Photoplay (Jul - Dec 1916)

114 Photoplay Magazine there was under the surface ! If I could only make you feel how good life seems to me now ! Wanting you as I do, and empty as this place is without you, yet every minute is happy just as if some exquisite essence of you kept flowing across all the thousands of miles into my heart. Time seems endless until we see each other again — won't you please become a wonderful star right away? — and sometimes I rebel against this stupid separation. And then I wonder what you are doing out there and what is happening to you. But tljose are only moments after I've botched my work, or come to the conclusion that I'd better go back to the pick and shovel. Except for those times I am happy, you don't know how happy, just in the knowledge that you exist and that you have given me the dear blessing of your love. I feel young and radiant as if I had just burst out of some darkness into a new world all lighted. And when I come actually to realize that you do love me, I sometimes laugh at the perfectly incredible idea of it, and tell myself, "Why, this is ridiculous. She can't understand what she's doing." And then comes a letter telling me all over again that it is true, and I wonder what I've done to deserve you. "Oh, we will be happy, June. There never will have been such happiness as ours. Life is just beginning for me now, and when you're great and famous at last, and we can live the life together that we long for, I know I'll believe there is a Paradise on this earth after all. And that forces me to a confession. I don't believe Eve ever ate an apple. I think she slipped on a banana peel and made herself ridiculous, and when Adam laughed she got peevish and bounced an apple off his bean. After that, when the story got around, she moved out of Eden to escape the notoriety, and that's all there is to that yarn ! Well, bless your patience ! this is all. Best love to old Tom Briscoe, Elsie and Goldie and Elaine, and all of them. As for yourself — Continued in our next, Paul. TUNE, still smiling, folded the rustling sheets gently and then held them clasped in her hand. She was sitting on the cushions of her bedroom bay-window, wrapped in a blue quilted Japanese dressing-gown gay with pink chrysanthemums, and her luxuriant dark hair hung in two braids over her shoulders. Her knees were drawn up, and sitting as she did, her profile to the window, the clear, limpid light of closing day outlined half her face with cameo clearness, and threw the other half into complete shadow. It was a simple, unpretentious room with its white iron bed in one corner balancing the oak dresser at the window, a trunk paralleling the bed, a small oak table in the center, and a brace of the subtly treacherous chairs at points of vantage. The cream wall paper with its border of roses, and the chintz at the windows in the same pattern, lent cheerfulness ; the silver-backed dressing things on the bureau, intimacy ; photographs and three red roses in a vase on the center table, touches of color and homelikeness. For a little June mused, smiling, over the letter she had just finished, a letter thoroughly characteristic of Paul. Then, quite without warning, she experienced the queerest sensation of her life. She realized that she was going to marry him. It was as if. having forgot the fact, she had just been reminded of it. She felt for the first time in months a sense of strangeness in Paul, felt their wonderfully close union temporarily severed. This experience, compounded of uncertainty and a little fear for the future, comes^to every girl who has promised herself. But it had come to June less often than to many, perhaps, for both her own and Paul's love and faith had been tempered in the fire of suffering and sacrifice. Consequently to experience her present feeling was a revelation of what had been taking place in her life, a recognition at last of Holt. As she faced the situation fairly for the first time, June lacked any sense of guilt or wrong-doing, so gradual and pleasant had been her progress to this point. There had been a time at first when inherent. rigid scruples had disturbed her. But. like anv other normal human being plunged into a strange, new life, she had dreaded exposing these to ridicule. Especially so when she witnessed the conduct of her associates under similar circumstances. Anions; these gay folk she found betrothal and marriage regarded more lightly than at Fort McLeod. It seemed to be the fact that unless the lover or husband were on the ground in person, a girl was considered completely free, and open to any amount of attention. This fact, of course, had its foundation in the character of the work — work in which members of a company were thrown together at the studio or on "location"' often for weeks at a time. Thus, in the newness and strangeness of it all. taking her cue from her companions, she had done as they did. dreading more