“I don’t want to act! I don’t want the public to love me! I want only my Bret!”
The temptation to hurl the part in Reben’s face, to mock the petty withes of contract and promise, and to fly to her lover, insane as it was, was a temptation she barely managed to fight off.
CHAPTER XXX
In a similar tempest of infinitely much ado about next to nothing the distant Bret Winfield was browbeating himself silently, pleading with himself not to disgrace himself by running away from his loathsome factory. His father needed his presence, and Sheila needed his absence.
But gusts of desire for the sight of her swept through him like manias. He would try to reach her on the long-distance telephone. At the theater, where there was as yet no one in the box-office, it was usually impossible to get an answer or to get a message delivered. The attendants would as soon have called a priest from mass as an actor from rehearsal. Sometimes, after hours of search with the long-distance probe, he would find Sheila at the hotel and they would pour out their longings across the distance till strange voices broke in and mocked their sentimentalities or begged them to get off the wire. It was strange to be eavesdropped by ghosts whose names or even whereabouts one could never know.
Winfield’s mother observed her son’s distress and insisted that he was ill. She demanded that he see a doctor; it might be some lingering fever or something infectious. It was both, but there is no inoculation, no antitoxin, yet discovered to prevent the attack on a normal being. The mumps, scarlet fever, malaria, typhoid and other ailments have their serums, but love has none. Light attacks of those affections procure immunity, but not of this.
Winfield finally told his mother what his malady was. “Mother, I’m in love—mad crazy about a girl.”
Mrs. Winfield smiled. “You always are.”
“It’s real this time—”
“It always was.”