“A lady frien’ o’ mine went last night, and told me I mustn’t miss it. She says they got the handsomest actor playin’ the lover—feller name of Weldon or Weldrum or something like that—but anyway she says he makes love something elegant, and so does Sheilar. This frien’ o’ mine says they must be in love with each other, for nobody could look at one another that way without they meant it. Well, we’ll soon see.”
To hear his wife’s name and Eldon’s chewed up together in the gum of a strange plebeian was disgusting.
The sharp-elbowed woman was talking all the while in a voice of affected accents:
“She’s almost a lady, this Kemble gull. Really, she was received in the veribest homes hyah lahst wintuh. Yes, I met hah everywhah. She was really quite refined—for an actress, of cawse. Several of the nicest young men made quite fools of themselves—quite. Fawtunately their people saved them from doing anything rahsh. I suppose she’ll upset them all again this season. There ought to be some fawm of inoculation to protect young men against actresses. Don’t you think so? It’s fah more dangerous than typhoid fevah, don’t you think so?”
All about him Bret heard Sheila’s name tossed carelessly as a public property.
The curtain rose at last and the play began. Sheila made a conspicuously inconspicuous entrance without preparation, without even the laughter she had formerly employed. She was just there. The audience did not recognize her till she spoke, then came a volley of applause.
Bret’s eyes filled with tears. She was beautiful. She seemed to be sad. Was she thinking of him? He wanted to clamber across the seats and over the footlights to protect her once more from the mob, not from its ridicule as at that first sight of her, but from its more odious familiarity and possession.
He hardly recognized the revised play. The character she played—and played in her very selfhood—was emotional now, and involved in a harrowing situation with a mystery as to her origin, and hints of a past, a scandal into which an older woman, an adventuress, had decoyed her.
Then Eldon came on the scene and they fell in love at once; but she was afraid of her past, and evaded him for his own sake. He misunderstood her and accused her of despising him because he was poor; and she let him think so, because she wanted him to hate her.
The audience wept with luxurious misery over her saintly double-dealing. The gum-chewer’s tears salted her pepsin and she commented: “Ain’t it awful what beasts you men are to us trusting girrls! Think of the demon that loored that girrl to her roon!”