It irritated Sheila to have to hurry back to the theater after dinner to repeat again the afternoon’s repetition. The moon seemed to call down the alley to her not to give herself to the garish ache of the calcium; and the breeze had fingers twitching at her clothes and a voice that sang, “Come walk with me.”
She played the play, but it irked her. When she left the theater at half past eleven she found Winfield waiting, in his car. Vickery was walking at her side, jabbering about his eternal revisions. Winfield offered to carry them to their hotels. He saw to it that he reached Vickery’s first. When they had dropped Jonah overboard Winfield asked Sheila to take just a bit of the air for her health’s sake.
She hesitated only a moment. The need of a chaperon hardly occurred to her. She had been living a life of independence for months. She had no fear of Winfield or of anybody. Had she not overpowered the ferocious Reben? She consented—for the sake of her health.
CHAPTER XXVI
There will always be two schools of preventive hygiene for women. One would protect girls from themselves and their suitors by high walls, ignorance, seclusion, and a guardian in attendance at every step. The other would protect them by encouraging high ideals through knowledge, self-respect, liberty, and industry.
Neither school ever succeeded altogether, or ever will. The fault of the former is that what is forbidden becomes desirable; high walls are scalable, ignorance dangerous, seclusion impossible, and guardians either corruptible or careless.
The fault of the latter is that emotions alter ideals and subdue them to their own color; that knowledge increases curiosity, self-respect may be overpowered or undermined, and that liberty enlarges opportunity.
It always comes back to the individual occasion and the individual soul in conflict with it. There has been much viciousness in harems and in more sacred inclosures. And there has been much virtue in dual solitudes, Liberty is not salvation, but at least it encourages intelligence, it enforces responsibility, and it avoids the infinite evils of tyranny. For that reason, while actresses and other women are not always so good as they might be, they are not often so bad as they might be.
Sheila, the actress, was put upon her mettle. She had no duenna to play tricks upon. She had herself to take care of, her preciousness to waste or cherish. Sometimes women respond to these encounters with singular dignity: sometimes with singular indifference.
The town of Clinton was almost all asleep. The very houses seemed tucked up in sheeted moonlight. And soon Sheila and her cavalier—or engineer—were beyond the point where the streets were subtly changed to roads. The last car on the suburban line growled and glittered past, lurching noisily on its squealing rails. And then they were alone under the moony vastitude of sky, with the dream-drenched earth revolving around them in a huge, slow wheel.