The girl from Hollywood

by Edgar Rice Burroughs

The suddenly widening childish eyes meant nothing to the shallow mind of the callow little shrimp, whose brain pan would doubtless have burst under the pressure of a single noble thought. As she turned quickly and walked away, he laughed aloud. She had not gone back to that studio.

In the months that followed she had had many similar experiences, until she had become hardened enough to feel the sense of shame and insult less strongly than at first. She could talk back to them now, and tell them what she thought of them; but she found that she got fewer and fewer engagements. There was always enough to feed and clothe her, and to pay for the little room she rented; but there seemed to be no future, and that had been all that she cared about.

She would not have minded hard work—she had expected that. Nor did she fear disappointments and a slow, tedious road; for though she was but a young girl, she was not without character, and she had a good head on those trim shoulders of hers. She was unsophisticated, yet mature, too, for her years; for she had always helped her mother to plan the conservation of their meager resources.

Many times she had wanted to go back to her mother, but she had stayed on, because she still had hopes, and because she shrank from the fact of defeat admitted. How often she cried herself to sleep in those lonely nights, after days of bitter disillusionment! The great ambition that had been her joy was now her sorrow. The vain little conceit that she had woven about her screen name was but a pathetic memory.

She had never told her mother that she had taken the name of Gaza de Lure, for she had dreamed of the time when it would leap into national prominence overnight in some wonderful picture, and her mother, unknowing, would see the film and recognize her. How often she had pictured the scene in their little theater at home—her sudden recognition by her mother and their friends—the surprise, the incredulity, and then the pride and happiness in her mother’s face! How they would whisper! And after the show they would gather around her mother, all excitedly talking at the same time.

And then she had met Wilson Crumb. She had had a small part in a picture in which he played lead, and which he also directed. He had been very kind to her, very courteous. She had thought him handsome, notwithstanding a certain weakness in his face; but what had attracted her most was the uniform courtesy of his attitude toward all the women of the company. Here at last, she thought, she had found a real gentleman whom she could trust implicitly; and once again her ambition lifted its drooping head.

She thought of what another girl had once told her—an older girl, who had been in pictures for several years.

“They are not all bad, dear,” her friend had said. “There are good and bad in the picture game, just as there are in any sort of business. It’s been your rotten luck to run up against a lot of the bad ones.”

The first picture finished, Crumb had cast her for a more important part in another, and she had made good in both. Before the second picture was completed, the company that employed Crumb offered her a five-year contract. It was only for fifty dollars a week; but it included a clause which automatically increased the salary to one hundred a week, two hundred and fifty, and then five hundred dollars in the event that they starred her. She knew that it was to Crumb that she owed the contract—Crumb had seen to that.

Very gradually, then—so gradually and insidiously that the girl could never recall just when it had started—Crumb commenced to make love to her. At first it took only the form of minor attentions—little courtesies and thoughtful acts; but after a while he spoke of love—very gently and very tenderly, as any man might have done.