His wife laughed softly: “You ought to have heard what I’ve been hearing about this town! You’d think it was the home of all villainy. There’s enough scandal and tragedy here to fill a hundred volumes. There are problem-plays here—among busy church-members, too—that make Ibsen read like a copy of St. Nicholas.”
She put out the light in Sheila’s room and went into her own, lighted herself a cigarette from the cigar her husband had left in her hair-pin tray, and sat down before the cold radiator as before a fireplace to talk about life. People were all rôles to her and their histories were scenarios that interested her more or less as she saw herself playing them.
“When I look around at my old school friends and relatives off the stage,” she said, “I can’t see that they’ve found any recipe for happiness. Clara Gaines is a domestic soul and her husband is a druggist, but he leaves her to be domestic all by herself, and she tells me he never spends a minute at home that he can spend outside. Ella Westover has divorced two husbands in Terre Haute already. Marjorie Cranford tells me that her home town out in—in the Middle West somewhere—has a fast set that makes the Tenderloin look stupid. Clarice—What’s her name now?—well, she has married an awfully good man, but she has to wheedle every cent she gets out of him or cheat him out of it, and she says she wants to scream at his hypocrisy. She thinks she’ll run off and leave him any day now.”
Kemble drew a chair to her side and put his feet on the radiator alongside hers. He found his cigar out, and relighted it with difficulty from her cigarette as he laughed:
“Polly is a bit of a pessimist to-night, eh? Is it the quietness of this little burg? I was rather enjoying the peace and repose and all that sort of thing.”
“So was I. But that’s because it’s a change for us to have an evening off. Think of the women who never have anything else. They’re not happy, Roger. You can’t find one of them that will say she is.”
“You don’t fancy small-town respectability for your daughter, then?”
“I hope she’ll be respectable. But there’s so little real respectability in being just dull and bored to death, in just sitting round and waiting for some man to come home, in having nothing to spend except what you can steal out of his trousers or squeeze out of an allowance. I’d rather have Sheila an actress than a toadstool or a parasite on some man. She has one of those wild-bird natures that I had. The safest thing for her is the freedom and a lot of work and admiration, and a chance to act. The stage is no paradise, the Lord knows, but the first woman that ever knew freedom was the actress. These votes-for-women rebels are all clamoring now for what we actresses have always had. Would it break your heart, Roger, if our little Sheila went on the stage?”
Kemble followed a slow cloud of smoke with the soft words:
“My mother was an actress.”