Royal Street had the exhausted midnight desertion of an avenue given over during the day to brisk business and the shuffle of crowds. A parked taxi waited hopefully at a corner. Fog was coming in on a damp east wind. “You’re a worker, kid,” Wylie said. “You’ve got to work in this game. When you put on a show, the listeners hear it only once; it’s got to be good that one time. I don’t spare myself; I don’t spare my casts. I like an actor who’ll go along with me and take it.” He stood on Royal Street and rubbed his chin. “What’s Carver doing for you?” “He got me station auditions,” Joe said. It came to him with a shock of surprise that he hadn’t thought of Amby all day. Or of the McCoy Building. “Nobody has to get anybody station auditions. Anything else?” “He got me a bit part in _I Want Work_.” “Funny! I always thought FKIP picked its own casts. What’s he getting?” “Fifty per cent until I’m twenty-one.” Wylie made a sound with his lips. “Think you could leave word some place that Carver’d pick up?” Joe nodded. “I think so.” “When I use an actor who has an agent, I like to talk to that agent. Tell Carver I’ll be looking for him to-morrow.” There was an oasis of light and life outside the FKIP Building where a loudspeaker from the hall brought the blare of a late program to the street. The Northend bus carried a handful of sleepy passengers. Joe thought with surprise: “I’m not tired to-night.” Radio dealt you a life that was so full, so packed with surprise, so different. Amby Carver, for instance. He had ideas about Amby, but he wasn’t quite sure. Archie Munn in a tilted chair, philosophic, resigned. Did all radio performers haunt producers’ offices and spend anxious hours in anterooms? Lucille Borden, too hard, too tough for the lead in the Munson show. Two young singers “at liberty,” probably almost broke in a strange city, looking for an engagement and trying to hide their worry behind a mask of sparkling animation. Show business! Vic Wylie going into wild, creative trances. Vic Wylie pleading, Vic Wylie storming, Vic Wylie cutting you into inch pieces, Vic Wylie insulting you with maddening sarcasm. You hated him. You loathed him. You—you’d do anything for him any day in the week, every week. A light burned upstairs in the Carlin home. “That you, Joe?” his mother called. “A late rehearsal,” said Joe. “You’d never guess where. In a restaurant.” All at once he began to laugh. And yet, as he dropped off to sleep, his thoughts were not with a strange rehearsal in a restaurant, but with books. Romance and adventure! How could his father sell romance and adventure on the air? A nervous Ambrose Carver telephoned him in the morning. “What does Vic want, Joe?” “He says he likes to talk to an actor’s agent.” “Well—Did he say what time? How about three? You can go in with me and sort of break the ice.” “What ice? Isn’t he a great friend of yours?”