Eldon tossed his hands in despair.
Vickery began to babble as the plot spilled down into his brain in a cloudburst of ideas: “I might take Sheila for my theme. To disguise her decently she could be—say—Let me see—I’ve got it!—a singer! Her voice has thrilled Covent Garden and the Metropolitan and she marries a nice man and has some children and sings ’em little cradle-songs. She loves them and she loves her husband, but she is bursting with bigger song—wild, glorious song. Shall she stick to the nursery or shall she leave her babies every now and then and give the world a chance to hear her? Her mother-in-law and the neighbors say, ‘The opera is immoral, the singers are immoral, the librettos are immoral, the managers are immoral; you stay in the nursery, except on Sundays, and then you may sing in the choir.’
“But she remembers when she sang the death-love of Isolde in the Metropolitan with an orchestra of a hundred trying in vain to drown her; she remembers how she climbed and climbed till she was in heaven, and how she took five thousand people there with her, and—Oh, you can see it! It’s Trilby without Svengali; it’s Trilby as a mother and a wife. It’s all womankind.”
His thoughts were stampeded with the new excitement. He picked up the play he had loved so well and worked for so hard, and would have tossed it into the fire if Eldon’s room had not been heated by a steam-radiator. He flung it on the floor with contempt:
“That!” and he trampled it as the critics would have trampled it had it been laid at their feet.
“What to call my play?” he pondered, aloud. “It’s always easier for me to write the play than select the name.” As he screwed up his face in thought a memory came to him. “My mother told me once that when she was a little girl in the West her father wounded a wild swan and brought it home. She cared for it till it got well, then he clipped one of its wings so that it could not balance itself to fly. It grew tame and stayed about the garden, but it was always trying to fly.
“One day my grandfather noticed that the clipped wing was growing out and he sent a farm-hand to trim it down again. The fellow didn’t understand how birds fly, and he clipped the long wing down to the length of the short one. The bird walked about, trying its pinions. It found that, short as they were, they balanced each other.
“She walked to a high place and suddenly leaped off into the air; my mother saw her and thought she would fall. But her wings held her up. They beat the air and she sailed away.”
“Did she ever come back?” Eldon asked.
“She never came back. But she was a bird and didn’t belong in a garden. A woman would come back. We used to have pigeons at home. We clipped their wings at first, too, till they learned the cote. Then we let them free. You could see them circling about in the sky. Pigeons come back. I’m going to call my play ‘Clipped Wings.’ How’s that for a title?—‘Clipped Wings’!”