Sheila was passing through the meanest phase of play production when the first enthusiasms are gone and the nagging mechanics of position, intonation, and speed are   
wearing away the nerves: when those wrenches and inconsistencies of plot and character that are inevitably present in so artificial a structure as a play begin to 
 
stick out like broken bones; when scenery and property and costumes are turning up late and wrong; and when the first audience begins to loom nearer and nearer as a 
 
tidal wave toward which a ship is hurried all unready and aquiver to its safety or to disaster.
 
At such a time Sheila found the presence of Winfield a cool shelter in Sahara sands. He was an outsider; he was real; he loved her; he didn’t want her to be an 
 
actress; he didn’t want her to work; he wanted her to rest in his arms. His very angers and misunderstandings all sprang from his love of herself.
 
Yet only a few days and she must leave him. The most hateful part of the play was still to come—the process of “trying it on the dog”—on a series of “dog-towns,” 
 
where the play would be produced before small and timid audiences afraid to commit themselves either to amusement or emotion before the piece had a metropolitan 
 
verdict passed upon it.
 
It was a commonplace that the test was uncertain, yet what other test was possible? There was too much danger in throwing the piece on “cold” before the New York 
 
death-watch of the first night. That would be to hazard a great investment on the toss of a coin.
 
Sheila was cowering before the terrors that faced her. The difficulties came rushing at her one after another. She was only a young girl, after all, and she had swum 
 
out too far. Winfield was her sole rescuer from the world. The others kept driving her farther and farther out to sea. He would bring her to land.
 
The thought of separating from him for a whole theatrical season grew intolerable. Fatigue and discouragement preyed on her reserve of strength. Fear of the public 
 
swept her with flashes of cold sweat. She could not sleep; herds of nightmares stampeded across her lonely bed. She saw herself stricken with forgetfulness, with 
 
aphasia; she saw the audiences hooting at her; she read the most venomous criticism; she saw herself in train wrecks and theater fires. She saw the toppling scenery 
 
crushing her, or weight-bags dropping on her from the flies.
 
The production was heavy and complicated and Reben believed in many scenery rehearsals. There were endless periods of waiting for stage carpenters to repair mistakes, 
 
for property-men to provide important articles omitted from the property plot. The big set came in with the stairway on the wrong side. Almost the whole business of 
 
the act had to be reversed and learned over again. The last-act scene arrived in a color that made Sheila’s prettiest costume hideous. She must have a new gown or the 
 
scene must be repainted. A new gown was decided on; this detail meant hours more of fittings at the dressmaker’s.
 
The final rehearsals were merciless. Sheila left Bret at the stage door at ten o’clock one morning and did not put her head out of the theater till three o’clock the 
 
next morning. And five hours later she must stand for costume photographs in a broiling gallery.
 
Reben, utterly discouraged by the look of the play in its setting, feared to bring it into New York even after the two weeks of trial performances he had scheduled. An 
 
opportunity to get into Chicago turned up, and he canceled his other bookings. Sheila was liked in Chicago and he determined to make for there. The first performance 
 
was shifted from Red Bank, New Jersey, to Grand Rapids, Michigan.
 
Sheila was in dismay and Bret grew unmanageable. The only excuse for the excitement of both was the fact that lovers have always been the same. Romeo and Juliet would 
 
not wait for Romeo to come back from banishment. They had to be married secretly at once. The world has always had its Gretna Greens for frantic couples.
 
So this frantic couple—not content with all its other torments—must inflict mutual torment. Bret loved Sheila so bitterly that he could not endure the ordeal she was 
 
undergoing. The wearier and more harried she grew, the more he wearied and harrowed her with his doubts, his demands, his fears of losing her. He was so jealous of her 
 
ambition that he made a crime of it.
 
He looked at her with farewell in his eyes and shook his head as over her grave and groaned: “I’m going to lose you, Sheila. You’re not for me.”
 
This frightened her. She was even less willing to lose him than he her. When she demanded why he should say such things he explained that if she left him now he would 
 
never catch up with her again. Her career was too much for him, and her loss was more than he could bear.
 
She mothered him with eyes of such devoted pity that he said: “Don’t stare at me like that. You look a hundred and fifty years old.”
 
She felt so. She was his nurse and his medicine, and she was at that epoch of her soul when her function was to make a gift of herself.
 
When he sighed, “I wanted you to be my wife” it was the “my” that thrilled her by its very selfishness; it was the past tense of the verb that alarmed her.
 
“You wanted me to be!” she gasped. “Don’t you want me any more?”
 
“God knows there’s nothing else I want in the world. But I can’t have you. My mother said that I couldn’t get you; she said that your ambition and the big money 
 
ahead of you would keep you from giv............