He leaned close to her and whispered, “Don’t you wish you were up there?”
She heard the little clang of jealousy in his mournful tone, and for his sake she answered, “Not in the least.”
He knew that she lied, and why. He loved her for her love of him, but he felt lonely.
Dulcie did not send for Sheila to come back after the play. Broadway stars are busy people, with many suppliants for their time. Dulcie had no time for ancient history.
Sheila was glad to be spared, but did not misunderstand the reason. As she walked out with the audience she did not feel the aristocracy of her wealth and her leisure. She wanted to be back there in her dressing-room, smearing her features into a mess with cold-cream and recovering her every-day face from her workaday mask.
Bret and she supped in the grand manner, and Sheila had plenty of stares for her beauty. But she could see that nobody knew her. Nobody whispered: “That’s Sheila Kemble. Look! Did you see her in her last play?” It was not a mere hunger for notoriety that made her regret anonymity; it was the artist’s legitimate need of recognition for his work.
She went back to the hotel and took off her fine plumage. It had lost most of its warmth for her. She had not earned it with her own success. It was the gift of a man who loved her body and soul, but hated her mind.
Sheila was very woman, and one Paris gown and the prospect of more had lifted her from the depths to the heights. But she was an ambitious woman, and clothes alone were not enough to sustain her. In her situation they were but gilding on her shackles. The more gorgeously she was robed the more restless she was. She was in the tragi-comic plight of the man in the doleful song, “All dressed up and no place to go!”
Fatigue enveloped her, but it was the fag of idleness that has seen another day go by empty, and views ahead an endless series of empty days like a freight-train.
She tried to comfort Bret’s anxiety with boasts of how well she was, but she fell back on the pitiful refrain, “I’m all right.” If she had been all right she would not have said so; she would not have had to say so.