She was more jealous of Eldon than Bret was.
CHAPTER XLVIII
Sheila suffered the very same feeling to a more sickening degree, a little later, when “The Woman Pays” company, now in its fourth year, reached Blithevale in cleaning up the lesser one-night stands. The play that Sheila had rejected had become the corner-stone of Reben’s fortunes. It was as inartistic and plebeian and reminiscent as apple pie. But the public loves apple pie and consumes tons of it, to the great neglect of marrons glacés.
That play was a commodity for which there is always a market. A great artist could adorn it, but it was almost actor-proof against destruction.
Even Dulcie Ormerod could not spoil it for its public. When she played it Batterson gnashed his teeth and Reben held his aching head, but there were enough injudicious persons left to make up eight good audiences a week.
Dulcie “killed her laughs” by fidgeting or by reading humorously or by laughing herself. She lost the audience’s tears by the copiousness of her own. But she loved the play and still “knew she was great because she wept herself.” When she laughed she showed teeth that speedily earned a place in the advertisement of dentifrice, and when she wept, a certain sort of audience was overawed by the sight of a genuine tear. Real water has always been impressive on the stage.
By sheer force of longevity the play slid her up among the prominent women of the day. She stuck to the rôle for four years, and was beginning to hope to rival the records of Joseph Jefferson, Denman Thompson, Maggie Mitchell, and Lotta.
The night the company played in Blithevale Bret and Eugene, Sheila, Dorothy and her Jim, made up a box-party.
Jim proclaimed that Dulcie was a “peach,” but he alluded less to the art she did not possess than to the charms she had. She was pretty, there was no question of that—as shapely and characterless as a Bouguereau painting, as coarsely sweet as granulated sugar. Dorothy credited her with all the winsome qualities of the character she assumed, and took a keen dislike to the actress who played the adventuress, an estimable woman and a genuine artist whose oxfords Dulcie was not fit to untie.
Eugene and Sheila suffered from Dulcie’s utter falsehood of impersonation. Even Bret felt some mysterious gulf between Dulcie’s interpretation and Sheila’s as he remembered it.