The morning after the Jim Greeley adventure Sheila went back to her children and the seaside. She had no energy and everything bored her. The shock of the surf did not
thrill her with new energy; it chilled and weakened her. She found Dorothy all aflutter over the attentions of a rich old widower who complimented her brutally.
Dorothy called him her “conquest” and spoke of her “flirtation.” Sheila knew that she used the words rather childishly than with any significance, but her face
betrayed a certain dismay.
Dorothy bristled at the shadow of reproof. “Don’t look at me like that! I guess if Jim can butterfly around the way he does I’m not going to insult everybody that’
s nice to me.”
Sheila disclaimed any criticism, but the incident alarmed her. And she thought of what Satan provided for idle hands.
Civilization keeps robbing women of their ancient housework. Spinning, weaving, grinding corn, making clothes, and twisting lamp-lighters are gone. Their husbands do
not want them to cook or sweep or wait upon their own children. With the loss of their back-breaking, heart-withering old tasks has come a longer life of beauty and
desire and a greater leisure for curiosity. They were unhappy and discontented in their former servitude. They are unhappy and discontented in their useless freedom.
Sheila saw everywhere evidences that grown-ups, like children, must either become sloths of indolence, or find occupation, or take up mischief for a business. She
wondered and dreaded what the future might hold for herself.
The summers were not quite so hard to get through, for they had usually been periods of vacation for her. Sometimes she spent a month or two with her father and
mother, or they with her. Sometimes old Mrs. Vining visited her and shamed her with the activity that kept the veteran actress alert at seventy years.
Sheila found a cynical amusement in pitting Mrs. Vining and Bret’s mother against each other. They began always with great mutual deference, but soon the vinegar of
age began to render their comments acidulous. Mrs. Winfield had grown old in the domestic world and the church. Mrs. Vining had grown old in the wicked theater. Of
course Sheila was prejudiced, but to save her she could not discover wherein Mrs. Winfield was the better of the two. She was certainly narrower, crueler, more somber.
Moreover, she was also less industrious, for to Sheila the hallowed duties of the household were not industry at all, or at best were the proper toil for servants.
Mrs. Winfield seemed to her to be a Penelope eternally reweaving each day the same dull pattern she had woven the day before.
When the autumn came her father and mother and Mrs. Vining and the other theater folk emerged from their estivation and made ready for the year’s work, while Sheila
must return to the idleness of the village, or its more insipid dissipations.
Daughter-in-law and mother-in-law began to get on each other’s nerves. Sheila could not forget the glory of the theater. Mrs. Winfield could not outgrow her horror of
it, and she could not refrain from nagging allusions to its baleful influences. To Sheila it was a case of the sooty pot eternally railing at the simmering kettle.
One day Sheila was wrought to such a pitch of resentment that she blurted out the whole story of her encounter with Jim Greeley.
“He was no actor,” said Sheila, triumphantly, “but he tried to win his friend’s wife away.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Winfield, “but his friend’s wife was an actress.”
Against such logic Sheila saw that she would beat her head in vain. She suppressed an inclination to tear her hair out and dance on it. And she gave Mrs. Winfield up
as hopeless. Mrs. Winfield had long before given Sheila up as beyond redemption, and eventually she moved away from Blithevale to live with a widowed sister in the
Middle West.
Sheila asked herself, bitterly, “What am I getting out of life? When one trouble goes another bobs into its place.” By the time the mother-in-law retired the
children had grown up to a noisy, uncontrollable restlessness that drove the office-weary Bret frantic.
It was he, and not Sheila, that insisted on their occasional flights to New York, where they made the rounds of the theaters. Sometimes Sheila ran back on the stage to
embrace her old friends and tell them how happy she was. And they said they envied her, knowing they lied.
They always asked her, “When are you coming back?” and when she always answered, “Never,” they did not believe her. Yet they saw that discontent was aging her.
Discontent was never yet a fountain of youth.
Sheila returned to Blithevale like a caught convict. Plays came there occasionally, and Bret liked to see them as an escape from the worries he found at home or the
worries that followed him from the office. He enjoyed particularly the entertainments concocted with the much-abused mission of furnishing relaxation for the tired
business man. As if the tired business man were not an important and pathetic figure, and his refreshment one of the noblest and most needful acts of charity.
At these times when Sheila sat and watched other people playing, and often playing atrociously, the r?les that she should have played or would have enjoyed, her
homesickness for the boards swept over her in waves of anguish. Sometimes the yearning to act goaded her so cruelly that she almost swooned. She felt like a canary
full of song with her tongue cut out.
Now and then Eugene Vickery came to visit his sister Dorothy. He usually spent a deal of time with Bret and Sheila.
He was a different Eugene so far as success and failure can alter a man. That play of his which Sheila had tried in stock and Reben had allowed to lapse Eugene had
patched up and sold to another manager who had a star in tow.
Play and star had been flayed with jubilant enthusiasm by the New York critics, but had drawn enough of the public to keep them on Broadway awhile, and then had
succeeded substantially on the road in the cheaper theaters known as the “dollar houses.”
Vickery the scholar was both irritated and amuse............