sheila had earned a vacation. and she had nearly a thousand dollars in bank, which was pretty good for a girl of her years, and enough for a golden holiday. but her

ambition was burning fiercely now, and after a week or two of golf, tennis, surf, and dance, at her father’s long island home, she joined the summer stock company in

the middle-sized city of clinton. she did twice her usual work for half her usual salary, but she was determined to broaden her knowledge and hasten her experience.

the heat seemed intentionally vindictive. the labor was almost incredible. one week she exploited all the anguishes of “camille” for five afternoons and six

evenings. during the mornings of that week and all day sunday she rehearsed the pink plights of “the little minister,” learning the r?le of lady babbie at such odd

moments as she could steal from her meals or her slumber or her shopping tours for the necessary costumes. the next week, while she was playing lady babbie eleven

times, she was rehearsing the masterful heroine of “the lion and the mouse” of mornings. while she played this she memorized the slang of “the chorus lady” for the

following week.

before the summer was over she had lived a dozen lives and been a dozen people. she had become the pet of the town, more observed than its mayor, and more talked about

than its social leader.

she had established herself as a local goddess almost immediately, though she had no time at all for accepting the hospitalities of those who would fain have had her

to luncheons, teas, or dinners.

she had no mornings, afternoons, or evenings that she could call her own. the hardest-worked swede cook in town would have given notice if such unceasing tasks had

been inflicted on her; and the horniest-handed labor-unionist would have struck against such hours as she kept.

to the townspeople she was as care-free and work-free as a fairy, and as impossible to capture. after the matinées throngs of young women and girls waited outside the

stage door to see her pass. after the evening performances she made her way through an aisle of adoring young men. she tried not to look tired, though she was as weary

as any factory-hand after overtime.

at first she hurried past alone. later they saw a big fellow at her side who proved to be a new-comer—eldon. and now the matinée girls divided their allegiance. eldon

’s popularity quickly rivaled sheila’s. but he had even less time for making conquests, for he had a slower memory and was not so habited to stage formulas.

nor had he any heart for conquests. a certain number of notes came to his letter-box, some of them anonymous tributes from overwhelmed young maidens; some of them

brazen proffers of intrigue from women old enough to know better, or bound by their marriage lines to do better.

eldon, who had thought that vice was a city ware, and that actors were dangerous elements in a small town, got a new light on life and on the theory that women are the

pursued and not the pursuers.

but these wild-oat seeds of the clinton fast set fell upon the rock where sheila’s name was carved. he found her subtly changed. she was the same sweet, sympathetic,

helpful sheila that had been his comrade in art; but he could not recapture the sheila that had shared his dreams of love.

as in the old irish bull of the two men who met on london bridge, they called each other by name, then “looked again, and it was nayther of us.”

the sheila and eldon that met now were not the sheila and eldon that had bade each other good-by. they had not outgrown each other, but they had grown away from each

other—and behold it was neither of them.

the eldon that sheila had grown so fond of was a shy, lonely, blundering, ignorant fellow of undisclosed genius. it had delighted sheila to perceive his genius and to

mother him. he was like the last and biggest of her dolls.

but now he was no longer a boy; he was a man whose gifts had proved themselves, who had “learned his strength” before audience after audience clear across the

continent. dulcie ormerod had irritated him, but she had left him in no doubt of his power.

already he had maturity, authority, and the confidence of a young siegfried wandering through the forest and understanding the birds that sang him up and sang him

onward.

he was a total stranger to sheila. she could not mother him. he did not come to her to cure his despair and kindle ambition. he came to her in the armor of success and

claimed her for his own.

at first he alarmed her more than reben had. she felt that he could never truly belong to her again. and she felt no impulse to belong to him. she liked him, admired

him, enjoyed his brilliant personality, but rather as a gracious competitor than any longer as a partner.

to eldon, however, the change endeared sheila only the more. she was fairer and wiser and surer, worthier of his love in every way. he could not understand why she

loved him no longer. but he could not fail to see that her heart had changed. it seemed a treachery to him, a treachery he could feel and not believe possible.

when he sought to return to the room he had tenanted in her heart he found it locked or demolished. he could never gain a moment of solitude with her. their former

long walks were not to be thought of.

