“Do you mind if I tag after you? I might get a swipe at that actor, too.”
“Oh, well, come along.”
They marched to the theater, stepping high and hoping higher. The stage door-keeper brought them to ground with the information that the company had left on a midnight train after the performance. He had no idea where they had gone.
The two youths, ignorant of the simple means of following theatrical routes, went back to their dismal university with a bland trust that fate would somehow arrange a rencounter for them.
Winfield was soon called before the faculty. He had rehearsed a speech written for him by Eugene Vickery. He forgot most of it and ruined its eloquence by his mumbling delivery.
The faculty had dealt harshly with the Freshmen, several of whom it had sent home to the mercy of their fathers. But Winfield’s explanation was accepted. In the first place, he was a Senior and not likely to have stooped to the atrocity of abetting a Freshman enterprise. In the second place, he would be needed in the next rowing-contest at New London. In the third place, his millionaire father was trembling on the verge of donating to the university a second liberal endowment.
Winfield and Vickery returned to their daily chores and put in camphor their various ambitions. Winfield endured the multitudinous jests of the university on his record-breaking backward dive across the footlights, but he made it his business to find out the name of the actor who brought him his ignominy. In time he learned it and enshrined “Floyd Eldon” and “Sheila Kemble” in prominent niches for future attention. Somehow his loneliness for Dorothy seemed less poignant than before.
Eugene Vickery could have been seen at almost any hour, lying on his stomach and changing an improbable novel into an impossible play.
CHAPTER VII
It was Sheila Kemble’s destiny to pass like a magnet through a world largely composed of iron filings, though it was her destiny also to meet a number of silver chums on whom her powers exerted no drag whatever. Her father had been greatly troubled by her growth through the various strata of her personality. He had noted with pain that she had a company smile which was not the smile that illumined her face when she was simply happy. He had begun a course of education. He kept taking her down a peg or two, mimicking her, satirizing her. Her mother protested.