eugene vickery’s sister dorothy lived in blithevale. having lost her first choice, bret winfield, to the scintillating sheila, she had sensibly accepted the devotion

of his rival, jim greeley, who was now a junior partner in the big chemical works where his father manufactured drug staples.

dorothy had never forgotten the child sheila, and the two women resumed their acquaintance, their souls little changed, for all their bodily evolution. they were still

two little girls playing with dolls. they were still utterly incomprehensible to each other, and the friendlier for that fact. dorothy found sheila a trifle insane,

but immensely interesting, and sheila found dorothy stodgily philistine, but thoroughly reliable, as normal as a yardstick.

sheila gave to her two children all the adoration of a madonna. they were fascinating toys to her; though at times she tired of them. she entertained them with all her

talents, wasting on the infantile private audience graces and gifts that the public would have paid thousands of dollars to see.

but the children tired of their expensive toy, too, and preferred a rag doll or a little tin automobile that banged into chair legs and turned over at the edge of a

rug.

sheila had nursed her babies with an ecstatic pride. that was more than many of the village women did. she had been amazed to learn how many bottle-fed infants there

were in town. dorothy herself strongly recommended one or two foods prepared in other factories than the mother’s veins.

dorothy was not the mother one meets in romance, but very much like the mothers next door and across the street—the ones the doctors know. her children drove her into

storms of impatience and outbursts of temper. now and then she had to get away from them for half a day or for many days. if she could not escape on a shopping prowl

to some other city she would send them off with the nurse under instructions to stay as long as the light held out. she welcomed their visits to relatives, she

encouraged them to play in other people’s yards. other mothers with headaches urged their children to play in one another’s yards. nobody knew very well where they

played or at what.

dorothy was a violent anti-suffragist and the head of the local league, whose motto was that woman’s place is in the home. she was kept away from home a good deal in

the furtherance of this creed.

jim greeley, the normal business man, spent his days at his desk, his evenings at his club, and his free afternoons at baseball games. sometimes he added a little

variety to the peace of his household by rolling in late, lyrical and incoherent.

there was a general impression about town that he found his home so well ordered that he sought a recreative disorder elsewhere. from the first meeting with him sheila

disliked the way he looked at her. his eyes, as it were, crossed swords with hers playfully and said, “do you fence?” she found the compliments he murmured to her

whenever opportunities arrived uncomfortably unctuous. but there was nothing that she could openly resent.

in the summer all the wives of blithevale whose husbands had the money or could borrow it followed the national custom and went to the seashore, the mountains,

anywhere to get away from home and husband; they took the children with them. the husbands stuck to their jobs and made occasional dashes to their families. all signs

fail in hot weather. even the churches close up. it is curious. it is even agreed that the rule about woman’s place being the home does not hold in hot weather.

dorothy and sheila and their youngsters went together one summer to a beach with nearly as much boardwalk as sand.

sheila fretted about leaving bret at his lonely grindstone. dorothy ridiculed her and told her she must get over her honeymoon. dorothy emphasized the importance of

the sea air “for the children.” she insisted that a mother’s first duty was to them. dorothy paid little enough heed to her own. she slept late, played cards,

watched the dancing, and changed her clothes with a chameleonic frequence.

sheila found that her children, like the rest, preferred the company of fellow-children and the sea to any other attractions. their mothers bored them, hampered them,

disgraced them. the children were self-sufficient, and better so. by the early evening they had played themselves into a comatose condition and never knew who took off

their shoes or put them to bed. the long evenings remained to the mothers and they formed porch-colonies, and rocked and gabbled and stared through the windows at the

dancers.

all over the country wives were enjoying their summer divorce. thousands, millions of wives deserted their husbands and loafed at great cost, and it was all right. but

for an actress to desert her husband and work—that was all wrong!

sheila felt that her husband needed her more than her children did. she pictured him distraught with longing for her. and he was—so far as his business worries gave

him time for sentimental worries. sheila left the children in charge of the governess and fled back to bret, who was enraptured at the sight of her and had an enormous

amount of factory news to tell her.

the men-folk were working in spite of the summer, and glad to be working. bret was absorbed in his business and left sheila all day to sit in the darkened oven of the

closed-up house, alone.

she contrasted her life this summer with the summer she had played in the stock company and toiled so hard to furnish amusement to the people who could not get away to

seashores or mountains. she wondered wherein her present indolence was an improvement over her period of toil.

still she was glad to be where her husband could find her in the brief entr’actes of his commercial drama. she had learned enough of the village to know that some of

the men whose wives left them for the summer found substitutes among the village belles who could not or would not leave the old town.

