“Reben wants me to be especially strict because I’ve got to play innocent young girls, and he says that many a promising actress has killed herself commercially with the nice people, by thinking that it was none of the public’s business what she did outside the theater. Of course it isn’t really their business in a way, but the public make it so.
“And you can’t wonder at it. I know I’m not prudish or narrow, but when I see a play where a character is supposed to be terribly ignorant and pathetic and trusting, it sort of hurts the illusion when I know that the actress is really a hateful cat who has broken up a dozen homes.
“So you see Reben’s right. He’d come over here now and send me home if old Rhys would let him. He’s dying to know who you are. But of course I won’t tell him.”
This did not comfort Winfield in the least. It angered him, too, to think of Reben as right about anything; and he felt no thanks to him for his counsels of prudence. When it is insisted too strenuously that honesty is good policy, even honesty becomes suspect.
The tête-à-tête and the dinner were ruined and it was not yet dark enough on the way back to permit any of the embraces and kisses that Winfield was famished for. He took no pleasure even in the spectacular sunset along the Hudson—miles of assorted crimsons in the sky, with the cool green Palisades as a barrier between the radiant heavens and the long panel of the mirror-river that told the sky how beautiful it was.
Winfield was completely dissatisfied with life. It was peculiarly distressing to be so deeply in love with so dear a girl so deeply in love in turn, and to have her profession and its necessities brandished like a flaming sword between them.
This experience is likely to play an increasing part in the romances of the future as more and more women claim a larger and larger share of life outside the home. Existence has always been a process of readjustments, but certainly at no time in history has there been such a revolution as this in the relations of man and woman. From now on numbers of husbands will learn what wives have endured for ages in waiting for the spouse to come home from the shop.
The usual pattern of emotion was almost ludicrously reversed when Winfield took his sweetheart to her factory and left her at the door to resume her overtime night-work, while he idled about in the odious leisure of a housekeeper.
Winfield hated the situation with all the ferocity of a lover denied, and all the indignation of an old-fashioned youth who believed in taking the woman of his choice under his wing to protect her from the world.
But he had chosen a girl who proposed to conquer the world and who would find the shadow under his wing too close. He felt himself as feeble and misallied as a ring-dove mated with a falcon. She was an artist, a public idol, while he at best was as obscure as a vice-president; he was only the indolent heir of a self-made man.