They could not, to save their lives, get through a dramatic scene together without giving the observers a sickish feeling.

To see Tracy Gray Joyce lay his hand upon the left side of his cravat and cast his eyes upward always made Luck shiver; yet Tracy Gray Joyce would he have for leading man, and none other.

To see Lenore Honiwell throw back her head, close her eyes, and heave one of those terrific motion-picture sighs always made the camera man snort; yet Luck, who before had considered her scarcely worth a civil bow when he met her, had actually coaxed her away from a director who really admired her style of acting.
And when Luck, who had always gone about his work impervious to curious onlookers, suddenly changed his method and ordered all interior sets screened in, and all bystanders away from the immediate vicinity of his exterior scenes, the Acme people began to call him "swell-headed"-- when they did not call him worse.

Even his excuse that he was working with boys new to the business and did not want them rattled failed to satisfy most of them.
The Happy Family, in the tiny, bare dressing rooms which they called box-stalls in merciless candor, were smearing their faces liberally with cold cream and still arguing among themselves over the doubtful blessing of owning as many lives as a cat, and bewailing the bruises they had received while sacrificing a few of their lives to the blood-lust of Big Medicine and Pink, the two official, Bently-Brown bad men.

Outside their two connecting "stalls" a fine drizzle was making the studio yard an empty place of churchyard gloom and incidentally justifying Luck in quitting so early.