Eventually Vickery’s play was ready for production. At least Reben told him, with Job’s comfort:  
“We’ve all worked at it till we don’t know what it’s about. We’ve changed everything in it, so let’s put it on and get rid of it.”
 
The weather of the rehearsal week for the Vickery play was barbarously hot. The theater at night was a sea of rippling fans. The house was none the less packed; the 
 
crowd was almost always the same. People had their theater nights as they had their church nights. The prices were very low and a seat could be had for the price of an 
 
ice-cream soda. People were no hotter in the theater than on their own porches, and the play took their minds off their thermometers.
 
Reben had come down for the rehearsals. There were to be few of them—five mornings and Sunday. There was no chance to put in or take out. The actors could do no more 
 
than tack their lines to their positions.
 
Still Reben found so much fault with everything that Vickery was ready for the asylum. Sheila simply had to comfort him through the crisis. Eldon proceeded to 
 
complicate matters by developing into a fiend of jealousy. Fatigue and strain and the weather were all he could bear. The extra courtesies to Vickery were the final 
 
back-breaking straws.
 
He told Sheila he had a mind to throw the play. The distracted girl, realizing his irresponsible and perilous state, tried to tide him over the ordeal by adopting him 
 
and mothering him with melting looks and rapturous compliments. This course brought her into further difficulties with the peevish author.
 
While they were rehearsing Vickery’s play they were of course performing another.
 
By some unconscious irony the manager had chosen to revive a melodrama of arctic adventure, thinking perhaps to cool the audience with the journey to boreal regions. 
 
The actors were forced to dress in polar-bear pelts, and each costume was an ambulant Turkish bath. The men wore long wigs and false beards. The spirit gum that held 
 
the false hair in place frequently washed away from the raining pores and there were astonishingly sudden shaves that sent the audience into peals of laughter.
 
Eldon congratulated himself that his face at least was free, for he was a faithful Eskimo. But in one scene, which had been rehearsed without the properties, it was 
 
his duty to lose his life in saving his master’s life. On the first night of the performance the hero and the villain struggled on two big wabbly blocks of blue 
 
papier-maché supposed to represent icebergs. Eldon, the Eskimo, was slain and fell dead to magnificent applause. But his perspiratory glands refused to die and his 
 
diaphragm continued to pant.
 
And then his grateful master delivered a farewell eulogy over him. And as a last tribute spread across his face a great suffocating polar-bear skin! There were fifteen 
 
minutes more of the act, and Sheila in the wings wondered if Eldon would be alive or completely Desdemonatized when the curtain fell.
 
He lived, but for years after he felt smothered whenever he remembered that night.
 
During the rest of the week his master’s farewell tribute was omitted at Eldon’s request. But it was impossible to change the scene to Florida and the arctic 
 
costumes had to be endured. Sheila’s own costumes were almost fatal to her.
 
And that was the play they played afternoons and evenings while they devoted their mornings to whipping Vickery’s drama into shape.
 
And now Reben, goaded by the heat as by innumerable gnats, and fuming at the time he was wasting in the dull, hot town where there was nothing to do of evenings but 
 
walk the stupid streets or visit a moving-picture shed or see another performance of that detestable arctic play—Reben proceeded to resent Sheila’s graciousness to 
 
both actor and author and to demand a little homage for the lonely manager.
 
Sheila said to Pennock: “I’m going to run away to some nice quiet madhouse and ask for a padded cell and iron bars. I want to go before they take me. If I don’t I’
 
ll commit murder or suicide. These men! these men! these infernal men! Why don’t they let me alone?”
 
All Pennock could say was: &............