“I’m sorry you feel this way, Ruth,” he said. “It seems to me Rumph plays a pretty important part in the picture. It would be rather hard to get along without him, wouldn’t it?”
To his surprise Ruth shook her head vehemently in the negative.
“Not the way I see it,” she said. “I have watched this—this afflicted creature work in other pictures, and he has never failed to make me sick with mingled pity and loathing. I have always felt—I may be wrong, but I don’t believe so—that the audience agreed with me. People go to the moving pictures to be amused and, in some cases, edified, but they don’t go to see monstrosities. It seems to me that it offends the ordinary normal-minded person to see a deformity, such as Rumph’s, exploited, brought into the limelight. It seems to me—and again I may be wrong—that I could make a far more striking, more powerful picture without Joe Rumph than with him.”
“But the book!” protested Tom. “It is necessary, isn’t it, to make the film production as near like the finished story as possible?”
“Of course,” said Ruth. “But if you will remember, the villain of the novel was no such deformed creature as Rumph. He had been crippled, it is true, in a railroad accident and his spine so hurt that he would always be a marked man, but he was no such repulsive animal as this Rumph!”
Ruth shuddered again and Tom laughed ruefully.
“I must admit myself he isn’t any beauty,” he said, beginning to stride up and down the room. “But if you should get rid of Rumph what would you do for a villain? No ordinary actor could take that part, you know.”
“No,” admitted Ruth simply. But there was the queer little secret look in her face that Tom had often surprised there when Ruth was seized by inspiration. “No ordinary actor could. But—have you noticed Carlton Brewer?”
“The one who plays the hero’s best friend—the spineless, good-natured, devoted lad whose idiocy is always getting him into laughable scrapes?” Tom wanted to know.
“The same,” said Ruth, her eyes half-closed in dreamy contemplation of some vision that only she herself could see. “His part in this picture is not impressive, I’m bound to admit, but I am convinced that that boy would make a great actor if he had only half a chance.”