Clipped Wings

by Rupert Hughes

The other galley-slaves in the company must still bend to the oar, but she had shore leave of mornings, and after Saturday she was free altogether.

Now that she had time to be tired, old aches and fatigues whose consideration had had to be postponed came thronging upon her, till she wondered how she had endured the toil. Still more she wondered why.

Then she wondered nothing at all for a good many hours, until the old habit of being called awakened her. She glanced at her watch, saw that it was half past ten, and flung out of bed, gasping, “They’ll be rehearsing and I’m not there!”

Then she remembered her liberty, and stood feeling pleasantly foolish. The joy of toppling back to bed was more than payment for the fright she had suffered. It was glorious to float like a basking swimmer on the surface of sleep, with little ripples of unconsciousness washing over her face and little sunbeams of dream between.

In the half-awake moods she reviewed her ambitions with an indolent contempt. That man Winfield’s words came back to her. After all, she had no home except her father’s summer cottage. And she had been planning no home except possibly another such place whither she would retire in the late spring until the early fall, to rest from last season’s hotels and recuperate for next season’s. Yes, that was just about the home life she had sketched out!

It occurred to her now that her plans had been unhuman and unwomanly. “A woman’s place is the home,” she said. It was not an original thought, but it came to her with a sudden originality as sometimes lines she had heard or had spoken dozens of times abruptly became real.

She wanted a pretty little house where she could busy herself with pretty little tasks while her big, handsome husband was away earning a pretty little provender for both of them. She would be a young mother-bird haunting the nest, leaving the male bird to forage and fight. That was the life desirable and appropriate. Women were not made to work. An actress was an abnormal creature.

Sheila did not realize that the vast majority of home-keeping women must work quite as hard as the actress, with no vacations, little income, and less applause. The picture of the husband returning laughing to his eager spouse was a decidedly idealized view of a condition more unfailing in literature than in life. Some of those housewives who had grown tired of their lot, as she of hers, would have told her that most husbands return home weary and discontented, to listen with small interest to their weary and discontented wives. And many husbands go out again soon after they have come home again.

Sheila was doing what the average person does in criticizing the stage life—magnifying its faults and contrasting it, not with the average home, but with an ideal condition not often to be found, and less often lasting when found.

Sheila had known so little of the average family existence that she imagined it according to the romantic formula, “And so they were married and lived happily ever afterward.” She thought that that would be very nice. And she lolled at her ease, weltering in visions of cozy domesticity with peace and a hearth and a noble American citizen and the right number of perfectly fascinating children painlessly borne and painlessly borne with.