Eldon was growing incandescent, too, but he advised caution:
“Be easy on the allegory, boy, or you’ll have only allegorical audiences. Stick to the real and the real people will come to see it. Go on and write it, and don’t forget I play the husband; I saw him first. Don’t write a lecture, now; promise me you won’t preach or generalize. You stick to your story of those two people, and let the audience generalize on the way home. And don’t let your dialogue sparkle too much. Every-day people don’t talk epigrams. Give them every-day talk. That’s as great and twice as difficult as blank verse.
“Don’t try to sweeten the husband. Let him roar like a bull, and everybody will understand and forgive him. I tell you the new wife has it all her own way. She’s venturing out into new fields. The new husband is the one I’m sorry for.
“I hate Winfield for taking Sheila off the stage, and I hate him for keeping her away. But if I were in his place I’d do the same. I’d hate myself, but I’d keep her. The more you think of it, the harder the husband job is.
“The new husband of the new woman is up against the biggest problem of the present time and of the future: what are husbands going to do about their wives’ ambitions? What are wives going to do about their husbands’ rights to a home? Where do the children come in? It doesn’t do the kids much good to have ’em brought up in a home of discontent by a broken-hearted mother raising her daughter to go through the same tragedy. But they ought to have a chance.
“There’s a new triangle in the drama. It’s not a question of a lover outside; the third member is the wife’s ambition. Go to it, my boy—and give us the story.”
Vickery stumbled from the room like a sleep-walker. The whole play was present in his brain, as a cathedral in the imagination of an architect.
When he came to drawing the details of the cathedral, and figuring out the ground-plan, stresses, and strains, the roof supports, the flying buttresses, the cost of material, and all the infernally irreconcilable details—that was quite another thing yet.
But he plunged into it as into a brier-patch and floundered about with a desperate enthusiasm. His health ebbed from him like ink from his pen. His doctor ordered him to rest and to travel, and he sought the mountains of New York for a while. But he would not stop work. His theme dragged him along and he hoped only that his zest for writing would not give out before the play was finished. If afterward his life also gave out, he would not much care.
He had lost Sheila, and Sheila had lost herself. If he could find his work, that would be something at least.