She read of another
occasion when she had either to spoil a good film or endanger her
existence as the automobile she was steering refused to answer the
brake and plunged over a cliff. Of course she would not ruin the
film. By some miracle she escaped with only a few broken bones, and
after a week in the hospital returned to the interrupted picture.
These old stories were told with such simple sincerity that she
almost believed them. But she tossed them aside and sneered:
"Bunc!"
She yawned over her own published portraits--and to be able to do
that is to be surfeited indeed.
Suddenly Kedzie stopped purring, thought fiercely, whirled to her
flank; her hands went among the papers. She remembered something,
found it at last, an article she had glanced at and forgotten
for the moment.
She snatched it up and read. It discussed the earning powers of
several film queens. It credited them with salaries ten or twenty
times as much as hers. Two or three of them had companies of their
own with their names at the head of their films.
Kedzie groaned. She rose and paced the floor, shamed, trapped,
humbled. The misers of the Hyperfilm Company paid her a beggarly
hundred dollars a week! merely featured her among other stars of
greater magnitude, while certain women had two thousand a week
and were "incorporated," whatever that was!
Kedzie longed to get at Ferriday and tell him what a sneak he was
to lure her into such a web and tie her up with such cheap ropes.
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