“Why, you’re nothing but a lady’s maid, Jane. You’ve been home five days and I haven’t had a chance to say ten words to you. Now, don’t misunderstand me. I’m fond of Aunt Josephine. She’s great fun, but, hang it all, she’s right smack in the center of the stage all the time. It isn’t fair, Jane. You can’t go on being a slave to her. She—”
“She has always had some one to wait on her, Oliver,” said Jane. “I don’t mind. I am really very fond of her. And she is just beginning to care for me. At first, I think she was a little afraid of me. She couldn’t believe that I was real. The other day—in Chicago—she suddenly reached out and touched my arm and said: ‘It doesn’t seem possible that you ever squalled and made the night hideous for me and your poor father. I can’t believe that you are the same little baby I used to fondle and spank when I wasn’t any older than you are now.’ Besides, Oliver, I like doing things for her. It makes father happy.”
“But it doesn’t make me happy,” he grumbled. Then his face brightened. “Wasn’t she great last night when she got started on Uncle Horace and—and all this hullabaloo he’s stirring up?”
The fourth day after his wife’s return to Rumley, Mr. Sage blurted out the question that had lain captive in his mind for weeks.
“If it is a fair question, my dear, would you mind telling me just why you came back to me?”
She leaned back in her chair and studied the ceiling for a few minutes before answering.
“I may as well be honest about it, Herby,” she said, changing her position to meet his perplexed gaze with one that was absolutely free from guile. “I came back because they were through with me over there. I was getting passé—in fact, I was quite passé. They were beginning to cast me for old women and character parts. Two or three years ago they started my funeral services by seeing what I could do with Shakespeare. I played Rosalind and Viola with considerable success. The next season they had me do Lady Macbeth, and last season there was talk of reviving Camille with me in the title rôle. I was through. My musical comedy days were over. The stage was crowded with young women who could dance without wheezing like a horse with the heaves and whose voices didn’t crack in the middle register. People didn’t want to see me in musical comedy any longer and they wouldn’t see me in anything else. I’m fifty-three, Herbert—between you and me, mind you—and just the right age to be a preacher’s wife. So I made up my mind to retire. I used to have a hundred pounds a week. Good pay over there. I was offered twenty pounds a week for this season to tour the provinces in a revival of Peter Pan—and that was the last straw. Peter Pan! When an actress gets so old that she can’t stand on one leg without expecting people to applaud her for a feat of daring, they send her out into the woods to revive poor Peter, the boy who isn’t allowed to grow old. You notice, Herby, I didn’t cable to ask if I could come home—I cabled that I was on the way. Now, you know the secret of my home-coming. The time has come when I must submit to being buried alive, and I’d sooner be buried alive in Rumley than in London. It’s greener here. Besides you are a human Rock of Ages, Herby. I’m going to cling to you like a barnacle. I haven’t forgotten what lovers and sweethearts we were in the old days. I’ve been faithful to you, old dear. If I hadn’t been faithful to you I would never have come back. By the way, I’ve put by a little money—quite a sum, in fact—so you mustn’t regard me as a charity patient. We’ll pool our resources. And when the time comes for you to step down and out of the pulpit for the same reason that I chucked the stage—you see, Herby, audiences and congregations are a good deal alike—why, we’ll have enough to live on for the rest of our days. You won’t have to write sermons and preach ’em, and I sha’n’t have to listen to them. It’s an awful thing to say, but we’ll both have to mend our ways if we want our grandchildren to love us.”
He laid his arm over her shoulder and gently caressed her cheek.
“You are still pretty much of a pagan, Jo,” was all that he said, but he was smiling.
“But you are jolly well pleased to have me back, aren’t you?”