His look of amazement and his sharp “Why?” found her without any available excuse. She drearily consented and was led along.
During and after the cold supper everybody had much to say except Sheila. Endless discussions arose on minutely unimportant points or upon great vague principles of the drama and of public appeal. At three o’clock Sheila began to doze and wake in short agonies. There was a hint of daybreak in the sky when the meeting broke up. She was too sleepy to care much whether she lived or died or had a husband or had just lost one. She made a somnambulistic effort to search for Bret, but Reben and the others had adjourned to the hotel lobby for further debate and she dared not challenge their curiosity.
She went to the room the manager had reserved for her and slept there like a Juliet on her tomb.
CHAPTER XXXV
The next morning Pennock did not call Sheila till the last moment. Then her breakfast was on the table and her bath in the tub. The old dragon had again forbidden the telephone operator to ring the bell, and the bell-boys that came to the door with messages from Bret she shooed away.
Sheila found on her breakfast-tray a small stack of notes from Bret. They ranged from incredulous amazement at her neglect to towering rage.
Sheila was still new enough to wedlock to feel sorrier for him than for herself. She had a dim feeling that Bret had in him the makings of a very difficult specimen of that most difficult class, the prima donna’s husband. But she blamed her profession and hated the theater and Reben for tormenting her poor, patient, devoted, long-suffering lover.
Yet as the soldier bridegroom, however he hates the war, obeys his captain none the less, so Sheila never dreamed of mutiny. She was an actor’s daughter and no treachery could be worse than to desert a manager, a company, and a work of art at the crisis of the whole investment. She regretted that she was not even giving her whole mind and ambition to her work. But how could she with her husband in such a plight?
She wrote Bret a little note of mad regret, abject apology, and insane devotion, and asked Pennock to get it to him at once.
Pennock growled: “You better give that young man to me. You’ll never have time to see him. And his jealousy is simply dretful.”