What is a person to answer if, one day, a strange man knocks at his door and asks him with perfect politeness: “Would you like your daughter to try her luck in the cinema?”

This, approximately, is what happened last summer to Mrs. Archer of the village of Islington in England. While the younger of her two little girls, Helen, was playing in the street, her lightness and grace caught the eyes of the film director Hugh Stewart and the director Philip Leacock, who were in earnest search of a little girl of about her age to play an important part in the film “Innocent Sinners.” The two film men simply approached her and spoke to her, asking her name and her address, and whether she would like to work in the cinema.

The child went home and told her mother the details of the incident, but the mother paid her daughter no attention, for she knew well her runaway imagination, which seldom rested upon fact. But how great was her astonishment when, the next morning, she received an official telephone call from the film company asking the mother's permission for Helen to visit the studio for a test, which would serve as an examination to judge her cinematic gifts.

Did the mother accept? Of course! After she had talked the matter over with her husband, and the two hastened to comply with the request. But Helen did not go alone; her elder sister June, aged 14, went with her. In the evening the two sisters came back recounting the details of their exciting tests in the “city of the cinema” — and with them glad tidings and a surprise... Success in the examination had fallen to June, not to Helen! It was she who was chosen as the heroine of the film “Innocent Sinners,” for the part demands of its heroine not so much physical beauty as skill in expressing the pent-up feelings of childhood, with which June's own feelings abounded... And so the budding child began wiping the blue ink from her fingertips in preparation for setting to rehearsal

and study... Perhaps she will meet with success and become, between one night and