The doctor advised her to take up some active occupation. Bret suggested water-colors, authorship, pottery, piano-playing, the harp, vocal lessons—Sheila had an ear for music and sang very well, for one who did not sing. Sheila waved the suggestions aside one by one.
Bret and the doctor hinted at charity work. It is necessary to confess that the idea did not fascinate Sheila. She had the actor’s instinct and plenteous sympathy, and had always been ready to give herself gratis to those benefit performances with which theatrical people are so generous, and whose charity should cover a multitude of their sins. But charity as a job! Sheila did not feel that going about among the sick and poverty stricken people would cheer her up especially.
The doctor as his last resort suggested a hobby of his own—he suggested that Sheila take up the art of hammering brass. He had found that it worked wonders with some of his patients.
Sheila, not knowing that it was the doctor’s favorite vice and that his home was full of it, protested: “Hammered brass! But where would I hide it when I finished it? No, thank you!”
She said the same to every other proposal. You can lead a woman to an industry, but you cannot make her take it up. Still Bret agreed with the doctor that idleness was Sheila’s chief ailment. There was an abundance of things to do in the world, but Sheila did not want to do them. They were not to her nature. Forcing them on her was like offering a banquet to a fish. Sheila needed only to be put back in the water; then she would provide her own banquet.
Bret gave up trying to find occupations for her. The summer did not retrieve her strength as he hoped. She tired of beaches and mountains and family visitations.
In Bret’s baffled anxiety he thought perhaps it was himself she was so sick of; that love had decayed. But Sheila kept refuting this theory by her tempests of devotion.
He knew better than the doctor did, better than he would admit to himself, what was the matter with her. She wanted to go on the stage, and he could not bear the thought of it. Neither could he bear the thought of her melancholia.
If Sheila had stormed, complained, demanded her freedom he could have put up a first-class battle. But he could not fight the poor, meek sweetheart whose only defense was the terrible weapon of reticence, any more than he could fight the birch-tree that he had brought from its native soil.
The Sheila tree made a hard struggle for existence, but it grew shabbier and sicker, while the Bret tree, flourishing and growing, offered her every encouragement to prosper where she was. But she could not prosper.