Winfield had said, “I ought to!” It is strange that we always say “I ought to” with skepticism, wondering both “Shall I?” and “Will I?” If our selves are our 
 
real gods, we are all agnostics.
 
The next morning Sheila woke with less than her yester joy. Leisure was not so much a luxury and more of a bore. Not that she felt regret for the lack of rehearsals. 
 
She was not interested in plays, but in the raw material of plays, and she was not so proud of her noble renunciation of Bret Winfield as she had been.
 
To fight off her new loneliness she decided to go shopping. When men are restless they go to clubs or billiard-parlors or saloons. Women go prowling through the shops. 
 
The Clinton shops were as unpromising to Sheila as a man’s club in summer. But there was no other way to kill time.
 
As she set out she saw Bret Winfield’s car loafing in front of her hotel. He was sitting in it. The faces of both showed a somewhat dim surprise. Sheila quickened her 
 
steps to the curb, where he hastened to alight.
 
“You didn’t go,” she said, brilliantly.
 
“No.”
 
“Why not?”
 
“I—I couldn’t.”
 
“Why?”
 
“Well, I didn’t sleep a wink last night, and—”
 
“I didn’t close my eyes, either.”
 
It was a perfectly sincere statement on both sides and perfectly untrue in both cases. Both had slept enviably most of the time they thought they were awake. Sheila 
 
tried to make conversation:
 
“What was on your mind?”
 
“You!”
 
His words filled her with delicious fright. On the lofty hill under the low-hanging moon he had scared love off by attempted caresses. With one word he brought love 
 
back in a rose-clouded mantle that gave their communion a solitude there on the noisy street with the cars brawling by and the crowds passing and peering, people 
 
nudging and whispering: “That’s her! That’s Sheila Kemble! Ain’t she pretty? She’s just grand in the new show! Saw it yet?”
 
They stood in gawky speechlessness till he said, “Which way you going?”
 
“I have some shopping to do.”
 
“Oh! Too bad. I was going to ask you to take a little spin.”
 
They span.
 
Winfield did not leave Clinton till the week was gone and Sheila with it. They were together constantly, making little efforts at concealment that attracted all manner 
 
of attention in the whole jealous town.
 
Vickery and Eldon were not the least alive to Winfield’s incursion into Sheila’s thoughts. Both regarded it as nothing less than a barbaric danger. Both felt that 
 
Winfield, for all his good qualities, was a Philistine. They knew that he had little interest in the stage as an institution, and no reverence for it. It was to him an 
 
amusement at best, and a scandal at worst.
 
But to Vickery the theater was the loftiest form of literary publication, and to Eldon it was the noblest forum of human debate. To both of them Sheila was as a high 
 
priestess at an altar. They felt that Winfield wanted to lure her or drag her away from the temple to an old-fashioned home where her individuality would be merged in 
 
her husband’s manufacturing interests, and her histrionism would be confined to an audience of one, or to the entertainment of her own children.
 
This feeling was entirely apart from the love that both of them felt for Sheila the woman. Each was sure in his heart that his own love for Sheila was far the greatest 
 
of the three loves.
 
Vickery forgot even his own vain struggles to make the heroine of his play behave, in his eagerness to save Sheila from ruining the dramatic unity of her life by 
 
interpolating a commercial marriage as the third act. He found a chance to speak to her one afternoon just before the second curtain rose. He was as excited as if he 
 
had been making a curtain speech and nearly as awkward:
 
“Sheila,” he hemmed and hawed, “I want to speak to you very frankly about Bret. Of course, he’s a splendid fellow and a friend I’m very fond of, but if he goes 
 
and makes you fall in love with him I’ll break his head.”
 
“He’s bigger than you are,” Sheila laughed.
 
&ldq............