Eight o’clock and a section of Broadway is a throng of throngs, as if all the world were prowling for pleasure. At this theater or that, parts of the crowd turn in.   
Where many go there is success; but there are sad doorways where few cabs draw up and few people march to the lonely window; and that is a home of failure, though as 
 
much work has been done and as much money deserved. Only, the whim of the public is not for that place.
 
Eight o’clock and Sheila sits in her dressing-room in an ague of dread, painting her face and wondering why she is here, a lone woman fighting a mob for the sake of a 
 
dying man’s useless glory, and for the ruin of a living man’s schedule of life. Why is she not where Bret Winfield said a woman’s place was—at home?
 
She wonders about Bret. If she fails, if she succeeds, what does it mean to him and her? She understands that he has left her alone till now because he could not help 
 
her. But no flowers, no telegram, nothing? She looks over the heap of telegrams—no, there is nothing from him.
 
Then a note comes. He is there. Can he see her? Her heart leaps with rapture, but she dares not see him before the play. She would cry and mess her make-up, and she 
 
must enter with gaiety. She sends Pennock with word begging him to come after the play is over—“if he still wants to—if he’s not ashamed of me; tell him that.”
 
She thinks of him wincing as he is turned away from the stage door. Then she banishes the thought of him, herself, everybody but the character she is to play.
 
Outside the curtain is a throng eager to be entertained, willing to pay a fortune for entertainment, but merciless to those who fail. There is no active hostility in 
 
the audience—just the passive inertia of a dull, dreary, anxious mob afraid of being bored and cheated of an evening.
 
“Here are our hearts,” it says; “we are sick of our own lives. We do not care what your troubles are or your good intentions. We have left our homes to be made 
 
happy, or to be thrilled to that luxurious sorrow for some one else that is the highest happiness. We have come here at some expense and some inconvenience. We have a 
 
hard day ahead of us to-morrow. It is too late to go elsewhere. You have said you have a good show. Show us!”
 
Back of that glum curtain the actors, powdered, caparisoned, painted, wait in the wings like clowns for the crack of the whip—and yet also like soldiers about to 
 
receive the command to charge on trenches where unknown forces lie hidden. No one can tell whether they are to be hurled back in shame and confusion, or to sweep on in 
 
uproarious triumph. Their courage, their art, will be the same. The result will be history or oblivion, homage or ridicule.
 
It is an old story, an incessantly recurring story, a tragi-farce so commonplace that authors and actors and managers and critics make jokes of their failures and 
 
successes—afterward. But they are not jokes at the time.
 
It was no joke for the husband who had intrusted Sheila to the mercy of the public and the press, and who made one of the audience, though he quivered with an anguish 
 
of fear as each line was delivered, and an anguish of joy or woe as it scored or lapsed.
 
It was no joke to Eugene Vickery, lying in the quiet white room with the light low and one stolid stranger in white to sentinel him. It was hard not to be there where 
 
the lights were high, where the throngs heard his pen and ink made flesh and blood. It was hard not to know what the words he had put on paper sounded like to New York
 
—the Big Town of his people. He wanted to see and hear and his soul would have run there if it could have lifted his body. But that it could not do.
 
It could lift thousands of hands to applause and lift a thousand voices to cry his name, but it could not lift his own hands or his own voice.
 
The nurse, who did not understand playwrights, tried to keep him quiet. She kept taking the sheet from his hands where they kept tugging at its edge. She forbade him 
 
to talk. She refused to tell him what time it was.
 
But he would say, “Now the overture’s beginning,” and then, later, “Now the curtain’s going up............