He lowered his high head and his low voice to murmur, with an impudence that did not offend her, “You’re too darned nice to waste your gifts on the public.”
“Waste them!—on the public?” Sheila mocked. “And what ought I to do with them, then?”
He spoke very earnestly. “Invest them in a nice quiet home. You oughtn’t to be slaving away like this to amuse a good-for-nothing mob. You let some big husky fellow do the work and build you a pretty home. Then you just stay home and—and—bloom for him—like a rose on a porch. I tell you if I had you I’d lock you up where the crowds couldn’t see you.”
Sheila put back her head and laughed at the utter ridiculousness of such insolence. Then her laugh stopped short. The word “home” got her by the throat. And the words “bloom just for him” brought sudden dew to her eyes.
She had hurt Winfield by her laughter. Under the raillery of it he had muttered a curt “Good night” without heeding her sudden softness.
He had rejoined Eldon and Vickery. Of the three tall men he was the least gifted, the least spiritual. But he was the only one of the three, the only one of all her admirers, who had not urged her forward on this weary climb up the sun-beaten hill. He was the only one who had suggested twilight and peace and home.
At any other time his counsel would have wakened her fiery dissent. Now in her fatigue and her loneliness it soothed her like the occasional uncanny wisdom of a fool.
CHAPTER XXV
That night Sheila went to bed to sleep out sleep. When Pennock asked, on leaving her arranged for slumber, “Will you be called at the usual hour, please?” Sheila answered, “I won’t be called at all, please!”
This privilege alone was like a title of gentility to a tired laundress. There would be no rehearsal on the morrow for her.