The evening lifted his spirits so much that the projectionist put on a second film. This maneuver took four minutes, during which Wilhelm elected to use the water closet that the projectionist had used earlier.

There was a magazine on a small stone gargoyle that crouched between the sink and the windowsill. Photoplay. An edition from February with the lovely Alma Rubens holding a powder puff on the cover.

Inside were glamorous photographs of the Talmadge sisters, the comic Bebe Daniels, followed by a profile of Mary Miles Minter, who, the Kaiser learned, was fifteen years old and whose name was once Juliet Shelby, named for the Shakespeare heroine. There was a full-page photograph, exquisitely composed, of her feeding swans while attended by her mother and grandmother. The accompanying story had a sentence that he realized he was reading and rereading as if it were a coded telegram.

She has quick, intuitive likes and dislikes and, as soon as she meets people, associates them with some color or combination of colors that seem to suit them most.

He flipped to the cover of the magazine—it cost twenty cents—then back to that sentence. He had no understanding of why someone would pay twenty cents to learn this. The young Miss Minter felt Maude Fiske was beige, Mary Pickford marigold with a narrow stripe of violet, and Marshal Foch was red and blue. The page ended here, and for the briefest second, the Kaiser wondered, should he turn the page, if he might appear in her thoughts. What color did Mary Miles Minter think he was?

The idiocy of having been sucked into this thought caused him to fling the magazine away. It landed on the tile with a skid. Alas, nature was not to be hurried, and with a sigh he used his toe to shuttle Photoplay back into his grasp. A story about a stenographer who was now an actress. Another story that won five hundred dollars for its author, who was now going to be a scenario writer for Metro Pictures. Then photos of Eileen Percy, a beauty, knitting a scarf for servicemen, followed by Roscoe Arbuckle, apparently a fat comedian, showing how he had lost weight by conserving food for the war effort. And a page of prose by Douglas Fairbanks, or so it was said.

He understood the subtext: those people onscreen weren’t that different from you, and here was your chance to commune with them as they pretended to be people. And you had a chance, whether stenographer or scenario writer, to elevate your station. We are not so different, it promised, which made him chuckle.