An elevator boy in shirt sleeves left his car and came to the bend in the hall. “You looking for Carver? He telephoned downstairs to wait.” Joe waited. The wait dragged. He paced the dusty hall, forgot himself and leaned against the dusty wall, tried to see out through the dusty window. At noon the elevator door complained harshly and Amby Carver arrived. “Sorry, Joe. Got tied up. Waiting long?” “Two hours.” “Took me more than an hour to get John Royal long distance. You know—Royal, N.B.C., New York. National Broadcasting. Great friend of mine. Interested in one of my singers.” A key turned in the lock of 615. “What singer?” Joe asked eagerly. Amby shook his head. “No can do, Joe. My pet superstition. Had a baritone last year; thought I had him in the bag for five hundred dollars a week; talked about it. Contract fell right out of the bag. Don’t mention names anymore until a contract’s signed.” The office was furnished with the bare essentials—desk, typewriter, chairs, and a filing cabinet that looked second-hand. But what caught and held Joe’s attention raptly was a microphone in a corner, probably discarded by some studio. “Bring it out,” said Amby. “I keep it around to get young talent acclimated. Let them be around a mike long enough, even a dead mike, and they’ll never get mike fright. Just one of my little tricks.” There had been several letters pushed under the office door. The agent opened them and became absorbed. Joe lifted the microphone to the center of the floor. The instrument was unwired, unconnected, dead; and yet the feel of it, the look of it, sent electric currents through his nerves. He lost himself completely in its magic spell, and Amby’s shabby office faded and was gone. He began to whisper bits from _The Prince Laughs Last_, feeling the part again as he had felt it on the stage of Northend High. A door slammed somewhere on the floor and Joe came back to the McCoy Building with a start. Amby, delicately fingering the suspicion of a black mustache, was staring at him. “I’m coming in a door,” Amby said without preamble. “You greet me as though you’re overjoyed to see me. All right; let me hear you. Remember, you’re overjoyed.” Joe tried to call up a mental picture of the scene. He cried with ringing gaiety: “Amby! If I’m not glad—” “No, no,” said Amby. “Just ‘Hello.’ And into the mike. You got to talk, talk into the mike so that it becomes instinct.” Joe tried again. Amby’s finger tapped his upper lip. “Not quite overjoyed—just glad. You do not like me when I come in. Give me a hate ‘Hello.’” Joe spoke a thin, cold: “Hello.” “Better. If you speak ten words and two are sour, you still have eight words to put you over. But with only one word, it must be everything on that one word. When you can do it with one word, you are acting. Hate, scorn, love, doubt, fear: you do it all with one word. ‘Hello.’ You get me, Joe?”