewhere?"

"Once you start that sort of thing, the whole pack will be on your back, they won't give you a minute's peace. But if you insist.... What's her type?"

"Olive brune; about my height; and the loveliest, most tragic eyes...."

"Any experience?"

"Yes. She told me she'd been working in the East, but her health broke down and the doctors advised California. She'd been out here before, I gathered, but not in pictures. At least—I'm not sure—that's what I understood. She only got in last night, and they put her at my table in the dining-room, so we met at luncheon today."

"Lost no time boning you for a job——"

"She didn't suggest anything of the sort. I don't believe she's heard yet about my having my own company. All she said was, she hoped she wouldn't have too much trouble finding work, she needed it so desperately."

"Well, since you make a point of it, I'll see what I can do—speak to Zinn about her. What's her name?"

"Miss Marquis—Nelly Marquis, I think she said."

Summerlad had just then opened his cigarette case. After a thoughtful pause he shut it with a snap, neglecting to help himself to a cigarette, and replaced it in his pocket. Then becoming sensible of the query in Lucinda's attitude, he asked in a dull voice: "What name did you say?"

"Nelly Marquis. Why? Do you know her?"

"I know a good deal about her. Rather a bad lot, I'm afraid. Look here, Linda: I wish you'd drop her."

"Don't be stupid, Lynn."

"I'm not. I mean it. I can't very well tell you what I know, but I do wish you'd take my word for it and cut this woman out. She's really not the sort you can afford to get mixed up with."

"You're sure, Lynn? You really want me to understand she is—what you're trying to avoid saying?"

"Yes—and worse. I'm in earnest, Linda. I think you might trust me. After all, I ought to know my way about Hollywood, I've lived in it long enough."

"Of course I trust you, Lynn. I'm sorry though. I felt so sorry for her, she didn't seem one of the usual sort."

"She isn't." Summerlad gave a curt, meaning laugh. "But you said you wanted to get rid of me, and I think I'd better go before the old curiosity gets in its fine work and you ask me questions I wouldn't want to answer."

He possessed himself of Lucinda's hands again and kissed them ardently, while she looked on with lenient eyes, more than half in love already. Why, then, must she persist in hanging fire with him? Was it merely crude, primordial instinct prompting her to withstand the male till his will prevailed? Or was there something wanting in the man, some lack divined by a sense in her subtle, anonymous, and inarticulate?

Infinitely perplexed, Lucinda lingered on where Summerlad had left her, near the far end of the veranda, where it rounded the rotund corner of the hotel. Here there was always shade by day, thanks to a screen of subtropical foliage, by night a deeper gloom than elsewhere on the veranda, and at all times a better show of privacy.

The engine roared as Summerlad's car swung down the drive, then changed its tune to a thick drone as it took the boulevard, heading away for Beverly Hills. Still Lucinda rested as she was, absently observing the play of street lights on leaves whose stir was all but imperceptible in the softly flowing air.

Impossible to understand herself, to read her own heart, make up her mind....

A thin trickle of sound violated the mid-evening hush, a broken and gusty beating of stifled sobs that for a time she heard without attention, then of a sudden identified.

Windows of guest-rooms looked out on the veranda, but Lucinda had made sure these were closed and lightless before permitting Summerlad's wooing to become ardent. The semi-round room on the corner, however, had French windows let in at an angle which she could not see. After a moment she moved quietly to investigate, and discovered that one of these was open, that the sobbing had its source in a shapeless heap upon the floor in the darkness beyond.

Entering and kneeling, Lucinda touched gently the shoulder of the stricken woman. "Please!" she begged. "Can I do anything?"

In a convulsive tremor the woman choked off her sobs and lifted her face to stare vacantly. Enough light seeped in from the street to reveal the features of Nelly Marquis.

Her voice broke huskily on the hush: "Who are you?"

"Miss Lee—Linda Lee. Can't I do something——?"

With startling fury the girl struck aside Lucinda's hands and at the same time flung herself back and away.

"No!" she cried thickly. "No, no, no! Not you! Go away—please go!"

"I only wanted to help you, if I could," Lucinda explained, getting to her feet. "If you're unhappy—I'm so sorry——"

The movement must have been misinterpreted, for the girl sprang up like a threatened animal.

"I don't want your help!" she stormed throatily. "I don't want anything to do with you—only to be left alone!" She flung herself at Lucinda as if to thrust her out by force. "Go! go! go!" she screamed. Then the window slammed.

"Poor thing!" Lucinda told herself—"she must have heard...."