Bret telegraphed Sheila that he was coming to New York to see her. She telegraphed back:  
Awfully love see you but hideously busy rehearsals souls devotion.
 
These poor telegraph operators! The honey they have to transmit must fairly stick to the wires and gum up the keys.
 
Winfield determined to go, anyway—and to surprise her. He set out without warning and flew to the theater as soon as he reached New York. The tip-loving doorman 
 
declined so fiercely to take his card in that he frightened the poor swain out of the proffer of a bribe.
 
While Winfield loitered irresolutely near the stage entrance an actor strolled out to snatch a few puffs of a cigarette while he was not needed. Winfield was about to 
 
ask him to tell Miss Kemble that Mr. Winfield was waiting for her. He saw that the actor was Eldon.
 
He dodged behind the screen of a fire-escape from the gallery and slunk away unobserved. There was no fire-escape in his soul from the conflagration of jealousy that 
 
shot up at the sight of his rival, and the thought that Eldon was spending his days in Sheila’s company, while her affianced lover gnashed his teeth outside.
 
He hung about like Mary’s lamb for meekness and like Red Riding-Hood’s wolf for wrath. He would wait for Sheila to come out for lunch. Hours passed. He saw Eldon 
 
dash across the street to a little restaurant and return with a cup of coffee and a bundle of sandwiches. Ye gods, he was feeding her!
 
With all a lover’s fiendish ingenuity in devising tortures for himself, Winfield transported his soul from the vat of boiling oil to the rack and the cell of Little 
 
Ease and back again. He imagined the most ridiculous scenes in the theater and suspected Sheila of such treacheries that if he had really believed them he would surely 
 
have been cured of his love.
 
He saw that a policeman was regarding him with suspicion, and since he was faint with torture on an empty stomach, he went to a restaurant to kill time. When he 
 
returned he waited an hour before he ventured to steal upon the stage-door keeper again. Then he learned that the rehearsal had been dismissed two hours before. Aching 
 
with rage, he taxicabbed to Sheila’s hotel. She had not returned. Out riding with Eldon somewhere no doubt!
 
He went to the railroad station. He would escape from the hateful town where there was nothing but perfidy and vice. He called up the hotel to bid Sheila a bitter 
 
farewell. Pennock answered and informed him that Sheila had been at the dressmaker’s all afternoon and was just returned, so dead that Pennock had made her take a 
 
nap. She shouldn’t be disturbed till she woke, no, not for a dozen Winfields, especially as she had an evening rehearsal.
 
Winfield returned to her hotel and hung about like a process-server. He waited in the lobby, reading the evening papers, one after another, from “ears” to tail. He 
 
telephoned up to Pennock till she forbade the operator to ring the bell again.
 
The big fellow was almost hysterical when a hall-boy called him to the telephone-booth. He heard Sheila’s voice. She was fairly squealing with delight at his 
 
presence. Instantly chaos became a fresh young world, all Eden.
 
Sheila had just learned of Winfield’s arrival. She promised to be down as soon as she had scrubbed the sleep out of her eyes. She invited him to take her to dinner at 
 
Claremont before she went back to “the morgue,” as she called the theater—and meant it, for she was fagged out. Everything was wrong with the play, the cast, and, 
 
worst of all, with her costumes.
 
There was further tantalism for Bret in the greeting in the hotel lobby. A formal hand-clasp and a more ardent eye-clasp were all they dared venture. The long bright 
 
summer evening made it impossible to steal kisses in the taxicab, except a few snapshots caught as they ran under the elevated road. But they held hands and wrung 
 
fingers and talked rapturous nonsense.
 
The view of the Hudson was supremely beautiful from the restaurant piazza, until Reben arrived with his old Diana Rhys and the two of them filled the landscape like 
 
another Storm King and Dunderberg.
 
Mrs. Rhys had for some time resented Reben’s interest in Sheila and had made life infernal for him. She began on him at the table. He was furious with humiliation and 
 
swarthier with jealousy of the unknown occupant of the chair opposite Sheila.
 
Sheila explained to Winfield in hasty asides that she was in hot water. Reben did not like to have her appear in public places at all, and then only with the strictest 
 
chaperonage.
 
Winfield sniffed at such Puritanism from him.
 
“It isn’t that, honey,” Sheila said, “it’s business. He says that actresses, of all people, should lead secluded lives because—who wants to pay two dollars to 
 
see a woman who can be seen all over town for nothing? He’s planning a regular convent life for me, and he’s shutting down on all the personal publicity. I’m glad 
 
of it—for I really belong to you.
 
“Reben wants me to be especially strict because I’ve got to play innocent young girls, and he says that many a promising actress has killed herself commercially with 
 
the nice people, by thinking that it was none of the public’s business what she did outside the theater. Of course it isn’t really their business in a way, but the 
 
public make it so.
 
“And you can’t wonder at it. I know I’m not prudish or narrow, but when I see a play where a character is supposed to be terribly ignorant and pathetic and 
 
trusting, it sort of hurts the illusion when I know that the actress is really a hateful cat who has broken up a dozen homes.
 
“So you see Reben’s right. He’d come over here now and send me home if old Rhys would let him. He’s dying to know who you are. But of course I won’t tell him.”
 
This did not comfort Winfield in the least. It angered him, too, to think of Reben as right about anything; and he felt no thanks to him for his counsels of prudence. 
 
When it is insisted too strenuously that honesty is good policy, even honesty becomes suspect.
 
The tête-à-tête and the dinner were ruined and it was not yet dark enough on the way back to permit any of the embraces and kisses that Winfield was famished for. He 
 
took no pleasure even in the spectacular sunset along the Hudson—miles of assorted crimsons in the sky, with the cool green Palisades as a barrier between the radiant 
 
heavens and the long panel of the mirror-river that told the sky how beautiful it was.
 
Winfield was completely dissatisfied with life. It was peculiarly distressing to be so deeply in love with so dear a girl so deeply in love in turn, and to have her 
 
profession and its necessities brandished like a flaming sword between them.
 
This experience is likely to play an increasing part in the romances of the future as more and more women claim a larger and larger share of life outside the home. 
 
Existence has always been a process of readjustments, but certainly at no time in history has there been such a revolution as this in the relations of man and woman. 
 
From now on numbers of husbands will learn what wives have endured for ages in waiting for the spouse to come home from the shop.
 
The usual pattern of emotion was almost ludicrously reversed when Winfield took his sweetheart to her factory and left her at the door to resume her overtime night-
 
work, while he idled about in the odious leisure of a housekeeper.
 
Winfield hated the situation with all the ferocity of a lover denied, and all the indignation of an old-fashioned youth who believed in taking the woman of his choice 
 
under his wing to protect her from the world.
 
But he had chosen a girl who proposed to conquer the world and who would find the shadow under his wing too close. He felt himself as feeble and misallied as a ring-
 
dove mated with a falcon. She was an artist, a public idol, while he at best was as obscure as a vice-president; he was only the indolent heir of a self-made man.
 
He dawdled about, revolting against his dependency, till Sheila finished her rehearsal. Then she met him and they rode through the moonlit Park. She loved him 
 
immensely, but she was so exhausted that she fell asleep in his arm. He kissed the wan little moon of her face as it lay back on his shoulder. He loved her with all 
 
his might. He loved her enough to take her home to her hotel and surrender her to herself while he moped away to his o............