She saw how feeble Vickery was and how well Eldon was, and both saw that she was not the Sheila that had left the stage. Eldon felt a resentment against Winfield for what time and discontent had wrought to Sheila, but he knew what the theater can do for impaired beauty with make-up and artifice of lights.
After a certain amount of small talk and fuss about chairs the reading began. To Bret it was like a death-warrant; to Vickery and Eldon it was a writ of habeas corpus; to Sheila it was like the single copy of a great romance that she could never own.
Eldon read without action or gesticulation and with almost no attempt to indicate dialect or characterization. But he gave hint enough of each to set the hearers’ imagination astir and not enough to hamper it.
Outside in the far-below streets was a muffled hubbub of motors and street-cars. And within there was only the heavy elegance of hotel furniture. But the listeners felt themselves peering into the lives of living people in a conflict of interests.
The light in the room grew dimmer and dimmer as Eldon read, till the air was thick with the deep crimson of sunset straining across the roofs. It served as the very rose-light of daybreak in which the play ended, calling the husband and wife to their separate tasks in the new manhood and the new womanhood, outside the new home to which they should return in the evening, to the peace they had earned with toil.
Bret hated the play because he loved it, because he felt that it had a right to be and it needed his wife to give it being; because it seemed to command him to sacrifice his old-fashioned home for the sake of the ever-demanding world.
Sheila made no comment at all during the reading. She might have been an allegory of attention.
Even when Eldon closed the manuscript and the play with the quiet word “Curtain” Sheila did not speak. The three men watched her for a long hushed moment, and then they saw two great tears roll from the clenched eyes.
She murmured, feebly: “Who is the lucky woman that is to—to create it?”