Sheila asked herself, bitterly, “What am I getting out of life? When one trouble goes another bobs into its place.” By the time the mother-in-law retired the children had grown up to a noisy, uncontrollable restlessness that drove the office-weary Bret frantic.
It was he, and not Sheila, that insisted on their occasional flights to New York, where they made the rounds of the theaters. Sometimes Sheila ran back on the stage to embrace her old friends and tell them how happy she was. And they said they envied her, knowing they lied.
They always asked her, “When are you coming back?” and when she always answered, “Never,” they did not believe her. Yet they saw that discontent was aging her. Discontent was never yet a fountain of youth.
Sheila returned to Blithevale like a caught convict. Plays came there occasionally, and Bret liked to see them as an escape from the worries he found at home or the worries that followed him from the office. He enjoyed particularly the entertainments concocted with the much-abused mission of furnishing relaxation for the tired business man. As if the tired business man were not an important and pathetic figure, and his refreshment one of the noblest and most needful acts of charity.
At these times when Sheila sat and watched other people playing, and often playing atrociously, the rôles that she should have played or would have enjoyed, her homesickness for the boards swept over her in waves of anguish. Sometimes the yearning to act goaded her so cruelly that she almost swooned. She felt like a canary full of song with her tongue cut out.
Now and then Eugene Vickery came to visit his sister Dorothy. He usually spent a deal of time with Bret and Sheila.
He was a different Eugene so far as success and failure can alter a man. That play of his which Sheila had tried in stock and Reben had allowed to lapse Eugene had patched up and sold to another manager who had a star in tow.
Play and star had been flayed with jubilant enthusiasm by the New York critics, but had drawn enough of the public to keep them on Broadway awhile, and then had succeeded substantially on the road in the cheaper theaters known as the “dollar houses.”