Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/189

 dramatic talent. There is no mistaking it in a boy of nineteen. It is too rare to be overlooked. When the concert, was finished and the room was being cleared for the dance I hunted him out in the crowd on the club-house veranda and proposed that he should let me give him a letter to a playwright who, I knew, was in need of a juvenile. We were still shaking hands when I said it, and his gratitude was so violent that he all but wrung blood from my finger-ends.

"Really?" he said, half choked. "Will you? Gee!" And the rest strangled in his throat. I tried to explain that I was not doing him a favor so much as I was doing the playwright one; that the movies had taken so many presentable juveniles off the stage that there was little left but Romeos in false teeth and toupees. "If you do as well at rehearsals as you did here," I assured him, "Bidey 'll probably adopt you—to keep them from buying you away."

"Really?" he cried. "Was I all right? Gee!" He strained at my hand again. "Gee! Wait a minute!" And he turned to buck his way back through the crowd as if I had passed him the football in a scrimmage and he was going through the line for a touchdown.

He was a handsome boy, with an entire lack of self-consciousness. It was this lack that had struck me in his performance. It had shown not only in his voice, and his face, and his hands, but also in