Page:Held to Answer (1916).pdf/19

 ACTING TAUGHT. Charles Kenton, character actor, temporarily disengaged, will receive a few select pupils in dramatic expression at his studio in The Albemarle. Terms reasonable.

Then John looked across aggressively at the men who had laughed. They were not laughing now, but nodding in his direction, and whispering busily.

What were they saying? That he was a joke, a failure? That he had been in this chair seven years? That he was a big, snubbed, defeated, over-workedoverworked [sic] handy-man about this big, loosely organized office? That in seven years he had neither been able to get himself promoted nor discharged? No doubt!

As if to get away from the thought, John turned from his typewriter to the open window and looked out. There was the spire of the grand old First Church down there below him. Yonder were the sky-notching business blocks of the pushing city of Los Angeles, as it was in the early nineteen hundreds. There, too, were the villa-crowned heights to the north, shut in at last by the barren ridges of the Sierra Madre Mountains, some of which, in this month of January, were snow-capped.

But here were these foolish men still nodding and whispering. Good fellows, too, but blind. What did they know about him really?

They knew that he was a stenographer, but they did not know that he was a stenographer to the glory of God!—one who cleaned his typewriter, dusted his desk, opened the mail, wrote his letters, ate, walked, slept, all to the honor of his creator—that the whole of life to him was a sort of sacrament.

They thought he was beaten and discouraged, an industrial slave, drawn helplessly into the cogs. They, poor, purblind materialists, were without vision. They did not know that there were finer things than pickles and