Dewitt shifted a little, so that he was half facing her, and could look at her without having to turn his head. If his eyes told anything of his thoughts, the President of the Great Western Film Company was curious to know how she felt about her position and her sudden fame and the work itself. Before they had worked their way into the next block, he decided that Jean was not greatly interested in any of these things, and he wondered why.
The machine slowed, swung to the curb, and crept forward and stopped in front of the Victoria. Dewitt looked at Burns and Pete Lowry, who was on the front seat.
"I thought you'd like to take a glance at the lobby display the Victoria is making," he said casually. "They are running the Lazy A series, you know,--to capacity houses, too, they tell me. Shall we get out?"
The chauffeur reached back with that gesture of toleration and infinite boredom common to his kind and swung open the door.
Robert Grant Burns started up. "Come on, Jean," he said eagerly. "I don't suppose that eternal calm of yours will ever show a wrinkle on the surface, but let's have a look, anyway."
Pete Lowry was already out and half way across the pavement. Pete had lain awake in his bed, many's the night, planning the posing of "stills" that would show Jean at her best; he had visioned them on display in theater lobbies, and now he collided with a hurrying shopper in his haste to see the actual fulfillment of those plans.
Jean herself was not so eager. She went with the others, and she saw herself pictured on Pard; on her two feet; and sitting upon a rock with her old Stetson tilted over one eye and her hair tousled with the wind. She was loading her six-shooter, and talking to Lite, who was sitting on his heels with a cigarette in his fingers, looking at her with that bottled-up look in his eyes. She did not remember when the picture was taken, but she liked that best of all. She saw herself leaning out of the window of her room at the Lazy A. She remembered that time. She was talking to Gil outside, and Pete had come up and planted his tripod directly in front of her, and had commanded her to hold her pose. She did not count them, but she had curious impressions of dozens of pictures of herself scattered here and there along the walls of the long, cool-looking lobby. Every single one of them was marked: "Jean, of the Lazy A." Just that.
On a bulletin board in the middle of the entrance, just before the marble box-office, it was lettered again in dignified black type: "JEAN OF THE LAZY A." Below was one word: "To-day."
