Sheila fretted about leaving Bret at his lonely grindstone. Dorothy ridiculed her and told her she must get over her honeymoon. Dorothy emphasized the importance of the sea air “for the children.” She insisted that a mother’s first duty was to them. Dorothy paid little enough heed to her own. She slept late, played cards, watched the dancing, and changed her clothes with a chameleonic frequence.
Sheila found that her children, like the rest, preferred the company of fellow-children and the sea to any other attractions. Their mothers bored them, hampered them, disgraced them. The children were self-sufficient, and better so. By the early evening they had played themselves into a comatose condition and never knew who took off their shoes or put them to bed. The long evenings remained to the mothers and they formed porch-colonies, and rocked and gabbled and stared through the windows at the dancers.
All over the country wives were enjoying their summer divorce. Thousands, millions of wives deserted their husbands and loafed at great cost, and it was all right. But for an actress to desert her husband and work—that was all wrong!
Sheila felt that her husband needed her more than her children did. She pictured him distraught with longing for her. And he was—so far as his business worries gave him time for sentimental worries. Sheila left the children in charge of the governess and fled back to Bret, who was enraptured at the sight of her and had an enormous amount of factory news to tell her.
The men-folk were working in spite of the summer, and glad to be working. Bret was absorbed in his business and left Sheila all day to sit in the darkened oven of the closed-up house, alone.
She contrasted her life this summer with the summer she had played in the stock company and toiled so hard to furnish amusement to the people who could not get away to seashores or mountains. She wondered wherein her present indolence was an improvement over her period of toil.
Still she was glad to be where her husband could find her in the brief entr’actes of his commercial drama. She had learned enough of the village to know that some of the men whose wives left them for the summer found substitutes among the village belles who could not or would not leave the old town.
Sheila had heard a vast amount of gossip concerning Jim Greeley. She had not repeated any of it to Dorothy, of course. It is not according to the rules of the game and only very unpleasant persons do it.
Bret knew of Jim’s repute, but did not forbid Jim his house. The village was full of such scandals and it was dangerous to begin cutting and snubbing. When the gossips whispered they made a terrifying picture of village life, yet whenever the theater was mentioned they assumed an air of Pharisaic superiority.
As soon as Sheila hurried back to Blithevale Jim Greeley began to spoil her evening communions with her husband by “just dropping round.” He talked till Bret yawned him home.