That's always the way. Wickedness is the most fascinating study that mankind can take up. We all kid ourselves that our interest is purely "human interest"; that we can stand in the fire and not get burnt. That's one big reason Los Angeles has so carefully guarded the secret that it is in reality "the Port of Missing Girls." And since Los Angeles is merely a station which discharges passengers for Hollywood, so far as the movie struck millions are concerned, Hollywood really deserves the doubtful honor of being known as "The Port of Missing Girls" and boys and men and women. But it is the girls with whom we are most concerned. Every boy has a right to run away from home at least once in his adolescence; he hardly feels that it is worth-while to have his voice change and his pants get longer, if he doesn't prove his manhood by running away from home and half starving to death.

But girls who run away are marked for life-if they get caught and are hauled back home. Barbara LaMarr will never live down the fact that when she was fifteen years old she was abducted or ran away from home or something of the sort. The "whole truth" has been told so many times that probably Barbara herself has forgotten what really happened. But the story has become a "screen classic."

The ingenuity of the movie-struck to get to Hollywood in the first place and then to get into the studios after arrival would make a mere war strategist like von Hindenburg green with envy.

All over the country, from Hoboken to Medicine Hat, girls are saving their dimes and dollars to buy a wardrobe and a ticket to Hollywood. The thrift campaigns thought up by the banks are puny little affairs compared with the thrift urge which Hollywood-itis brings on. On the pass book of probably fifty per cent for the flapper-stenographer's savings accounts should be written in red ink, "Savings for Hollywood." Or simply "Account, Gypsy Blood."

The Credit Association, which keeps national tab on people with delinquent accounts, says that thousands of girls and women nurse an account along in their own hometowns, paying up promptly for months or even years until a sound credit rating is established, and then they purchase heavily of clothes, luggage and finery of all kinds, decamp for Hollywood, change their names and are never heard from again. A nice, ladylike procedure, to be sure. But not at all surprising to the Traveler's Aid, the YWCA, the Juvenile Hall authorities, and others, who could tell stories to make your hair stand on end.

Two great factors contribute to the delinquency of boys and girls, who are picked up in Hollywood: bad home conditions - starved natures demanding expression - and the lure of romance and adventure. Hollywood is the Mecca of the Victims of Suppressed Desires, to use a Freud term that is handled as freely as the weather in Hollywood. And young girls and boys are not the only victims to this antique but newly discovered condition. Wives of all ages, from brides to grandmothers, come to Hollywood - literally run away to Hollywood - to seek illicit love and romance.

This determination to have romantic love at any cost is the hardest problem the prevention and rescue organizations have to deal with.

A case illustrates the point beautifully.

She said she had been corresponding with Douglas Fairbanks for a long time and had come out here on definite promises. Her story was later found to be utterly false. She had stolen the money little by little from the cash drawer of her husband's small clothing store in Kansas City, and with it had provided herself with a resplendent wardrobe and a large assortment of beautiful and artistic photographs, which she thought would open sesame to a marvelous screen career. One of the first things the movie-struck wife did was to hunt up a Los Angeles photographer to get more pictures made. The photographer found her easy prey. Probably she was glad to encourage him, for shortly she moved her trunk into his studio on Third Street and he provided a flat for her, the children and the other girl. There was nothing snide about that photographer. He seemed to "spare no expense."

But feeling that the photographer after all could not get her into the movies, however grateful she might be for the flat and an endless assortment of beautiful photographs, she began to make the studios regularly, and soon had another lover, a mechanician from one of the largest studios, who became a constant visitor at the flat when the photographer was not expected. The mother worked it so that the other girl kept the babies out at picture shows most of the time.

Mrs. Lillian M. Toomey, of the Juvenile Bureau, received an appeal from the husband of the woman to help him locate his wife and babies. In some way, she got on the trail of the trunk, probably through the transfer company which had handled it and which is compelled to keep records of all calls. She called on the photographer, on pretext of wanting pictures of herself made, and nosed about until she located the trunk. She threatened him with arrest and exposure if he did not reveal the whereabouts of the missing wife. He finally confessed, to save trouble - having a wife who was not on calling terms with his mistress!

