Both stared at the sumptuous Delilah floating in at the side of Bret Winfield. They did not recognize either Bret or Sheila till Sheila was almost past them. Then they leaped to attention and called her by name.
All four exchanged greetings with cordiality. Time had blurred the old grudges. The admiration in the eyes of both Reben and Coleman reassured Sheila more than all the compliments they lavished.
Reben ended a speech of Oriental floweriness with a gracious implication: “You are coming in at the wrong door of the theater. This is the entrance for the sheep. The artists—Ah, if we had you back there now!”
Bret whitened and Sheila flushed. Then they moved on. Reben called after her, laughingly:
“I’ve got that contract in the safe yet.”
It was a random shot, but the arrow struck. When the Winfields had gone on Reben said to Coleman:
“She’s still beautiful—she is only now beautiful.”
Coleman, whose enthusiasms were exhausted on his typewriting machine, agreed, cautiously: “Ye-es, but she’s aged a good deal.”
Reben frowned. “So you could say of a rosebud that has bloomed. She was pretty then and clever and sweet, but only a young thing that didn’t know half as much as she thought she did. Now she has loved and suffered and she has had children and seen death maybe, and she has cried a lot in the night. Now she is a woman. She has the tragic mask, and I bet she could act—my God! I know she could act—if that fellow didn’t prevent.”
“Fellow” was not the expression he used. Reben abhorred Bret even more than Bret him.