But now he was no longer a boy; he was a man whose gifts had proved themselves, who had “learned his strength” before audience after audience clear across the continent. Dulcie Ormerod had irritated him, but she had left him in no doubt of his power.
Already he had maturity, authority, and the confidence of a young Siegfried wandering through the forest and understanding the birds that sang him up and sang him onward.
He was a total stranger to Sheila. She could not mother him. He did not come to her to cure his despair and kindle ambition. He came to her in the armor of success and claimed her for his own.
At first he alarmed her more than Reben had. She felt that he could never truly belong to her again. And she felt no impulse to belong to him. She liked him, admired him, enjoyed his brilliant personality, but rather as a gracious competitor than any longer as a partner.
To Eldon, however, the change endeared Sheila only the more. She was fairer and wiser and surer, worthier of his love in every way. He could not understand why she loved him no longer. But he could not fail to see that her heart had changed. It seemed a treachery to him, a treachery he could feel and not believe possible.
When he sought to return to the room he had tenanted in her heart he found it locked or demolished. He could never gain a moment of solitude with her. Their former long walks were not to be thought of.
“Clinton isn’t Chicago, old boy,” Sheila said. “Everybody in this town knows us a mile off. And we’ve no time for flirting or philandering or whatever it was we were doing in Chicago. I’m too busy, and so are you.”
Eldon’s heart suffered at each rebuff. He murmured to her that she was cruel. He thought of her as false when he thought of her at all. But that was not so often as he thought. He was too horribly busy.
To a layman the conditions of a stock company are almost unbelievable: the actors work double time, day and night shifts both. Most of the company were used to the life. In the course of years they had acquired immense repertoires. They had educated their memories to amazing degrees. They could study a new rôle between the acts of the current production.
Sheila and Eldon had not that advantage. They spent the intermission after one act in boning up for the next, rubbing the lines into the mind as they rubbed grease-paint into the skin.