At the corner of 3rd and Figueroa, she paused to catch her breath. Tears ran down her face; she sniffled and attempted to hold them back. She then proceeded to walk at a steady clip. She was rarely like this. Normally, Edna strolled through life with a faint smile on her face, as if she had heard a terrific joke, and would repeat it if you wanted, and even though she might get the details confused, and the punch line inverted, the two of you would be laughing so hard by then it hardly mattered. She had an orphan child’s expressive eyes that were as warm and round as pancakes, and a Junoesque body whose curves seemed seductive in a cabaret scene, comic if dunked under water, and matronly in the fadeout, when she had romanced the hero.

Although not a great beauty by local standards, which were rising by the day, she was known as a good sport. She was never the first to suggest a day at the lake, but she did keep a swimsuit by her makeup table. Levelheaded, unambitious, in no hurry to marry, a fine actress in the two-reelers, she had only one character flaw—a propensity to, when ignored at parties, faint dead away into the arms of the closest handsome man.

She had been acting for two years, neither rising nor falling in stature, but consistent in that her only leading man had been Charlie Chaplin. Whose death in a skiff off St. George Reef had just been reported to her by telephone.

So now she rocked on the heels of her worn leather boots at the corner of 6th and Olive, a block away from the Athletic Club. The wide avenues were deserted, built for crowds who hadn’t yet arrived. Los Angeles barely had Saturday nights, and Sunday mornings, unless you were a farmer, were equally desolate. It was too early for church or the fish market. The trolley cars were still in their barn. The sky was brightening and throwing shadows so deep they seemed to carry their own echoes. The architecture of the lumpen four-story Federal-style buildings—banks, offices, city departments—was safe, borrowed from other cities, as if the locals were still looking for permission actually to build here.

Edna thought this was the least picturesque corner in all of Los Angeles. Not a single girl in the whole of the United States would see this corner in a film and decide to throw off Atlanta or Omaha or Rochester. Nor, Edna thought, would she have come, not today, from Lovelock, Nevada. She clutched at her wrap as a brief, shockingly cold November wind harassed its edges. Three weeks before, she had turned twenty-one years old.