“clinton isn’t chicago, old boy,” sheila said. “everybody in this town knows us a mile off. and we’ve no time for flirting or philandering or whatever it was we

were doing in chicago. i’m too busy, and so are you.”

eldon’s heart suffered at each rebuff. he murmured to her that she was cruel. he thought of her as false when he thought of her at all. but that was not so often as

he thought. he was too horribly busy.

to a layman the conditions of a stock company are almost unbelievable: the actors work double time, day and night shifts both. most of the company were used to the

life. in the course of years they had acquired immense repertoires. they had educated their memories to amazing degrees. they could study a new r?le between the acts

of the current production.

sheila and eldon had not that advantage. they spent the intermission after one act in boning up for the next, rubbing the lines into the mind as they rubbed grease-

paint into the skin.

the barge of dreams was a freight-boat for them.

when pennock wakened sheila of mornings it was like dragging her out of the grave. she came up dead; desperately resisting the recall to life. at night she sank into

her sleep as into a welcome tomb. she was on her feet almost always. her hours in the playmill averaged fourteen a day. she grew haggard and petulant. eldon feared for

her health.

yet the theater was her gymnasium. she was acquiring a post-graduate knowledge of stage practice, supplying her mind as well as her muscles, like a pianist who

practises incessantly. if she kept at it too long she would become a mere audience-pounder. if she quit in time the training would be of vast profit.

one stifling afternoon eldon begged her to take a drive with him between matinée and night, out to “lotus land,” a tawdry pleasure-park where one could look at water

and eat in an arbor. she begged off because she was too busy.

she had no sooner finished the refusal than he saw her face light up. he saw her run to meet a lank, lugubrious young man. he saw idolatry in the stranger’s eyes and

extraordinary graciousness in sheila’s. he heard sheila invite the new-comer to buggy-ride with her to “lotus land” and take dinner outdoors.

eldon dashed away in a rage of jealousy. sheila did not reach the theater that night till after eight o’clock.

she nearly committed the unpardonable sin of holding the curtain. the stage-manager and eldon were out looking for her when they saw a bouncing buggy drawn by a lean

livery horse driven by a lean, liverish man. up the alley they clattered and sheila leaped out before the contraption stopped.

she called to the driver: “g’-by! see you after the performance.” she called to the stage-manager: “don’t say it! just fine me!” eldon held the stage door open

for her. all she said was: “whew! don’t shoot!”

she had no time to make up or change her costume. she walked on as she was.

after the performance eldon came down in his street clothes to demand an explanation. he saw the same stranger waiting for sheila, and dared not trust himself to speak

to her.

the next morning, at rehearsal, he said to sheila, with laborious virulence, “where’s your friend this morning?”

“he went back to town.”

“how lonely you must feel!”

sheila was startled at the same twang of jealousy she had heard in reben’s voice when she and vickery first met. it angered and alarmed her a little. she explained to

eldon who vickery was, and that he had run down to discuss his new version of the play. eldon was mollified a little, but sheila was not.

vickery, whose health was none too good, found it tedious to make a journey from braywood to clinton every time he wanted to ask sheila’s advice on a difficulty. he

suddenly appeared in clinton with all his luggage. he put it on the ground of convenience in his work. it must have been partly on sheila’s account.

eldon noted that sheila, who had been rarely able to spare a moment with him, found numberless opportunities to consult with this playwright. sheila’s excuse was that

business compelled her to keep in close touch with her next starring vehicle; her reason was that she found vickery oddly attractive as well as oddly irritating.

in the first place, he was writing a play for her, for the celebration of her genius. that was attractive, certainly. in the second place, he was not very strong and

not very comfortable financially. that roused a sort of mother-sense in her. she felt as much enthusiasm for his career as for her own. and then, of course, he

proceeded to fall in love with her. it was so easy to modulate from the praise of her gifts to the praise of her beauty, from the influence she had over the general

public to her influence over him in particular.

he exalted her as a goddess. he painted her future as the progress of venus over the ocean. he would furnish the ocean. he wrote poems to her. and it must be intensely

comforting to have poems written at you; it must be hard to remain immune to a sonnet.

vickery quoted love-scenes from his play and applied them to sheila. he very slyly attempted to persuade her to rehearse the scenes with him as hero. but that was not

easy when they were buggy-riding.

