“I could shake him!” declared Ellen to Doromea, her eyes always on the stage. “This dazzling play—and now the author, and—oh!” She stopped with a quick gasp, as once more the curtains parted and out in front stepped—Sheila! “Why, what—what——” Sheila’s two friends fell back speechless. It was the small butterfly creature who spoke now—deliberately, and with a faintly smiling friendliness. She stood scarcely five feet in her tiny, frivolous French slippers, a wide-eyed rose-leaf doll, in a halo of golden curls and gossamer rose fluff, before the dark dignity of the velvet curtain.
“Yes, I wrote it,” she confessed, looking out over the crowd without an atom of self-consciousness. “I didn’t want to tell, because I’ve always wanted the twins to do the extraordinary. I wanted to stay just their mother. But Mr. Butler says it will help the play if people know who wrote it; and I want to help the play. It’s a good play?” Like Peter Pan, she searched their faces eagerly. “You think it’s a good play, don’t you?”
“Yes!”
“Well, rather!”
“You betcherlife!”
Sheila dimpled. “Then it’s all right. I don’t mind your knowing; and I can stay on in ‘The Rut’—it’s not such a bad rut,” she pleaded. “I’ve dug it to pieces for you, but for myself I have had to put it together again, since the groove of it is my life. After all, you see, the author is just a plain, ordinary person!” With a gay little nod she slipped back behind the scenes, and so to Hawley.
“That is all I am, isn’t it, Hawley?” she asked, hiding herself behind his bigness, as the applause rose more and more enthusiastic. “Simply a society person and your wife—the mother of the twins.”
“Yes, darlin’—certainly; jus’ ’s you say.” But this time Hawley’s expression was quite satisfactory to Ellen and Doromea.
“And we said she didn’t realize herself”—Doromea turned to Ellen—“we said she could never swing wide enough to get outside the circle! Ellen!”
“Just shows we have a rut all our own, doesn’t it?” Ellen was wiping her eyes joyously. “We hadn’t the sense to see that she was staying in hers voluntarily—that she was creating an ideal society person!”