Civilization keeps robbing women of their ancient housework. Spinning, weaving, grinding corn, making clothes, and twisting lamp-lighters are gone. Their husbands do not want them to cook or sweep or wait upon their own children. With the loss of their back-breaking, heart-withering old tasks has come a longer life of beauty and desire and a greater leisure for curiosity. They were unhappy and discontented in their former servitude. They are unhappy and discontented in their useless freedom.
Sheila saw everywhere evidences that grown-ups, like children, must either become sloths of indolence, or find occupation, or take up mischief for a business. She wondered and dreaded what the future might hold for herself.
The summers were not quite so hard to get through, for they had usually been periods of vacation for her. Sometimes she spent a month or two with her father and mother, or they with her. Sometimes old Mrs. Vining visited her and shamed her with the activity that kept the veteran actress alert at seventy years.
Sheila found a cynical amusement in pitting Mrs. Vining and Bret’s mother against each other. They began always with great mutual deference, but soon the vinegar of age began to render their comments acidulous. Mrs. Winfield had grown old in the domestic world and the church. Mrs. Vining had grown old in the wicked theater. Of course Sheila was prejudiced, but to save her she could not discover wherein Mrs. Winfield was the better of the two. She was certainly narrower, crueler, more somber. Moreover, she was also less industrious, for to Sheila the hallowed duties of the household were not industry at all, or at best were the proper toil for servants. Mrs. Winfield seemed to her to be a Penelope eternally reweaving each day the same dull pattern she had woven the day before.
When the autumn came her father and mother and Mrs. Vining and the other theater folk emerged from their estivation and made ready for the year’s work, while Sheila must return to the idleness of the village, or its more insipid dissipations.
Daughter-in-law and mother-in-law began to get on each other’s nerves. Sheila could not forget the glory of the theater. Mrs. Winfield could not outgrow her horror of it, and she could not refrain from nagging allusions to its baleful influences. To Sheila it was a case of the sooty pot eternally railing at the simmering kettle.
One day Sheila was wrought to such a pitch of resentment that she blurted out the whole story of her encounter with Jim Greeley.
“He was no actor,” said Sheila, triumphantly, “but he tried to win his friend’s wife away.”
“Yes,” said Mrs. Winfield, “but his friend’s wife was an actress.”
Against such logic Sheila saw that she would beat her head in vain. She suppressed an inclination to tear her hair out and dance on it. And she gave Mrs. Winfield up as hopeless. Mrs. Winfield had long before given Sheila up as beyond redemption, and eventually she moved away from Blithevale to live with a widowed sister in the Middle West.