To the layman it would seem the simplest task on earth—to play oneself. The acting trade knows it to be the most complex, the last height the actor attains, if he ever attains it at all.
Bret watched Dorothy in amazement. He was too polite to say what he thought, since Jim Greeley was at his elbow. Jim was not so polite. He spoke for Bret when he groaned:
“Gee whiz! What’s the matter with that wife of mine? She’s put her kids to bed a thousand times and yet you’d swear she never saw a child in her life before. You’d swear nobody else ever did. O Lord! Whew! I’ll get a divorce in the morning.”
The neighbors hushed him and protested with compliments as badly read and unconvincing as Dorothy’s own lines. At last Sheila came on, in the fairy-queen robes. Everybody knew that she was Mrs. Winfield, and that there were no fairies, at least in Blithevale, nowadays.
Yet somehow for the nonce one fairy at least was altogether undeniable and natural and real. The human mother putting her chicks to bed was the unheard-of, the unbelievable fantasm. Sheila was convincing beyond skepticism.
At the first slow circle of her wand, and the first sound of her easy, colloquial, yet poetic speech, there was a hush and, in one heart-throb, a sudden belief that such things must be true, because they were too beautiful not to be; they were infinitely lovely beyond the cruelty of denial or the folly of resistance.
Bret’s heart began to race with pride, then to thud heavily. First was the response to her beauty, her charm, her triumph with the neighbors who had whispered him down because he had married an actress. Then came the strangling clutch of remorse: What right had he to cabin and confine that bright spirit in the little cell of his life? Would she not vanish from his home as she vanished from the scene? Actually, she merely walked between the rhododendron-bushes, but it had the effect of a mystic escape.
There was great laughter when the children woke up and scooted across the lawn in their bed-gear, but the sensation was Sheila’s. Her ovation was overwhelming. The women of the audience fairly attacked Bret with congratulations. They groaned, shouted, and squealed at him:
“Oh, your wife was wonderful! wonderful! wonderful! You must be so proud of her!”
He accepted her tributes with a guilty feeling of embezzlement, a feeling that the prouder he was of her the more ashamed he should be of himself.