On the way home Bret confessed that it rather hurt him to see a “dub like Dulcie rattling round in Sheila’s shoes.” The metaphor was meant better than it came out, but Sheila was not thinking of that when she groaned: “Don’t speak of it.”
Bret invited Vickery to stop in for a bit of supper and Vickery accepted, to Bret’s regret. Sheila excused herself from lingering and left Bret to smoke out Vickery, who was in a midnight mood of garrulity. The playwright watched Sheila trudge wearily up the staircase, worn out with lack of work. He turned on Bret and growled:
“Bret, there goes the pitifulest case of frustrated genius I ever saw. It’s a sin to chain a great artist like that to a baby-carriage.”
Bret turned scarlet at the insolence of this, but Vickery was too feeble to be knocked down. He was leaner than ever, and his eyes were like wet buckeyes. His speech was punctuated with coughs. As he put it, he “coughed commas.” Also he coughed cigarette-smoke usually. His friends blamed his cough to his cigarettes, but they knew better, and so did he.
He was in a hurry to do some big work before he was coughed out. It infuriated him to feel genius within himself and have so little strength or time for its expression. It enraged him to see another genius with health and every advantage kept from publication by a husband’s selfishness.
He was in one of his irascible spells to-night and he had no mercy on Bret. He spoke with the fretful tyranny of an invalid.
“It’s none of my business, I suppose, Bret, but I tell you it makes me sick—sick! to see Sheila cooped up in this little town. New York would go wild over her—yes, and London, too. There’s an awful dearth on the stage of young women with beauty and training. She could have everything her own way. She’s a peculiarly brilliant artist who never had her chance. If she had reached her height and quit—fine! But she was snuffed out just as she was beginning to glow. It was like lighting a lamp and blowing it out the minute the flame begins to climb on the wick.
“Dulcie Ormerod and hundreds of her sort are buzzing away like cheap gas-jets while a Sheila Kemble is here. She could be making thousands of people happy, softening their hearts, teaching them sympathy and charm and breadth of outlook; and she’s teaching children not to rub their porridge-plates in their hair!
“Thousands used to listen to every syllable of hers and forget their troubles. Now she listens to your factory troubles. She listens to the squabbles of a couple of nice little kids who would rather be outdoors playing with other kids all day, as they ought to be.
“It’s like taking a lighthouse and turning the lens away from the sea into the cabbage-patch of the keeper.”