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 AS ELSIE STONEMAN, IN “THE BIRTH OF A NATION”
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.”