It must be a strangely thrilling thing to be a woman and meet a man who has been so impressed by oneself in childhood that he has never forgotten—a man who has indeed   
devoted his gifts and ambitions to the perfection of a drama to exploit one’s charms and one’s gifts, and comes back years after with the extraordinary tribute.
 
The idol needs the idolater or it is no idol, and it doubtless watches the worshiper with as much respect and trepidation as the worshiper it. That is why gods, like 
 
other artists, have always been jealous. Their trade lies in their power to attract crowds and hold them. Rivals for glory are rivals for business.
 
Vickery was Sheila’s first playwright. She could not fail to regard him as a rescuer from mediocrity, and see a glamour about him.
 
She had planned to go to a late dance that night with some people of social altitude. But she would have snubbed the abbess of all aristocracy for a playwright who 
 
came offering her transportation to the clouds.
 
She had taken her best bib and tucker to her dressing-room and she put it on for Vickery. But she could not dredge up the faintest memory of him, and he found her 
 
almost utterly strange as he stared at her between the shaded candles on the restaurant table. She was different even from the girl he had seen on the stage recoiling 
 
from Bret Winfield’s unlucky chivalry. The few months of intermission had altered her with theatrical speed. She had had her sentiments awakened by Eldon and her 
 
authority enlarged by two important r?les. Her own character was a whole repertoire.
 
When Vickery had last seen her she was playing the second young woman under her aunt’s protection; now she was a metropolitan favorite at whose side the big manager 
 
of the country sat as a sort of prime minister serving her royalty.
 
First came the necessary business of ordering a supper. Sheila’s appetite amazed Vickery, who did not realize that this was her dinner, or how hard she had worked for 
 
it.
 
When the waiter had hurried off with a speed which he would not duplicate in returning, Sheila must hear about her first acquaintance with Vickery. He spoke with 
 
enthusiasm of the little witch she had been, and described with homage her fiery interpretation of Ophelia and her maniac shrieks. He could still hear them, he said, 
 
on quiet nights. He pictured her so vividly as she had sat on his mother’s knee and defended her family name and profession that Sheila’s eyes filled with tears and 
 
she turned to Reben for confirmation of her emotions. There are few children for whom we feel kindlier than for our early selves.
 
Her eyes glistened as Vickery recounted his own boyish ambitions to write her a play; the depths of woe he had felt when he found her gone. Then he described his 
 
retrieval of her during the riot at Leroy. He told how his friend Bret Winfield had been knocked galley-west by some actor in her troupe. He had forgotten the man’s 
 
name, but his words brought Eldon back in the room and seated him like a forlorn and forgotten Banquo at the table. Sheila blushed to remember that she had owed the 
 
poor fellow a letter for a long time.
 
Then Vickery explained that Winfield had gone to her defense and not to her offense, and she felt a pang of remorse at her injustice to him, also. A pretty girl has to 
 
be unjust to so many men.
 
She had a queer thrill, too, from Vickery’s statement that Winfield had vowed to meet her some day and square himself with her; also to meet “that actor” some day 
 
and square himself with him.
 
This strange man Winfield began to loom across her horizon like an approaching Goliath. She tried to remember how he had looked, but recalled only that he was very big 
 
and that she was very much afraid of him.
 
This confusion of retrospect and prospect was dissipated, however, when Vickery began to talk of the play he had written for her. Then Sheila could see nothing but her 
 
opportunity, and that strange self an actor visualizes in a new r?le. The rest of us think of Hamlet as a certain personage. The actor thinks of “Hamlet as Myself” 
 
or “Myself as Hamlet.”
 
Vickery’s play, as Reben’s play-reader had told him, contained an idea. But an idea is as dangerous to a playwright as a loaded gun is to a child. The problem is, 
 
What will he do with it?
 
When Vickery told Sheila the central character and theme of his play she was enraptured with the possibilities. When he began to describe in detail what he had done 
 
with them she was tormented with disappointments and resentments. She gave way to little gasps of, “Oh, would she do that?” “Oh, do you think you ought to have her 
 
say that?”
 
Vickery was young and opinionated and had never seen one of his plays after the critics and the public had made tatters of it. He could only realize that he had spent 
 
months of intense thought upon every word. He was shocked at Sheila’s glib objections.
 
How could one who simply heard his story for the first time know what ought to be done with it? He forgot that a play’s prosperity, like a joke’s, lies in the ear of 
 
those who hear it for the first time.
 
He responded to Sheila’s skepticisms with all the fanatic eloquence of faith. He convinced her against her will for the moment. She liked him for his ardor. She liked 
 
the reasons he gave. She could not help feeling: “What a decent fellow he is! What a kind, wholesome view of life he takes!”
 
Woman-like, as she listened to his ideas she fell to studying his character and the features that published it. She was contrasting him with Eldon—Eldon so powerful, 
 
so handsome, so rich-voiced, so magnetic, and so obstinate; Vickery so homely, so lean, so shambling of gait and awkward of gesture, his voice so inadequate to the big 
 
emotions he had concocted. And yet Eldon only wanted to join her in the interpretation of other people’s creations. This spindle-shanks was himself a creator; he had 
 
idealized and dramatized a play from and for Sheila’s very own personality.
 
She began to think that there was something a trifle more exhilarating about an alliance with a creative genius than with just another actor. In her youth and 
 
ignorance she used the words “creative” and “genius” with reverence. She had never known a “creative genius” before—except Sir Ralph Incledon, and she loathed 
 
him. Vickery was different.
 
Suddenly in the midst of Vickery’s description of the complexest tangle of his best situation Sheila dumfounded him by saying, “You have gray eyes, haven’t you?”
 
He col............