Minnie to the rapid-fire defense. "I'll bet if we didn't have that chicken stew the night Al come to dinner, and if you and pa hadn't got out your best clothes and Nettie fixed up her hair, he'd never have stuck around me the way he done, and seen to it that I was put on the right track of earnin' a lot o' money."
Money.
That is what had changed the attitude of the whole family toward Minnie. Al Kessler told them that if ever a girl stood a chance of making good in the movies, it was Minnie. He had been around the studios long enough to know how well her features would photograph. He'd get her into that line of work and he was willing to bet (yes, he'd put up real money if any of them wanted to take him up on it) that Minnie, inside of three months, would be earning no less than fifty dollars a week.
Fifty dollars a week!
Minnie, though still in a daze, could remember well the expressions on the faces of her family when Al's fist had pounded out the dazzling sum upon the dining room table. He had concluded with: "Maybe I'm wrong about the fifty bucks a week. But I believe in being conservative. That's the kind of a fellow I am, not given to exaggeration. But I know girls who haven't one half of Minnie's looks" (Minnie blushed and glanced shyly over at the mirror to arrange a stray lock of hair) "that are making today in the moving picture business close to one hundred dollars a week!"
"One hundred dollars a week! Oh, my God!" It staggered Michael Flynn. He repeated the sum several times to himself with the credulity of a child frightened though intrigued by the gross exaggeration of a fairy story.
"Why, that's nothing, Mr. Flynn," said Al easily, "there are actresses in this business that get as high as a thousand
