They cast hasty glances about, against witnesses, and then he flung his arms around her, and she flung hers around him. He crushed her as fiercely as he dared, and she him as fiercely as she could. Their lips met in the great kiss of betrothal.
She was happy beyond endurance. She was in love and her beloved loved her.
All the Sheilas there were in her soul agreed for once that she was happy to the final degree, contented beyond belief, imparadised on earth. The Sheilas voted unanimously that love was life; love was the greatest thing in the world; that woman’s place was with her lover, that a woman’s forum was the home; and that any career outside the walls was a plaything to be put away and forgotten like a hobby-horse outgrown.
As for her stage career—pouf! into the attic with it where her little tin house and the tiny tin kitchen and her knitted bear and the glueless dolls reposed. She was going to have a real house and real children and real life.
While she was consigning her ambitions to the old trunk up-stairs, Winfield was refurbishing his ambitions. He was going to do work enough for two, be ambitious for both and make Sheila the proudest wife of the busiest husband in the husband business.
But these great resolutions were mainly roaring in the back parlors of their brains. On the piazzas of their lips were words of lovers’ nonsense. There is no use quoting them. They would sound silly even to those who have used them themselves.
They sounded worse than that to Roger and Polly, who heard them all.
Roger and Polly had come home from dancing half an hour before, and had dropped into chairs in the living-room. The moon on the sea was dazzling. They watched it through the screens that strained the larger mosquitoes, then they put out the lights because the view was better and because enough mosquitoes were already in the house.
The conversation of the surf had made all the necessary language and Roger and Polly sat in the tacit comfort of long-married couples. They had heard Sheila brought home by a young man whom she dismissed with brevity. Before they found energy to call to her, another young man had hurried across the grass. To their intense amazement he leaped at Sheila and she did not scream. Both merged into one silhouette.
Polly and Roger were aghast, but they dared not speak. They did not even know who the man was. Sheila called him by no name to identify him, though she called him by any number of names of intense saccharinity.