Mrs. Vining was not able to be about for a while. Her neuralgia was revived by the knife-winds of Chicago. But Sheila and Eldon found them highly stimulating. He joined her in her constitutionals.
Chicago was large enough to give them a kind of seclusion by multitude, the solitude of a great forest. Among Chicago’s myriads the little “Friend in Need” company was lost to view. It was possible to go about with Eldon and never meet a fellow-trooper; to walk miles with him along the Lake front, or through Lincoln Park, to sidle past the pictures in the Art Institute or the Field Museum, and rest upon the benches in galleries where the dumb beauty on the walls warmed the soul to sensitiveness.
And when they were not alone their hearts seemed to commune without exchange of word or glance. He told her first how wonderful an artist she was, and by and by he was crediting her art to her wonderful “personality.” She told him that he had “personality,” too, lots of it, and charming. She told him that the stage needed men of birth and breeding and higher education, especially when these were combined with such—such—she could hardly say beauty—so she fell back again on that useful term—“personality.”
They never tired of discussing the technic of their trade and its emotional grandeurs. He told her that his main ambition was to see her achieve the heights God meant her for; he only wished that he might trudge on after her, in her wake. She told him that he had far greater gifts than she had, and that his future was boundless.
Finally she convinced him that she was convinced of this, and over a tea-table in the Auditorium Hotel he murmured—and trembled with the terrific audacity of it as he murmured:
“If only we could always play together—twin stars.”
She was shocked as if she had touched a live wire of frightful beatitude. And her lips shivered as she mumbled, “Would you like that?”
He could only sigh enormously. And his eyes were full of devout longing as he whispered, “Let’s!”
They burst into laughter like children planning some tremendous game. And then Mrs. Vining had to walk into their cloud-Eden and dissolve it into a plain table at which she seated herself.