On Saturday night the house-manager gave a farewell supper to Sheila on the stage and naturally failed to include Winfield in the invitations. He sulked about the somnolent town in a dreadful fit of loneliness, but he could not get a word with Sheila. Sheila, now that she was leaving the company, felt a mingling of fondness for the shabby old stage and the workaday troupe and of happiness at being pardoned out of the penitentiary.
On the morrow Winfield asked her by telephone if he might take her to the train in his car. She consented. She was late getting ready, and he had to go at high speed, with no chance for farewell conversation. As they reached the station his agony at leaving her wrenched from him a desperate plea:
“Won’t you kiss me Good-by?”
In the daylight, among the unromantic hacks, she laughed at the thought:
“Kiss you Good-by? Why, I haven’t kissed you How-d’-do? yet!”
CHAPTER XXVIII
When Sheila reached the home of her father and mother she spent her first few days renewing her kinship with them. They seemed older to her, but they had not aged as she had. They had been through just one more season. She had passed through an epoch.
They found her mightily changed. They were proud of her. They could see that she had taken good care of her body. They knew that she had succeeded in her art. They wondered what she had done with her soul. They had reached that thrilling, horribly anxious state of parentage when the girl child is grown to a woman and when every step is dangerous. Authority is ended; advice is untranslatable, and the parents become only spectators at a play whose star they have provided but whose cast they cannot select.
Sheila was not troubled about these things. Her chief excitement was in the luxury of having her afternoons to herself and every evening free. She was like a night-watchman on a vacation. It was wonderful to be her own mistress from twilight to midnight. She had no make-up to put on except for the eyes of the sun. There were no footlights. The only need for attention to her skin was to fight off sunburn and the attacks of the surf in which she spent hours upon hours.
The business of her neighbors and herself was improvising hilarities: the sea, the motors, saddle-horses, tennis, golf, watching polo-games, horse-races, airship-races, all the summer industries of Long Island.