“No, you don’t!” said Sheila. “You don’t hide me in any of those ‘Did you rings?’ and ‘Won’t you sit down, ma’ams?” ’
“We’ll have the author build up the part a little, and there’s a bit in the third act that’s really quite interesting.”
Sheila refused flatly. But her mother cried all that night, and her father looked so glum the next morning that she consented to chaperon them for one more year.
She revealed a genuine gift for the stage, and she had a carrying personality. When she entered as the chambermaid and said, “Did you ring?” the audience felt a strangely vivid spark of reality at once. She needed nothing to say. She just was. Like some of the curiously alive figures in the paintings of the Little Dutch masters, she was perfectly in and of the picture, and yet she was rounded and complete. She was felt when she entered and missed when she left.
Two or three times when her mother fell ill Sheila played her part—that of a young widow. She did not look it yet, of course, but there was that same uncanny actuality that had stirred the people who watched her as an infantile Ophelia.
Seeing that she meant to be a star and was meant to be one, her parents gave her the best of their wisdom, taught her little tricks of make-up, and gesture, and economy of gesture; of emphasis by force and of emphasis by restraint; the art of underlining important words and of seeming not to have memorized her speeches, but to be improvising them from the previous speech or from the situation. They taught her what can be taught of the intricate technique of comedy—waiting for the laugh while seeming to hurry past it; making speed, yet scoring points; the great art of listening; the delicate science of when to move and when not to move, and the tremendous power of a turn of the eyes. And, above all, they hammered into her head the importance of sincerity—sincerity.
“There are hundreds of right ways to read any line,” Roger would say, “and only one way that’s wrong—the insincere way. Insincerity can be shown as much by exaggeration as by indifference. Let your character express what you feel, and the audience will understand you, if it’s only a slow closing of the eyes once or a little shift of the weight. Be sincere!”
Two seasons later, Roger’s manager brought over from Europe a well-tried success that suited Roger and Polly to a T, but included no rôle at all for Sheila. She simply could not play the fat old dowager, and she simply would not play the laconic housemaid. The time had come for the family to part.
Fathers are always frightened to death of their daughters’ welfares in this risky, woman-trapping world. Roger Kemble knew well enough what dangers Sheila ran. Whether they were greater than they would have been in any other walk of life or in the most secluded shelter, he did not know. He knew only that his child’s honor and honesty were infinitely dear to him, and that he could not keep her from running along the primrose path of public admiration. He could not be with her always.