"I'm not sure of that. Not unless she's willing. To do her any real good, I'd have to have her under observation for some weeks. And cases like hers are peculiar, peculiarly strong-headed.... However, I'll see if I can do anything with her now, and let you know."
Three minutes after he had left, he knocked again.
"Too late, Miss Lee," he reported. "Nelly Marquis checked out about a quarter of an hour ago, they tell me at the desk—called for an auto and left no address."
XXVI
The indigene of Southern California has long since ceased to regard with much interest the publicly practised tribal customs of those clans which herd upon the motion-picture reservation. He no longer thinks he's seeing life when he comes upon troops of fairy policemen rapturously chasing their trails by broad daylight, or woebegone gentlemen with too much trousers popping out of manholes in public thoroughfares, or painfully unconscious sweethearts in broad-minded evening dress at high noon fondling each other in front of, say, the Hollywood Hotel. He no more knows a thrill when motor-loads of revellers in giddy costume and with sanguine noses blow by his unromantic bungalow at breakneck speed, preceded or followed by other cars filled with bored proletaires in workaday clothes, among them one embracing affectionately the slim young limbs of a camera tripod. And if he should chance to observe his next-door neighbour lamming the everlasting daylights out of his wife on the front lawn, he would make sure there was no camera within range before telephoning for the police.
A month of Hollywood had so accustomed Lucinda to such sights that she became a part of them, at least in as far as involved coursing through the streets in full make-up, without any sense of making herself unduly conspicuous.
She even forgot to think it strange that she, Lucinda Druce, should not resent being made love to unprofessionally, that is to say without an eye to the camera, by a man with rouge on cheeks and lips and eyelashes beaded with mascaro.
If the feeling that she had cast her lines in strange places was quick to wear off, in those three days of work with the Summerlad company, the fun of it wasn't. Lucinda threw herself into the detail of every hour with tremendous zest, and liked it all as she seldom had liked anything before.
To rise hours before the time at which use had habited her to waking, rout the drowsiness from her flesh with a cold plunge, dress hastily in her becoming white costume, snatch a bite of breakfast and dash out into the cool glow of morning sunlight to rendezvous at the studio; to pick up Lynn and Fanny for company on a cross-country race to a wild canyon of the Sierra Madre; to change to horseback when the going grew perilous for motor travel, and ride five miles farther up a trail that now ran level with the rushing waters of a mountain stream, now climbed dizzily above it on rocky ledges barely wide enough to afford foothold for one horse at a time, ending in a lovely wilderness spot which Jacques had selected because, he said, it hadn't been "shot to death"; to idle, chat and giggle with Lynn, Fanny and Alice Drake during the long delays devoted by Jacques to making up his mind what he wanted the company to do in preference to the action indicated in the continuity which he was politely presumed to be producing; to lunch al fresco, grouped round a blanket on which a decidedly rude and hearty picnic meal was spread; to frolic through a few minutes of make-believe while the camera clicked and Jacques bawled directions through a megaphone; then to drive back in the evening lull, with lights breaking out in lilac dusk like fireflies in a tinted mist; to get home so weary that she could hardly keep awake long enough to wolf down the dinner for which she was ravening, then to fling herself into the warm, all-obliterating haven of bed; and all the while to be falling more and more madly in love but still practising delectable, self-tantalizing self-denial: this wasn't work in any sense, but play, sheer play of a most gorgeous sort and of which surely one could never tire.