Floyd Eldon.
Eldon’s denials were as welcome as denials of picturesque newspaper stories always are. They were suppressed or set in small type, with statements that Mr. Eldon very charmingly and chivalrously and with his characteristic modesty attempted to minimize his share in a most unpleasant matter.
Bret was so annoyed by a chance encounter with a group of cross-examining reporters, and found himself so hampered by his inability to explain his own anger at Eldon and the theater without implying gross suspicion of his wife’s behavior, that he broke away, returned to the policy of silence that he ought not to have left, and, gathering Sheila up, fled with her to his own home.
The play profited by the advertisement, and Dulcie Ormerod slid into the established rôle like a hand going into a glove several sizes too large. Eldon was doubly a hero now, and Reben went back to New York with triumph perched on his cigar.
CHAPTER XLIII
A honeymoon is like a blue lagoon divinely beautiful, with a mimicry of all heaven in its deeps; blinding sweet in the sun, and almost intolerably comfortable in the moon.
But by and by the atoll that circles it like a wedding-ring proves to be a bit narrow and interferes with the view of the big sea pounding at its outer edges. The calm becomes monotonous, and at the least puff of wind the boat is on the reefs. They are coral reefs, but they cut like knives and hurt the worse for being jewelry.
To Bret and Sheila the newspaper storm over her departure from the theater, her elopement from success, was like the surf on the shut-out sea.
The Winfield influence had suppressed most of the newspaper comment in the home papers, but the people of Blithevale read the metropolitan journals, and Sheila’s name flared through those for many days.
When the news element had been exhausted there were crumbs enough left for several symposiums on the subject of “Stage Marriages,” “Actresses as Wives,” “Actresses as Mothers,” “The Home vs. the Theater,” and all the twists an ingenious press can give to a whimsy of public interest.