Motion Picture Magazine (Feb-Jul 1919)

I an institutional countenance, warned Annie to "mind her ways." Annie did — by keeping quiet. She kept very quiet. She locked the little green shoots safe within her heart. She kept to herself severely the quivering of her small body at the smell of the young green May, the calling of the birds, the spirals of the incense at chapel. She never alluded to the little thoughts of love that prodded her with gentle sweetness . . . elusive . . . delicious . . . She read books and thought . . . At sixteen she was working in the Modest Restaurant. She got out her working papers. In her way, she was happy. The work, she thought, was pleasant. It was somehow satisfying, in a deep, warm sort of way, to feed these coming and going but ever-hungry men. It gave ner a glow in the waste places of her heart. It gave her a place, an import, a need . . . Then she liked the cheery chatter of the dishes, the little frequent jangling of the silver, the staccato of the cash-register. At night, she had her tiny room over the restaurant. She had joined the Tabloid Library. She read a lot of books. Somehow or other, she got the nice books . . . they always told of love ... of love that sacrificed and never died . . . woman's love .. . . They told of homes, these books, and even of babies, pink and delectable . . . Love . . . home . . . pink babies . . . young May . . . Annie would dream over the dreams until her head nodded and she fell asleep . . . She was eighteen when Howard Jeffries, Jr., was piloted into the Modest Restaurant one day by Robert Underwood. Robert Underwood had been in there before. Annie had waited upon him. He had given her an exorbitant tip and had said he would "see her some more." Annie had not liked him much, altho she thought his eyes were romantic — and somehow tragical. They looked as if they were always turned inward upon himself, those eyes, as if they were forever seeing some dark secret thing . . . but he had prest her palm too closely in his own hand and his hand had been burning, and once, when she had inadvertently got his breath, there had come to her a flash-back of the blasphemous Pa. . ;£. Howard Jeffries, Jr., was different. Instantly she saw him something motherly and deep welled up in Annie. He seemed an answer to something or other, to something, she thought, rather confusedly, she had been demanding all her famished life. She was possessed by insistent -desires to serve him, to do things for him, to wait upon him. She garnished his chop with some stolen lettuce leaves and cut his bread in fantastic shapes never evolved by the Modest Restaurant, which lived faithfully up to its name. She hovered over him, then, when he glanced up at her, she shrank away and the hot blood stained her face like an early peony. Robert Underwood caught the little play and his bitter mouth curved. He knew the signs so well ... so well ... i Oftentimes, in the forty dollar a month apartment, there was not enough to eat When Howard Jeffries, Jr., glanced up at the young waitress he did not immediately glance away. This was not unusual. Howard, Jr., was in the habit of glancing. It was very much "done" by his ilk. But this, he felt, was a different kind of a glance. It was that kind of different which is all the world different from all things else . . . Howard had dreamed his dreams, too . . . after his fashion. And like Annie, he had kept them closely within. One does not dream within the precincts of a huge stone house on the Avenue, a huge stone house presided over by housekeepers with stiff skirts, impeccable butlers and footmen, governesses who forced one to live by the rule of nine and who never, never admitted the bombastic love of a very small boy into their category of paid duties. Howard Jeffries, Jr., was planned along systematically from year to year, from school to school, from vacation to vacation until he was planned methodically into a pre-selected college. Upon the attainment of which Howard Jeffries, Sr., gave a huge sigh as of one who has got a colossus off his chest and prated largely of having "brought the lad up all alone, by hand as it were . . . mother dead twenty years . . . hard job . . . well done, if he did say it himself . . . etc., etc." Everybody believed Howard Jeffries, Sr. Jeffries' millions had the most inducing effect toward belief of any sort. Everybody spoke of the devotion of Jeffries, Sr., toward Jeffries, Jr. "Beautiful," they called it. A newspaper article sobbed out the mellow fact that the "Iron Financier" had the "heart of a little che-ild." There was much pathos. LAS£