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 amused by the irony of his success. almost illiterate journalists called his wisdom trash and only the less sophisticated

people would accept it. his feelings were only partly soothed by the dollar anodyne and the solace of regular royalties.

his manager ordered another play, and vickery tried to write down to his public. the result was a dismal fiasco, critically and box-officially. the lesson was worth

the price. he went back to writing for himself in the belief that if he could succeed in the private theater of his own heart he would be sure at least of one

sympathetic auditor. that was one more than the insincere writer could count on.

his bookish tastes and training led him to a bookish ideal. he felt that the highest dramatic art was in the blank-verse form, and he felt that there was something

nobler in the good old times of costumes and rhetoric. in fact, blank verse demanded heroic garb, for when the words strut the speakers must. his americanism was

revealed only in the fact that he chose for his chief character a man struggling for liberty, for the right of being himself.

he selected the epic argosy of the puritans and their battle for freedom of worship. his central figure was a granite and velvet soul of the type of roger williams.

he told sheila and bret a little about his scheme and they thought it wonderful. bret found any literary creation incredibly ingenious, though more brilliant mental

processes applied to mechanical problems seemed simple enough.

sheila thought vickery’s plan wonderful because her heart swelled at the lofty program of the plot. blank verse had been her first religion and shakespeare her first

scripture. it was one of her bitterest regrets that she had never paid the master the tribute of a performance of any of his works since she adapted his “hamlet” to

the needs of her own children’s theater.

“who’s going to play your hero?” bret asked, idly.

vickery answered, “well, i haven’t read it to him yet, but there’s only one man in the country with the brains and the skill and the good looks.”

“and who might all that be?” sheila asked, with a laugh.

“floyd eldon.”

the name seemed to drop into a well of silence.

vickery had forgotten for the moment the feud of the two men. the silence recalled it to him. he spoke with vexation:

“good lord, people! haven’t you got over that ancient trouble yet? when a grudge gets more than so old the board of health ought to cart it away. eldon’s got over

it, i know. a year or two ago he was telling me how kindly he felt toward sheila and how he didn’t really blame bret.”

bret was not at all obliged for eldon’s magnanimity, but vickery went on singing eldon’s praises till he noticed the profound silence of his auditors. he suddenly

felt as if he had been speaking in an empty room. he saw that bret was sullen and sheila uneasy. vickery spread the praise a little thicker in sheer vexation.

“reben is going to star eldon the minute he finds his play. i’m hoping i can fit him with this. he’s on the way up and i want to ride up on his coat-tails. he’s a

gentleman, a scholar, an athlete—”

“but, after all, he’s an actor,” sniffed bret.

“so was shakespeare, the noblest mind in english literature.”

“i don’t care for the type,” said bret. “always posing, always talking about themselves.”

“thanks, dear,” said sheila, flushing.

“oh, i don’t mean you, honey,” bret expostulated. “that’s why i loved you—you almost never talk about yourself. you’re everything that’s fine.”

vickery tried to restore the conversation to safer generalities. “actors talk about their personality sometimes because that is what they are putting on the market.

but did you ever hear traveling-men talk about their line of goods? or clergymen about the church? or manufacturers about what they are making? do you ever talk shop

yourself?”

“oh no!” sheila laughed ironically, and now bret flushed.

“shop talk is merely a question of manners,” said vickery. “some people know enough not to talk about themselves, and some don’t. there are lots of old women that

will talk you to death about their cooks and their aches. i’m one of those who jaw about themselves all the time. it’s not because i’m conceited, for the lord knows

i have too much reason for modesty. it’s just a habit. eldon hasn’t got it. he’ll talk about a r?le, or about an audience, but you’ll never hear him praise

himself. and there are plenty of actors like him.”

bret grunted his disbelief.

“you don’t know enough of them to be a judge,” vickery insisted.

“no, and i don’t want to,” bret growled. “i prefer good, honest, wholesome, normal, real men—men like jim greeley and other friends of mine.”

a little shiver passed through sheila. bret felt it, and assumed that she was distressed at hearing eldon’s name taken in vain. vickery was not impressed with the

choice of his brother-in-law as an ideal. dorothy had told him too much about jim. he did not suspect, however, that sheila had cause to loathe him. he continued to

talk his own shop, and to praise eldon, to celebrate his progress, his increasing science in the dynamics of theatricism.

“he’s becoming a great comedian,” he said. “and comedy requires brains. pathos and tragedy are more or less matters of emotion and temperament, but comedy is a

science.”

as vickery chanted eldon up, sheila’s eyes began to glow again. bret fumed with jealousy, imputing that glow of hers to enthusiasm for eldon.

the fact was that she was thinking of eldon without a trace of affection. she was thinking of him as a successful competitor, as a beginner who was forging ahead and

growing expert, growing famous while she had fallen out of the race.

she was more jealous of eldon than bret was.