sheila had heard a vast amount of gossip concerning jim greeley. she had not repeated any of it to dorothy, of course. it is not according to the rules of the game and

only very unpleasant persons do it.

bret knew of jim’s repute, but did not forbid jim his house. the village was full of such scandals and it was dangerous to begin cutting and snubbing. when the

gossips whispered they made a terrifying picture of village life, yet whenever the theater was mentioned they assumed an air of pharisaic superiority.

as soon as sheila hurried back to blithevale jim greeley began to spoil her evening communions with her husband by “just dropping round.” he talked till bret yawned

him home.

still, sheila was glad to keep jim interested in respectable conversation, for dorothy’s sake. sometimes when bret had to go back to his office, after dinner, and jim

was free, he just dropped round just the same.

on these occasions he seemed to be laboring under some excitement, full of audacious impulses restrained by timidity. sheila felt a nausea at her suspicions; she was

ashamed of them.

one cruelly hot evening when bret was at the factory and the only stir of air eddied in a vine-covered corner of the big piazza she heard jim come up the walk. she did

not speak, hoping that he would go away. but he called her twice, and she had to answer.

he invited himself to sit down, and after violently casual chatter began to talk of his loneliness and her kindliness. she was his one salvation, he said.

in the dusk he was only a voice, a voice of longing and appeal, like a disembodied satan in a mood of desire. in the gloom she felt his hand brush hers, then cling.

she drew hers away. his followed. it was very strange that two beings should conflict so tangibly, audibly, without any other evidence of existence.

suddenly she knew that he was standing close to her, bending over her. she pushed her chair back and rose. unseen arms caught her to a ghost as invisible and

ineluctable as the wrestler with jacob.

sheila was horrified. she blamed herself more than jim. she hated herself and humanity. “don’t! please!” she pleaded in a whisper. she dreaded to have the servants

overhear such an encounter. jim misinterpreted her motive, clenched her tighter, and tried to find her lips with his.

“i thought you were bret’s friend,” she protested as she hid her face from him.

“i like bret,” jim whispered in a frenzy, “but i love you. and i want you to love me. you do! you must! kiss me!”

she tried to release the proved weapon of her elbow, but he held her by the wrists till she wrenched her hand loose with great pain and gave him her knuckles for a

kiss.

the shock to his self-esteem was more than to his mouth, and he let her go. she rebuked him in guttural disgust:

“i suppose you think that because i’m an actress you’ve got to be a cad.”

“no, no,” he mumbled. “it’s just because you are you, and because you are so wonderful. forgive me, won’t you?”

even as he asked for forgiveness his hand sought her arm again. she slipped away and went into the starlight and sat on the steps.

“you’d better go now,” she said, “and you’d better not come back.”

“all right,” he sighed.

in the silence she heard bret’s car far away. “sit down,” she said, “and stay awhile. and smoke!”

she had foreseen bret arriving as jim hurried away. she did not like the way it would appear. if bret’s suspicions were aroused he could not but look uneasily on her,

and once he suspected her she felt that she would never forgive him. and it was altogether odious, too, to be included in the list of women whose names were remembered

when jim greeley’s was mentioned.

and so she conspired with a knave by lies and concealments to keep peace in her husband’s home. jim lighted a cigar and dropped down on the steps, puffing with

ostentation.

sheila looked out on the innocent seeming of the village and the gentle benignity of the stars, and hated to think how much evil could cloak itself and prosper in

these deep shadows and soft lights and peaceful hours.

the car bustled to the curb, stopped while bret got out. then the chauffeur shot away with it to the garage. bret came drowsily up the walk, kissed his wife, gripped

the hand of his friend, and sat down.

jim asked how business was, and they talked shop with zest while sheila sat in utter solitude, watching the village lothario play the r?le of honest horatio.

her husband had spent the day and half the evening at his business, and yet it interested him more than sheila did. he showed no impatience to be rid of this man, no

eagerness to be alone with his wife who had given up all her own industry to be his companion.

no instinct warned him that his absorption in his business was imperiling his home, nor that his crony was a sneaking conspirator against his happiness.

sheila was wildly excited, but she pretended to be sleepy and yawningly begged to be excused. it was an hour later before bret finished talking and she heard him

exchange cheery good nights with jim greeley. when bret arrived up-stairs she pretended to be asleep. before long he was asleep, worn out with honest toil, while she

lay battling for the slumber she had not earned. she was sleeping little and ill nowadays, and she rose unrefreshed from unhappy nights to uninteresting days. the

effect on her health was growing manifest.