Halson, the stage manager, was a tall, tubercular person, with a husk in his throat and a cloudy eye. This eye seemed always to John to be cloudier still when turned on him. On the fourth day of rehearsal, these clouded looks broke out in lightning. "Stop that preaching!" Halson commanded impatiently. "You are intoning those speeches like a parrot in a pulpit. Colonel Delaro is not a bishop. He is a villain—a damned, detestable, outrageous villain! Play it faster; read those speeches more naturally. My God, you must have been playing— By the way, Hampstead, what were you playing last?" The shot was a bull’s-eye. John felt himself suddenly a monstrous fraud and had a sickening sense of predestined failure. In his soul he suddenly saw the truth. Acting was not bluffing. Acting was an art! The poorest, dullest of these people, bad as they appeared to be, knew how to read their lines more naturally than he. He was not an actor. He never had been an actor. He was only a recitationist. "What were you playing last, I say?" bullied Halson, as if suddenly suspicious. But John had rallied. "If I don’t get the experience, how will I ever become an actor," was what he said to himself. "My last season was in Shakespeare," was what he observed to Halson, with deliberate dignity. "Oh," exclaimed the stage manager, much relieved. "That explains it. I was beginning to think somebody had sawed off a blooming amateur on me." John had not deemed it prudential to add that this season in Shakespeare lasted one whole evening and consisted of some slices from the Merchant of Venice presented in the parlor of the Hotel Green in Pasadena; and the scorn with which Halson had immediately pronounced the word "amateur" sent a shiver to Hampstead’s marrow, while he congratulated himself on his discretion. Nevertheless, he suffered this day many interruptions and much kindergarten coaching from Halson and felt himself humiliated by certain overt glances from the cast. "The boobs!" thought John. "The pin-heads! They don’t know half as much as I do. They never taught a Y.M.C.A. class in public speaking; they never gave a lesson in elocution in all their lives, and here they are staring at me, because I have a little trouble mastering the mere mechanics of stage delivery. It’s simple. I’ll have it by to-morrow." But at the end of the rehearsal, John felt weak. Instead of leaving the theater, he slipped behind a curtain into one of the boxes and sank down in the gloom to be alone and think. But he was not so much alone as he thought. A voice came up out of the shadows in the orchestra circle. It was the voice of Neumeyer, the ’angel’ of the enterprise, who was even more inexperienced in things dramatic than his "heavy" man. "How do you think it’ll go?" Neumeyer had asked anxiously.