FROM THE LIFE
his legs, where the constraint of the young actor stiffens and struts even after he has eased it up everywhere else. When his friends in the audience applauded his entrance he grinned genially, and his grin was just as contagious then as it is now. As soon as he began to speak his lines his voice took all the innumerable sliding gradations of a conversational tone, and it seemed impossible that he could do such a thing without training, yet his accent was quite obviously untrained. His r's were ferocious.
They did not matter. I had understood that the rôle of the boy in my friend's play was not a straight part.
In a few minutes Con came rushing back to me to explain that he was not really an actor; that he had done only amateur stunts; that he sang and danced, chiefly; that he had never thought of getting a part in a real play—only in musical comedy—and he had never been able to "break in" there. I promised to write a letter of introduction and mail it to him early in the morning. He bolted away again. He was in a pathetic state of pale excitement.
"Too bad!" said the man with whom I had been talking. "Nice boy, too!"
"What's too bad about him?"
"No good for anything," he said. He was the proprietor of the coal-yards on Leedy Street. "Parents' fault."
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