Page:Wilson - Merton of the Movies (1922).djvu/268

 I mean. I could have found a lot who were better lookers; but the poor thing has a bedridden father and mother and a little crippled brother and a little sister that isn't well, and she's working hard to send them all to school—I mean the children, not her parents; so I saw the chance to do her a good turn, and I hope you'll feel that you can work harmoniously with her. I know I'm too darned human to be in this business" Baird looked aside to conceal his emotion.

"I'm sure, Mr. Baird, I'll get along fine with the young lady, and I think it's fine of you to give these people jobs when you could get better folks in their places."

"Well, well, we'll say no more about that," replied Baird gruffly, as one who had again hidden his too-impressionable heart. "Now ask in the outer office where that Wayne film is to-day and catch it as often as you feel you're getting any of the Edgar Wayne stuff. We'll call you up when work begins."

He saw the Edgar Wayne film, a touching story in which the timid, diffident country boy triumphed over difficulties and won the love of a pure New York society girl, meantime protecting his mother from the insulting sneers of the idle rich and being made to suffer intensely by the apparent moral wreck of his dear little sister whom a rich scoundrel lured to the great city with false promises that he would make a fine lady of her. Never before had he studied the acting method of Wayne with a definite aim in view. Now he watched until he himself became the awkward country boy. He was primed with the Wayne manner, the appealing ingenuousness, the simple embarrassments, the manly regard for the old mother, when word came that Baird was ready for him in the new piece.

This drama was strikingly like the Wayne piece he had watched, at least in its beginning. Baird, in his striving for the better things, seemed at first to have copied his model almost too faithfully. Not only was Merton to be the awkward country boy in the little hillside farmhouse,