Vickery the scholar was both irritated and amused by the irony of his success. Almost illiterate journalists called his wisdom trash and only the less sophisticated people would accept it. His feelings were only partly soothed by the dollar anodyne and the solace of regular royalties.
His manager ordered another play, and Vickery tried to write down to his public. The result was a dismal fiasco, critically and box-officially. The lesson was worth the price. He went back to writing for himself in the belief that if he could succeed in the private theater of his own heart he would be sure at least of one sympathetic auditor. That was one more than the insincere writer could count on.
His bookish tastes and training led him to a bookish ideal. He felt that the highest dramatic art was in the blank-verse form, and he felt that there was something nobler in the good old times of costumes and rhetoric. In fact, blank verse demanded heroic garb, for when the words strut the speakers must. His Americanism was revealed only in the fact that he chose for his chief character a man struggling for liberty, for the right of being himself.
He selected the epic argosy of the Puritans and their battle for freedom of worship. His central figure was a granite and velvet soul of the type of Roger Williams.
He told Sheila and Bret a little about his scheme and they thought it wonderful. Bret found any literary creation incredibly ingenious, though more brilliant mental processes applied to mechanical problems seemed simple enough.
Sheila thought Vickery’s plan wonderful because her heart swelled at the lofty program of the plot. Blank verse had been her first religion and Shakespeare her first Scripture. It was one of her bitterest regrets that she had never paid the master the tribute of a performance of any of his works since she adapted his “Hamlet” to the needs of her own children’s theater.
“Who’s going to play your hero?” Bret asked, idly.
Vickery answered, “Well, I haven’t read it to him yet, but there’s only one man in the country with the brains and the skill and the good looks.”
“And who might all that be?” Sheila asked, with a laugh.
“Floyd Eldon.”