The husband was sent for and arrived post haste, to gather up his erring wife and neglected babies. But the wife, Mrs. Toomey hears from the discouraged husband, will not live with him and insists on returning to Hollywood when she can finance another trip.

"I am so good-looking that it will be no trouble for me to get into pictures," was the girl's oft-repeated defiance of the law and husband. "She'll probably slip into Hollywood by way of Pasadena next time and thus elude the watchful waiters at the station," Mrs. Toomey says regretfully. "and there will be one more unfortunate, contributing to the unsavory reputation of the movies."

The significant thing is that the seventeen-year-old beauty did not get a single day's work in pictures during the long months she was in Hollywood.

So typical that it may be recognized by hundreds of heartsick parents as well and the girl herself, is the case of a girl of fourteen, from Indianapolis, who stole $400 from her mother and left home dressed in plain gingham. She fitted herself out in Indianapolis with a brown silk dress, hat, shoes, silk stockings to match, and an expensive coat. In her suitcases she packed two suits of silk underwear. She purchased a ticket for Los Angeles via San Francisco. Through telegrams from her parents, she was found by the Traveler's Aid matron at the Southern Pacific station and turned over to the Juvenile Bureau. She was a very homely, gawky, uninteresting looking little girl, according to Mrs. Toomey, but she said naively that she has come to "shine in the movies."

The girls consulted together in low tones, overheard by Mrs. Toomey and at last decided to telegraph their mothers. Mrs. Toomey followed them to the telegraph desk, pretending to write a message while she watched. They were wiring to their mothers: "We were married today. Billy and Betty."

"You may hand those telegrams to me," said Mrs. Toomey, explaining who she was. The girls began to weep, telling each other, "We knew something like this would happen." She put the girls in Juvenile Hall until the parents could send for them. The "actors" were warned not to repeat the amusing little stunt.

The studios co-operate in every way possible with the Los Angeles and Hollywood police, Traveler's Aid and YWCA in an effort to round up every missing girl and boy. Goldwyn studios has recently announced a special system for work, requiring every girl who registers with the casting director to show credentials. If her record appears at all shady, or if her youthfulness indicates that she may be a runaway, her parents, whose names she is required to give, are notified.

The mother arrived, very ill, and at once became the ward of the Traveler's Aid and YWCA. They fed and clothed her, assisting her in every way possible in her search, hampered as it was by her lameness.

One day the mother was eating a bowl of soup in the cafeteria across the street from Universal Studios, when a girl sat down beside her. The mother rose with a cry which startled everyone in the place, crowded as it was with movie people, in make-up.

"Hallie!" The mother cried over and over. She seized the girl's hands and tried to kiss them but the girl drew away in haughty distaste. She believed her heavy make-up and her hennaed hair - she had left home a brown '"I have never seen you before! What do you mean?"

'`I have never seen you before! What do you mean?" She was in evening dress, a cheap, tarnished affair, hanging to her rather plump shoulders by tiny straps of soiled gold ribbon.

The mother wept loudly, calling upon God and man to witness that she had found her daughter at last. But the girl stoutly protested her claims, asserting she was from St. Louis, that she had never lived in Emporia. The Traveler's Aid, who has police authority, insisted upon taking the girl into custody and wired the people she names as her parents. The wire was returned marked "No such address in St. Louis."

That clinched matters, but the girl stubbornly held out. The mother became violently ill with grief and died later in the county hospital. The girl was made a ward of the state and has been put to work, and forced to care for the orphaned half-brother she still repudiates. The child recognized her instantly on his arrival in Los Angeles. Sullenly the girl goes about her work in a Los Angeles cafeteria, ready at any minute to make another break for freedom and the movies. It is a coincidence that the day her mother found her was the first day she had ever worked in pictures. If she had made a niche for herself in the studios, she would have been given a chance by the officials who took her in charge. The evening dress she had worn on set that day had been stolen from an "extra" who had kindly given her a night's lodging when she was completely out of funds.

So - parents who have been combing New York for runaways, transfer your energies to the Pacific Coast, to Hollywood, the new "Port of Missing Girls." New York is passe. No flapper especially yearns to tread Broadway. Hollywood Boulevard is heaven to her now.

And please come after them, these little runaways, suffering from "Gypsy Blood." They are cluttering up Juvenile Hall "something dreadful." And the movies haven't room for them!