Then there was a paragraph: “What are you doing to our Eris, Barry? I suppose it’s what you did to me, to Rosalind, to every fresh and attractive face which possessed ears to listen to your golden vocabulary. Still, I don’t see how you had time: you saw her only that one afternoon in the projection room, she tells me.
“But I suppose you’re as deadly by letter as otherwise. Like measles I suppose we all have got to have you. Eris had it harder, that’s all.
“But I’m going to tell you that when she recovers,—as we all do,—you’ll be surprised at the charming creature she is turning into.
“I honestly think she is the most intelligent girl I ever knew. She not only looks but she sees. She learns like lightning. The odd thing about her is the decided quality in her. Her mind is the mind of a gentlewoman. As for the externals—trick of voice and speech and bearing, it scarcely seems as though she acquired them. Rather they seem to have been latent in her, and have merely developed.
“Yet she tells me she is the daughter of very plain people.
“Well, Eris, in her way, is already a celebrity on the Coast. She has become quite the loveliest to look at out here. And she is a natural actress. There, my friend! Am I generous?
“Alas, Barry, she worries me. I like her, admire her, but—it seems ignoble in me—I can’t stand the competition. We can’t go on together. She’s too pretty and too clever. It seems impossible to bury her under any part, no matter how rotten.
“There’ll come a time when the Betsy Blythe Films will mean only Eris.
“If she’s going to become as good as that she ought to have her own company. She couldn’t stand such competition; nobody could; and I’m not going to.
“I don’t want to bury her; but if we go on playing together she’ll bury me. It’s right that we should part, professionally. It’s only fair to both of us.