Mrs. Vining was thinking “Aha!” as she crossed the room to their table. “It’s high time I was getting well. Affairs have been progressing since I began to nurse my neuralgia.”
She resolved to stick around, like the “demon chaperon” of Fontaine Fox’s comic pictures. At all costs she must rescue Sheila from the wiles of this good-looking young man. For her ward to lose her head and find her heart in an affair with an actor would be a disaster indeed; the very disaster that Sheila’s mother had warned her against.
Of course Sheila’s mother had married an actor and been as happy as a woman had a right to expect to be with any man. And of course Mrs. Vining’s own dear dead John Vining had been the most lovable of rascals. But such bits of luck could not keep on recurring in the same family.
And Mr. Reben did not believe in marriage for actors, either. He had many reasons far from romantic. The public did not like its innocent heroines to be wives. The prima donna’s husband is a proverb of trouble-making. Separated, the couple pine; united, they quarrel with other members of the company or with each other. Children arrive contrary to bookings and play havoc with youth and vivacity, changing the frivolous Juliet into a Nurse or a Roman Matron.
Reben would have been infuriated to learn that Sheila Kemble, his Sheila of the golden future, was dallying on the brink of an infatuation for an infatuated minor member of one of his companies. A flirtation, even, was too dangerous to permit. He would have dismissed Eldon without a moment’s pity if he had known what none of the company had yet suspected. Unwittingly he accomplished the effect he would have sought if he had been aware.
Reben ran out to Chicago ostensibly, according to his custom, to inspect the troupe in the last fortnight of its run there. He invited Sheila to supper with Mrs. Vining. He criticized Sheila severely and praised Miss Griffen. Later, as if quite casually, he spoke to Mrs. Vining of a new play he had found abroad. It was a man star’s play. “I bought it for Tom Brereton,” he said, “but the leadin’ woman’s rôle is rather interestin’.”
He described one of her scenes and noted that Sheila was instantly excited. It was one of those craftsmanly achievements the English dramatists arrive at oftener than ours, and it had made the instant fame of the actress who played it in London. Having dropped this golden apple before Atalanta, he changed the subject carelessly.
Sheila turned back to the apple:
“Tell me more about the play, please!”
Reben told her more, permitted her to coax him to tell it all. He yawned so crudely that she would have noticed his wiles if she had been able to think of anything but that rôle; for an actress thrills at the thought of putting on one of these costumes of the soul as quickly as an average woman grows incandescent before a new gown.