She restored her attention to Vickery’s plot, but the background of her thoughts was full of ominous lightnings and rumblings like a summer sky when a storm is far off but inevitable.
Now the plight of Vickery’s heroine seemed much less thrilling than her own. Here she sat almost betrothed to the distant Eldon, almost bewitched by the new-comer, Vickery, and threatened with the wrath of an unexpected claimant who was her manager and held both her present and her future in his hand.
She studied Reben out of the corner of her eye. This new, this utterly unsuspected phase of his, made necessary a fresh appraisal of him. He was now something more and something less than her manager. He was something of a conquest of hers; but did he hope to be a conqueror, too?
It was strange to think of him as a suitor—an amorous manager! a business man with a bouquet! In this guise he looked younger than she had seen him, yet more crafty, more cruel than ever. The Orientalism that had made him so shrewd a bargainer in the bazar was now in a harem humor. His black hair was, after all, in curls; his big eyes were shadowy, wet; his fat hands wore rings—a sanguine ruby twinned with a gross diamond and a shifty opal, like the back of an iridescent and venomous beetle.
Sheila thought of David and Solomon with their many loves, and she felt that perhaps Mrs. Rhys was not sufficient for this man. If he should claim her, too, what should she say to him? Must she sacrifice her career at its very outset just because this man turned monster?
She became so involved in her own meditations that Vickery found her almost deaf to his narrative. He lost the thread of his spinning and tangled himself in it like another Lady of Shalott.
Finally Sheila confessed her bewilderment. She spoke with an assumption of vast experience: “I never could tell anything from a scenario. The play is written out, isn’t it?”
“Oh yes,” said Vickery. “May I send it to your hotel?”
“I’d rather you’d read it to me,” Sheila pleaded. “You could explain it, you know. I’m so stupid.”
“That would be splendid!” said Vickery. “When? Where?”