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
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