The car was a handsomer car than their own, and in the quietest taste. Polly had somewhat softened the truth in the matter of its tender. Roger had protested mightily   
against offering the car to the Winfields, but Sheila and Polly had taken it away from him.
 
He had resisted their scheme for the dinner with even greater vigor, but Polly mocked him and gave her orders. Seeing himself committed to the plot, he said, “Well, 
 
if we’ve got to have this try-out performance we’ll make a production of it with complete change of costumes, calciums, and extra people.”
 
Polly and Roger did not approve of Bret any more than the Winfields approved of Sheila; but they resolved to jolt the Philistines while they were at it.
 
After a day in the Kemble limousine the Winfields picked up Sheila, who had been spending an hour on her toilet, though she apologized for the wreckage of rehearsals.
 
She dazzled both of them with her beauty. She did most of the talking, but permitted restful silences for meditation. The Winfields were as shy and as staring as 
 
children. It was the first time they had been so close to an actress.
 
The Kemble cottage on Long Island was a pleasant enough structure at any time, but at night under a flattering moon it looked twice its importance.
 
The dinner was elaborate and the guests impressive. Roger apologized for the presence of a famous millionaire, Tilton, his wife, and their visitor Lady Braithwaite. He 
 
said that they had been invited before, though it would have been more accurate to say that they had been implored at the last moment, and had consented because Roger 
 
said he needed them.
 
Sheila never acted harder. She never suffered worse from stage-fright and never concealed it more completely. She suffered both as author and as actor. Her little 
 
comedy was, like Hamlet’s brief tragedy, produced for an ulterior purpose. Which it accomplished.
 
The Kembles had succeeded in shifting the burden of discomfort to their observers. The Winfields felt hopelessly small town. Polly and Sheila were exquisitely 
 
gracious, and Lady Braithwaite kept my-dearing Polly, while the millionaire called Kemble by his first name. Roger set old Winfield roaring over his stories and, as if 
 
quite casually, he let fall occasional allusions to the prosperity of prosperous stage people. He referred to the fact that a certain actress, “poor Nina Fielding,” 
 
had “had a bad season, and cleared only sixty thousand dollars.”
 
Tilton exclaimed, “Impossible! that’s equivalent to six per cent, on a million dollars.”
 
Roger shrugged his shoulders. “Well, there are others that make more, and if Nina is worth a million, Sheila is worth two of her. And she’ll prove it, too. And why 
 
shouldn’t actors get rich? They do the world as much good as your manufacturers of shoes and electricity and automobiles. Why shouldn’t they make as much money?”
 
Tilton said: “Well, perhaps they should, but they haven’t done so till recently. It’s a big change from the time when you actors were rated as beggars and 
 
vagabonds; you’ll admit that much, won’t you?”
 
He had touched Kemble on a sensitive spot, a subject that he had fumed over and studied. Roger was always ready to deliver a lecture on the topic. He blustered now:
 
“That old idiocy! Do you believe it, too? Don’t you know that the law that branded actors as vagrants referred only to actors without a license and not enrolled in 
 
an authorized company? At that very time the chief noblemen had their own troupes and the actors were entertained royally in castles and palaces.
 
“For a time the monks and nuns used to give plays, and there was a female playwright who was a nun in the tenth century. The Church sometimes fought against the 
 
theater during the dark ages, but so it fought against sculpture and painting the human form. Actors were forbidden Christian burial once and were treated as outlaws, 
 
but so were the Catholics in Protestant countries and Protestants in Catholic regions, and Presbyterians and Episcopalians in each other’s realms, and Quakers in 
 
Boston.
 
“The Puritans did not believe in the theater any more than the theater believed in the Puritans, and there was a period in England when plays had to be given secretly 
 
in private houses. But what does that prove? Religious services had to be given the same way; and political meetings.
 
“There are plenty of people who hate the theater to-day. It always will have enemies—like the other sciences and arts.
 
“But one thing is sure. Wherever actors have been permitted at all, they have always gone with the best people. Several English actors have been knighted recently, 
 
but that’s nothing new. The actor Roscius was knighted at Rome in 50 b.c. In Greece they carved the successful actors’ names in stone.
 
“We made big money then, too. The actor ?sopus—Cicero’s friend—left his good-for-nothing son so much money that the cub dissolved a pearl in vinegar and drank it. 
 
He tossed off what would amount, in our money, to a forty-thousand-dollar cocktail.
 
“In the Roman Empire actors like Paris stood so high at co............