“Well, say, give me a ride in that wagon, will you? Do you suppose I could meet her? I’ve got to square myself with her.”
Eugene looked a trifle pained at Bret’s interest in another girl than Dorothy, but he said: “I’m on my way to the theater now to find out where she’s stopping and leave this note for her. I don’t suppose she’ll remember me; but she might.”
“Do you mind if I tag after you? I might get a swipe at that actor, too.”
“Oh, well, come along.”
They marched to the theater, stepping high and hoping higher. The stage door-keeper brought them to ground with the information that the company had left on a midnight train after the performance. He had no idea where they had gone.
The two youths, ignorant of the simple means of following theatrical routes, went back to their dismal university with a bland trust that fate would somehow arrange a rencounter for them.
Winfield was soon called before the faculty. He had rehearsed a speech written for him by Eugene Vickery. He forgot most of it and ruined its eloquence by his mumbling delivery.
The faculty had dealt harshly with the Freshmen, several of whom it had sent home to the mercy of their fathers. But Winfield’s explanation was accepted. In the first place, he was a Senior and not likely to have stooped to the atrocity of abetting a Freshman enterprise. In the second place, he would be needed in the next rowing-contest at New London. In the third place, his millionaire father was trembling on the verge of donating to the university a second liberal endowment.
Winfield and Vickery returned to their daily chores and put in camphor their various ambitions. Winfield endured the multitudinous jests of the university on his record-breaking backward dive across the footlights, but he made it his business to find out the name of the actor who brought him his ignominy. In time he learned it and enshrined “Floyd Eldon” and “Sheila Kemble” in prominent niches for future attention. Somehow his loneliness for Dorothy seemed less poignant than before.
Eugene Vickery could have been seen at almost any hour, lying on his stomach and changing an improbable novel into an impossible play.
CHAPTER VII
It was Sheila Kemble’s destiny to pass like a magnet through a world largely composed of iron filings, though it was her destiny also to meet a number of silver chums on whom her powers exerted no drag whatever. Her father had been greatly troubled by her growth through the various strata of her personality. He had noted with pain that she had a company smile which was not the smile that illumined her face when she was simply happy. He had begun a course of education. He kept taking her down a peg or two, mimicking her, satirizing her. Her mother protested.
“Let the child alone. It will wear off. She has to go through it, but she’ll molt and take on a new set of feathers in due time.”
“She’s got to,” Kemble groaned. “I’d rather have her deformed than affected. If she’s going to be conscious of something, let her be conscious of her faults.”
Sheila had been schooled at school as well as at home. With both father and mother earning large sums, the family was prosperous enough to give its only child the most expensive forms of education—and did. In school she tormented and charmed her teachers; she was so endlessly eager for attention. It was true that she always tried to earn it and deserve it, but the effort irritated the instructors, whose ideal for a girl was that she should be as inconspicuous as possible. That was not Sheila’s ideal. Not at all!
She had soon tired of her classes. She was by nature quick at study. She learned her lessons by a sort of mental photography, as she learned her rôles later. The grind of her lessons irked her, not because she wanted to be out at play like other children, but because she wanted to be in at work. As ambitious young men chafe to run away from school and begin their destinies, so young women are beginning to fret for their own careers.
But Sheila’s father and mother were eager for her to stay a baby. Polly Farren especially was not unwilling to postpone acknowledging herself the mother of a grown-up daughter.
“You must have your childhood,” Roger had said.
“But I’ve had it,” Sheila declared.
“Oh, you have, have you?” her father laughed. “Why, you little upstart kid, you’re only a baby.”
Sheila protested: “Juliet was only thirteen years old when she married Romeo, and Eleonora Duse was only fourteen when she played the part, and here I’m sixteen and I haven’t started yet.”
“Help! help!” cried Roger, with a sickish smile. “But you must prepare yourself for your career by first educating yourself as a lady.”
This argument had convinced her. She consented to play one more season at Miss Neely’s school. She came forth more zealous than ever to be an actress. Polly and Roger had wheedled her along as best they could, tried to interest her in literature, water-colors, needlework, golf, tennis, European travel. But her cry for “work” could not be silenced.
When the autumn drew on they had urged her to try one year more at school, pleaded that there was no opening for her in their company. She was too young, too inexperienced.
She murmured “Yes?” with an impudent uptilt of inflection.
She left the house, and came home that afternoon bringing a contract. She handed it to her father with another of those rising inflections, “No?”
He looked at the paper, gulped, called, “Polly!”
They looked it over together. The party of the first part was J. J. Cassard.
“And who is J. J. Cassard?” said Polly, trying not to breathe fast. Roger growled:
“One of those Pacific-coast managers trying to jimmy a way into New York.”
Hoping to escape the vital question by attacking the details, Roger glanced through the various clauses. It was a splendid contract—for Sheila. The hateful “two-weeks’ clause” by which she could be dismissed at a fortnight’s notice was omitted and in its place was an agreement to pay for her costumes and a maid.
“Do you mean to say,” Kemble blustered, “that Cassard handed you a document like that right off the reel?”
“Oh no,” perked Sheila; “he gave me a regular white-slave mortgage at first.”
“Where does she learn such language!” gasped Polly.
Sheila went on, “But I whipped him out on every point.”
“It looks almost suspicious,” said Kemble, and Polly protested.
“I was ten years on the stage before I got my modern costumes and a maid.”
“Well,” said Sheila, as blandly as if she were a traveling saleswoman describing her wares, “Cassard said I was pretty, and I reminded him that I had the immense advertising value of the great
