"Oh."
"Each one's autographed by Florence Kelley or Gaston Mears or Mack Dodge--" He winked confidentially. "At least when Minnie McGlook out in Sauk Center gets the picture she wrote for, she _thinks_ it's autographed."
"Just a stamp?"
"Sure. It'd take 'em a good eight-hour day to autograph half of 'em. They say Mary Pickford's studio mail costs her fifty thousand a year."
"Say!"
"Sure. Fifty thousand. But it's the best kinda advertising there is--"
They drifted out of earshot and almost immediately Bloeckman appeared--Bloeckman, a dark suave gentleman, gracefully engaged in the middle forties, who greeted her with courteous warmth and told her she had not changed a bit in three years. He led the way into a great hall, as large as an armory and broken intermittently with busy sets and blinding rows of unfamiliar light. Each piece of scenery was marked in large white letters "Gaston Mears Company," "Mack Dodge Company," or simply "Films Par Excellence."
"Ever been in a studio before?"
"Never have."
She liked it. There was no heavy closeness of greasepaint, no scent of soiled and tawdry costumes which years before had revolted her behind the scenes of a musical comedy. This work was done in the clean mornings; the appurtenances seemed rich and gorgeous and new. On a set that was joyous with Manchu hangings a perfect Chinaman was going through a scene according to megaphone directions as the great glittering machine ground out its ancient moral tale for the edification of the national mind.
A red-headed man approached them and spoke with familiar deference to Bloeckman, who answered: "Hello, Debris. Want you to meet Mrs. Patch.... Mrs. Patch wants to go into pictures, as I explained to you.... All right, now, where do we go?"
Mr. Debris--the great Percy B. Debris, thought Gloria--showed them to a set which represented the interior of an office. Some chairs were drawn up around the camera, which stood in front of it, and the three of them sat down.
"Ever been in a studio before?" asked Mr. Debris, giving her a glance that was surely the quintessence of keenness. "No? Well, I'll explain exactly what's going to happen. We're going to take what we call a test in order to see how your features photograph and whether you've got natural stage presence and how you respond to coaching. There's no need to be nervous over it. I'll just have the camera-man take a few hundred feet in an episode I've got marked here in the scenario. We can tell pretty much what we want to from that."