Life and Lillian Gish (1932)

44 Life and Lillian Gish station — oh, anywhere — Uncle High was faithful, and those little girls never ceased to remember it. Uncle High was really very tall — "six feet six, and skinny as a blue-racer" according to one of the notices. In the play there was a house-warming, at which he was one of the guests. When Uncle High entered, Lillian, the "golden-haired grandchild," was moved to examine him., They stood just at the footlights, and very deliberately she looked him up and down until the snickering audience was still. Then very gravely: "Grandpa, what is he standing on?" a line, according to Uncle High, that was "always a scream." "Uncle High" further remembers that "no matter what time of night Lillian and Dorothy had to get out of a warm, comfortable bed to catch a train, or how many times they had to be awakened to change cars, no one ever heard a whimper or complaint from either, and I cannot recall one instance where they ever found any fault with anything, and I never heard their mother speak a cross word to either of them. Lillian was just like a little mother to Dorothy, and looked after her all the time. Her whole life seemed to be to watch that nothing happened to her little sister. And Lillian only eight years old" She was, in fact, considerably less. Mrs. Gish's skilful handicraft included drawing. She had received no art instruction but her pen sketches were exquisite. She thought them poor, and destroyed them. There remains only a water-color interior — subtle in tone, atmospheric — of a quality that commands immediate attention. It seems curious that she should also have had a taste for