when he grew demonstrative she could hardly elbow his teeth down his throat; for his manner was not reben’s. it needed no blow to quell poor vickery’s hopes. it

needed hardly a rebuke. it needed nothing more than a lack of response to his ardor. then his wings would droop as if he found a vacuum beneath them.

to repel reben even by force of arms had seemed the only decent thing that sheila could do. she was keeping herself precious, as her father told her to. to keep eldon

at a distance seemed to be her duty, at least until she could be sure that she loved him as he plainly loved her. but to fend off vickery’s love seemed to her a sin.

that would be quenching a fine, fiery spirit.

but, dearly as she cherished vickery, she felt no impulse to surrender, not even to that form of conquest which women call surrender. and yet she nearly loved him. her

feeling was much, much more than liking, yet somehow it was not quite loving. she longed to form a life-alliance with him, but a marriage of minds, not of bodies and

souls.

and vickery proposed a very different partnership from the league that eldon planned. eldon was awfully nice, but so all the other women thought. and if she and eldon

should marry and co-star together, there could be no success for them, not even bread and butter for two, unless lots and lots of women went crazy over eldon. sheila

had little doubt that the women would go crazy fast enough, but she wondered how she would stand it to be married to a matinée idol. she wondered if she had jealousy

in her nature—she was afraid she had.

in complete contrast with eldon’s life, vickery’s would be devoted to the obscurity of his desk and the creation of great r?les for her to publish. if any

fascinating were to be done, sheila would do it. she thought it far better for a man to keep his fascination in his wife’s name.

thus the young woman debated in her heart the merits of the rival claimants. so doubtless every woman does who has rival claimants.

sometimes when vickery was unusually harrowing in his inability to write the play right, and eldon was unusually successful in a performance, sheila would say that,

after all, the better choice would be the great, handsome, magnetic man.

playwrights and things were pretty sure to be uncertain, absent-minded, moody, querulous. she had heard much about the moods of creative geniuses and the terrible

lives they led their wives. wasn’t it byron or bulwer lytton or somebody who bit his wife’s cheek open in a quarrel at the breakfast-table or something? that would

be a nice thing for vickery to do in a hotel dining-room.

he might develop an insane jealousy of her and forbid her to appear to her best advantage. worse yet, he might devote some of his abilities to creating r?les for other

women to appear in.

he might not always be satisfied to write for his wife. in fact, now and then he had alluded to other projects and had spoken with enthusiasm of other actresses whom

sheila didn’t think much of. and, once—oh yes!—once he spoke of writing a great play for mrs. rhys, that statue in cold lava whom even reben could endure no longer.

a pretty thing it would be, wouldn’t it, to have sheila’s own husband writing a play for that rhys woman? well—humph! well! and sheila had wondered if jealousy were

part of her equipment!

between the actor and the playwright there was little choice.

a manager also had offered himself to sheila. she could have reben for the asking. if he were not so many things she couldn’t endure the thought of, he might make a

very good husband. he at least would be free from temperament and personality. two temperaments in one family would be rather dangerous.

these thoughts, if they were distinct enough to be called thoughts, drifted through her brain like flotsam on the stream of the unending demands of her work. this was

wearing her down and out till, sometimes, she resolved that whoever it might be she married he needn’t expect her to go on acting.

this pretty well cleared her slate of suitors, for reben, as well as the other two, had never suggested anything except her continuance in her career. as if a woman

had no right to rest! as if this everlasting battle were not bad for a woman!

in these humors her fatigue spoke for her. and fatigue is always the bitter critic of any trade that creates it. frequently sheila resolved to leave the stage. often,

as she fell into her bed and closed her lead-loaded eyelashes on her calcium-seared eyes and stretched her boards-weary soles down into the cool sheets, she said that

she would exchange all the glories of lecouvreur, rachel, bernhardt, and duse for the greater glory of sleeping until she had slept enough.

when pennock nagged her from her eden in the morning sheila would vow that as soon as this wretched play of that brute of a vickery was produced she would never enter

a theater again at the back door. if the vickery play were the greatest triumph of the cycle, she would let somebody else—anybody else—have it. mrs. rhys and dulcie

ormerod could toss pennies for it.