and cooperative and acquired the proper attitudes for successful community living. He gave up the old silver voluntarily, he accepted the Youth Bed, he looked at the Happy Clown, and he did much better in kiddie-garden. He even joined in the group experimentation and was not sick any more, though he could not keep himself from losing color.

They were pleased with him at the clinic and after a few months discharged him. By the time Steven was twelve and had made the Happy Tour and joined the Happy Scouts and had a happy affair, involving experimentation, with a neighbor's daughter, Harriet and Richard ceased to worry about him. If sometimes he felt so tightly strung-up that a storm of tears was his only relief, he kept the tears quiet.

He was graduated from high school at sixteen and from college at twenty, having read all he could of the silent books in the scant high school library and the more ample university one, and having wisely elected to appear more stupid than he was. Even his I.Q. was now judged to be only slightly above normal. He left college with honors, popularity and a reputation as an actor. He took the lead in all the dramatic club plays, having particular success in the reproduction of a Happy Clown program. Steven, of course, was the Happy Clown. He enrolled at once in the New York School of Television Arts, and his mother cried when he left home to live in the School dormitory.

Steven did well at Television Arts, soon taking more leads than was customary in School productions, which were organized on a strictly repertory basis. He did not stay to graduate, being snatched away in his first year by a talent scout for a popular daytime serial, "The Happy Life."

"The Happy Life" recounted the trials of a young physician, too beautiful for his own good, who became involved in endless romantic complications. Steven was given the lead, the preceding actor having moved up to a job as understudy for the Jolly Kitten, and was an immediate success. For one thing he looked the part. He was singularly handsome in a lean dark-browed way and did not need flattering makeup or special camera angles. He had a deep vibrant voice and perfect timing. He could say, "Darling, this is tearing me to pieces!" with precisely the right intonation, and let tears come into his magnificent eyes, and make his jaw muscles jump appealingly, and hold the pose easily for the five minutes between the ten-minute pitch for Marquis cigarettes which constituted one episode of "The Happy Life." His fan mail was prodigious.

If 

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