The actor tapped a cigarette against the desk. “Stella gets two nights a week as a waitress in an all-night restaurant. Lucille thought she was all set to go into a night club as a cigarette girl. The club folded up.” A match flamed and touched the cigarette. “I don’t have to do it, Joe. I love funerals. Didn’t you know?” In two sentences Archie had painted a picture. Once Joe would have said lightly: “That’s show business.” Now he couldn’t be flippant. He knew it _was_ show business—their show business. Rehearsals for hours, cutting platters that probably never sold, perhaps playing a rôle in a sustaining show day after day! And nobody paid you a dollar. Going hungry, perhaps; washing out your single shirt, as Pop Bartell did, and hanging it to dry while you slept. You dug up a job so that you could eat, but it had to be a skimpy, part-time job that permitted you to keep body and soul together, and you lavished that body and soul on radio. You lived on a sustaining hope, a feverish, burning hope, that some day all the mean, petty economies of small time would be behind you and you’d know the glory of the fame of big time. Joe said doggedly: “It won’t be that way with me.” In Wylie’s book, he had top billing. If he was good enough for Wylie, he was good enough for any of them. Time would do it. He had made the rounds to-day and had found nothing. But to-morrow.... To-morrow became another yesterday, and then another yesterday. A week passed. And still he had nothing. Once John Dennis said an automatic “Have a good summer?” as though forgetting this was not his first visit. That was the day the sway of Joe’s shoulders lost easy naturalness and became front. The bread-and-butter tide had dwindled. Those no longer making the rounds were working. Perhaps not getting any money, but at least rehearsing and auditioning. Archie Munn had caught on with a sponsored Sunday show. Soon the commercials would all be cast. After that there would be only occasional bits in shows like _I Want Work_, or the sustaining shows, originating in the studios, that paid only in experience. And actors and actresses that the producers had thus far discarded would still make the rounds, and smile a smile that was becoming fixed and mechanical, and pray for a chance at even these starvation crumbs. In show business, Joe told himself, you had to get the breaks. The breaks hadn’t yet come. They would. Either Wylie had judgment or he hadn’t. The boy was sure he had. He believed in Wylie. And yet, to-day when he reached the building that housed Vic Wylie Productions, he could not go in. With the red-headed, dynamic producer present the office was magnetized; with Wylie absent, the place was only four barren walls. He couldn’t stand barrenness—too many other things were barren. Undecided, he kept walking and approached his father’s store. He thought with surprise, “I always seem to end up here when show business gets tough.”