Suddenly in the midst of Vickery’s description of the complexest tangle of his best situation Sheila dumfounded him by saying, “You have gray eyes, haven’t you?”
He collapsed like a punctured balloon and a look of intense discouragement dulled his expression. Misunderstanding the cause of his collapse entirely, she hastened to add:
“Oh, but I like gray eyes! Really! Please go on!”
Vickery understood her misunderstanding, smiled laboriously, then with an effort gathered together the wreckage of his plot for a fresh ascension. Just as he was fairly well away from the ground again Sheila turned to Reben and spoke very earnestly:
“He ought to write a good play. He has the hands of a creative genius—those spatulate fingers, you know. See!”
Since she had known Vickery from childhood, she felt at liberty to stop his hand in the midst of an ardent gesture and submit it to Reben’s inspection. Vickery was hugely embarrassed. Reben was gruff:
“If he’s such a genius you’d better not hold his hand. Let him gene.”
She stared at Reben in amazement; there was a clang of anger in his sarcasm. Abruptly she realized that she had quite ignored him. She had lent Vickery her eyes and ears for half an hour. Reben’s anger was due to hurt pride, the miff of a great manager neglected by a minor actress and an unproduced author. But as she glanced up into the Oriental blackness of his glare she saw something lurking there that frightened her. Her instant intuition was, “Jealousy!” Slower-footed reason said, “Absurd!”
Reben had been closely attached for years to the exaltation of the famous actress, Mrs. Diana Rhys, who had floated to the stage on the crest of a famous scandal from a city where she had been known as Diana the Huntress. She had behaved rather better as an actress than as a housewife, but none too well in either calling. For some years she had been bound to Reben by ties that were supposed to be permanent.
Sheila reproached herself for imagining that Reben could be jealous of herself. Yet she cherished a superstitious belief that when she disregarded her intuition she went wrong. The superstition had fastened itself on her, as superstitions do, from her habit of remembering the occasional events that seemed to confirm it and forgetting the numberless events that disproved it.