"Elocution?" Kenton observed, with a little grimace of derision. "No! Oratory? Not at all!" The weight of his withering scorn was tremendous. "There are no such things. It is all acting! A man speaks with the whole of himself—his eyes, his mouth, his body, his walk, his pose—everything. That’s what you need to learn. Self-expression! I can make your face fit. That’s simple enough," and Kenton waved his hand as if the re-stamping of a man’s features was the easiest thing he did. "I can make your body graceful. I can take that voice of yours and make it strong as the roar of a bull, and as soft as rich, brown velvet. Yes," and the actor leaped to his feet in growing enthusiasm, "I can make ’em all respond to every whim of what’s passing inside. But," he asked suddenly, with a penetrating glance, "will that make an orator of you? Well, that depends on what’s passing inside. It takes a great soul to make an orator—great imagination, mind, feelings, sentiments. Have you got ’em? I doubt it! I doubt it!" The old man confirmed his dubiousness with the uncomplimentary emphasis of hesitating silence. In the sincerity of his critical analysis, he had forgotten that he was trying to secure a pupil. "And yet—and yet—" his eye began to kindle as he looked, "I tell you I don’t know, boy—there’s something—there might be something behind that face of yours. It might come out, you know, _it might come out_!" Kenton drawled the last words out slowly in a deeply speculative tone, and then asked abruptly: "How old are you?" "Twenty-four," admitted John, feeling suddenly as if he confessed the years of Methuselah. But the dark eyes of the old actor sparkled, and his long, mobile lips parted in the ghost of a sigh which crept out through teeth stained yellow by years and tobacco, after which he ejaculated admiringly: "My God, but you are young!" This came as an inspiring thought to John. He did feel young, all but his eyes. What was the matter with them that the lids were so woodeny of late? Yes; he was young, despite seven submerged years, and the wings of his soul were preening. Back in the General Freight Office, John fell upon his work with happy vigor. Spat, spat, spat, and a letter was on its way from Dear Sir to Yours truly. But in the midst of these spattings, he paused to muse. "Kenton said he could make me graceful," the big fellow was communing over his typewriter, when abruptly the outer door opened and, after a single glance, John appeared to forget both his communings and his work. Swinging about, he sat transfixed, his odd features turned eccentrically handsome by a light of adoration which began to glow upon them, as if an astral presence had entered.