She had established herself as a local goddess almost immediately, though she had no time at all for accepting the hospitalities of those who would fain have had her to luncheons, teas, or dinners.
She had no mornings, afternoons, or evenings that she could call her own. The hardest-worked Swede cook in town would have given notice if such unceasing tasks had been inflicted on her; and the horniest-handed labor-unionist would have struck against such hours as she kept.
To the townspeople she was as care-free and work-free as a fairy, and as impossible to capture. After the matinées throngs of young women and girls waited outside the stage door to see her pass. After the evening performances she made her way through an aisle of adoring young men. She tried not to look tired, though she was as weary as any factory-hand after overtime.
At first she hurried past alone. Later they saw a big fellow at her side who proved to be a new-comer—Eldon. And now the matinée girls divided their allegiance. Eldon’s popularity quickly rivaled Sheila’s. But he had even less time for making conquests, for he had a slower memory and was not so habited to stage formulas.
Nor had he any heart for conquests. A certain number of notes came to his letter-box, some of them anonymous tributes from overwhelmed young maidens; some of them brazen proffers of intrigue from women old enough to know better, or bound by their marriage lines to do better.
Eldon, who had thought that vice was a city ware, and that actors were dangerous elements in a small town, got a new light on life and on the theory that women are the pursued and not the pursuers.
But these wild-oat seeds of the Clinton fast set fell upon the rock where Sheila’s name was carved. He found her subtly changed. She was the same sweet, sympathetic, helpful Sheila that had been his comrade in art; but he could not recapture the Sheila that had shared his dreams of love.
As in the old Irish bull of the two men who met on London Bridge, they called each other by name, then “looked again, and it was nayther of us.”
The Sheila and Eldon that met now were not the Sheila and Eldon that had bade each other good-by. They had not outgrown each other, but they had grown away from each other—and behold it was neither of them.
The Eldon that Sheila had grown so fond of was a shy, lonely, blundering, ignorant fellow of undisclosed genius. It had delighted Sheila to perceive his genius and to mother him. He was like the last and biggest of her dolls.