Reben had told Coleman to play up strong his belief in the American dramatist, particularly the young dramatist. Reben always did this just before he set out on his annual European shopping-tour among the foreign play-bazars. Over there he could inspect the finished products of expert craftsmen; he could see their machines in operation, in lieu of buying pigs in pokes from ambitious Yankees who learned their trade at the managers’ expense.
This widely copied “Youth” interview brought down on Reben’s play-bureau a deluge of American manuscripts, almost all of them devoid of theme or novelty, redolent of no passion except the passion for writing a play, and all of them crude in workmanship. Reben kept a play-reader—or at least a play-rejector, and paid him a moderate salary to glance over submitted manuscripts so that Reben could make a bluff at having read them before he returned them. This timid person surprised Reben one day by saying:
“There’s a play here with a kind of an idea in it. It’s hopeless as it stands, of course, but it might be worked over a little. It’s written by a man named Vicksburg, or Vickery, or something like that. Funny thing—he suggests that Sheila Kemble would be the ideal woman for the principal part. And, do you know, I’ve been thinking she has the makings of a star some day. Had you ever thought of that?”
“No,” said Reben, craftily.
“Well, I believe she’ll bear watching.”
In after-years this play-returner used to say, “I put Reben on to the idea that there was star material in Kemble, before he ever thought of it himself.”
But long before either of them thought of Sheila Kemble as a star, that destiny had been dreamed and planned for her by Sheila Kemble.
Frivolous as she appeared on the stage and off, her pretty head was full of sonorous ambitions. That head was not turned by the whirlwinds of adulation, or drugged by the bouquets of flattery, because it was full of self-criticism. She was struggling for expressions that she could not get; she was groping, listening, studying, trying, discarding, replacing.
She thought she was free from any nonsense of love. Nonsense should not thwart her progress and make a fool of her, as it had of so many others. It should not interrupt her career or ruin it as it had so many others. She would make friends with men, oh yes. They were so much more sensible, as a rule, than women, except when they grew sentimental. And that was a mere form of preliminary sparring with most of them. Once a girl made a fellow understand that she was not interested in spoony nonsense, he became himself and gave his mind a chance. And all the while nature was rendering her more ready to command love from without, less ready to withstand love from within. She was becoming more and more of an actress. But still faster and still more was she becoming a woman.