“I understand. I’ll try to save myself for myself. I don’t belong to any man. I belong just to me; and I’m all I’ve got.”
“That’s a much better way to put it. Much better.” And he sighed with immense relief.
The idea of the man that should make his daughter his own was an odious idea to the father. It was odious now to the girl, too, for she was not yet ready for that stormy crisis when she would make a pride of humility and a rapture of surrender.
CHAPTER VIII
The play that Sheila was surrendered to, “A Friend in Need,” proved a success and raised its young author to such heights of pride and elation that when his next work, an ambitious drama, was produced, he had a long distance to fall. And fell hard.
Young Trivett had tossed off “A Friend in Need” and had won from it the highest praise as a craftsman. He had worked five years on his drama, only to be accused of being “so spoiled by success as to think that the public would endure anything he tossed off.”
But the miserable collapse of his chef-d’œuvre did not even check the triumph of his hors-d’œuvre. “A Friend in Need” ran on “to capacity” until the summer weather turned the theater into a chafing-dish. Then the company was disbanded.
In the early autumn following it was reorganized for a road tour. Of the original company only four or five members were re-engaged—Sheila, Mrs. Vining, Miss Griffen, and Tuell.
During the rehearsals Sheila had paid little attention to the new people. She was doomed to be in their company for thirty or forty weeks and she was in no hurry to know them. She was gracious enough to those she met, but she made no advances to the others, nor they to her. She had noticed that a new man played the taxicab-driver, but she neither knew nor cared about his name, his aim, or his previous condition of servitude.
The Freshmen of Leroy University brought him to her attention with a spectacular suddenness in the guise of a hero. The blow he struck in her supposed defense served as an ideal letter of introduction.