Sheila suffered the very same feeling to a more sickening degree, a little later, when “The Woman Pays” company, now in its fourth year, reached Blithevale in   
cleaning up the lesser one-night stands. The play that Sheila had rejected had become the corner-stone of Reben’s fortunes. It was as inartistic and plebeian and 
 
reminiscent as apple pie. But the public loves apple pie and consumes tons of it, to the great neglect of marrons glacés.
 
That play was a commodity for which there is always a market. A great artist could adorn it, but it was almost actor-proof against destruction.
 
Even Dulcie Ormerod could not spoil it for its public. When she played it Batterson gnashed his teeth and Reben held his aching head, but there were enough injudicious 
 
persons left to make up eight good audiences a week.
 
Dulcie “killed her laughs” by fidgeting or by reading humorously or by laughing herself. She lost the audience’s tears by the copiousness of her own. But she loved 
 
the play and still “knew she was great because she wept herself.” When she laughed she showed teeth that speedily earned a place in the advertisement of dentifrice, 
 
and when she wept, a certain sort of audience was overawed by the sight of a genuine tear. Real water has always been impressive on the stage.
 
By sheer force of longevity the play slid her up among the prominent women of the day. She stuck to the r?le for four years, and was beginning to hope to rival the 
 
records of Joseph Jefferson, Denman Thompson, Maggie Mitchell, and Lotta.
 
The night the company played in Blithevale Bret and Eugene, Sheila, Dorothy and her Jim, made up a box-party.
 
Jim proclaimed that Dulcie was a “peach,” but he alluded less to the art she did not possess than to the charms she had. She was pretty, there was no question of 
 
that—as shapely and characterless as a Bouguereau painting, as coarsely sweet as granulated sugar. Dorothy credited her with all the winsome qualities of the 
 
character she assumed, and took a keen dislike to the actress who played the adventuress, an estimable woman and a genuine artist whose oxfords Dulcie was not fit to 
 
untie.
 
Eugene and Sheila suffered from Dulcie’s utter falsehood of impersonation. Even Bret felt some mysterious gulf between Dulcie’s interpretation and Sheila’s as he 
 
remembered it.
 
Sheila was afraid to speak her opinion of Dulcie lest it seem mere jealousy. Eugene voiced it for her.
 
“To think that such a heifer is a star! Getting rich and getting admiration,” he growled, “while a genius like Sheila rusts in idleness. It’s a crime.”
 
“It’s all my fault,” said Bret. “I cut her out of it.”
 
“Don’t you believe it, honey,” Sheila cooed. “I’d rather be starring in your home than earning a million dollars before the public.”
 
But somehow there was a clank of false rhetoric in the speech. It was lover’s extravagance, and even Bret felt that it could not quite be true, or that, if it were 
 
true, somehow it ought not to be.
 
He felt himself a dog in the manger, yet he was glad that Sheila was not up there with some actor’s arms about her.
 
After the third act Dulcie sent the company-manager—still Mr. McNish—to invite Mrs. Winfield to come back at the end of the play.
 
Sheila had hoped to escape this test of her nerves, but there was no escape. She felt that if Dulcie were haughty over her success she would hate her, and if she were 
 
not haughty and tried to be gracious she would hate her more.
 
Dulcie assumed the latter r?le and played it badly. She condescended as from a great height, patronized like a society patroness. Worse yet, she pawed Sheila and 
 
called her “Sheila” and “dearie” and congratulated her on having such a nice quiet life in such a dear little village, while “poor me” had to play forty weeks a 
 
year. Sheila wanted to scratch her big doll-eyes out.
 
On the way home Bret confessed that it rather hurt him to see a “dub like Dulcie rattling round in Sheila’s shoes.” The metaphor was meant better than it came out, 
 
but Sheila was not thinking of that when she groaned: “Don’t speak of it.”
 
Bret invited Vickery to stop in for a bit of supper and Vickery accepted, to Bret’s regret. Sheila excused herself from lingering and left Bret to smoke out Vickery, 
 
who was in a midnight mood of garrulity. The playwright watched Sheila trudge wearily up the staircase, worn out with lack of work. He turned on Bret and growled:
 
“Bret, there goes the pitifulest case of frustrated genius I ever saw. It’s a sin to chain a great artist like that to a baby-carriage.”
 
Bret turned scarlet at the insolence of this, but Vickery was too feeble to be knocked down. He was leaner than ever, and his eyes were like wet buckeyes. His speech 
 
was punctuated with coughs. As he put it, he “coughed commas.” Also he coughed cigarette-smoke usually. His friends blamed his cough to his cigarettes, but they knew 
 
better, and so did he.
 
He was in a hurry to do some big work before he was coughed out. It infuriated him to feel genius within himself and have so little strength or time for its 
 
expression. It enraged him to see another genius with health and every advantage kept from publication by a husband’s selfishness.
 
He was in one of his irascible spells to-night and he had no mercy on Bret. He spoke with the fretful tyranny of an invalid.
 
“It’s none of my business, I suppose, Bret, but I tell you it makes me sick—sick! to see Sheila cooped up in this little town. New York would go wild over her—yes, 
 
and London, too. There’s an awful dearth on the stage of young women with beauty and training. She could have everything her own way. She’s a peculiarly brilliant 
 
artist who never had her chance. If she had reached her height and quit—fine! But she was snuffed out just as she was beginning to glow. It was like lighting a lamp 
 
and blowing it out the minute the flame begins to climb on the wick.
 
“Dulcie Ormerod and hundreds of her sort are buzzing away like cheap gas-jets while a Sheila Kemble is here. She could be making thousands of people happy, softening 
 
their hearts, teaching them sympathy and charm and breadth of outlook; and she’s teaching children not to rub their porridge-plates in their hair!
 
“Thousands used to listen to every syllable of hers and forget their troubles. Now she listens to your factory troubles. She listens to the squabbles of a couple of 
 
nice little kids who would rather be outdoors playing with other kids all day, as they ought to be.
 
“It’s like taking a lighthouse and turning the lens away from the sea into the cabbage-patch of the keeper.”
 
“Go right on,” Bret said, with labored restraint. “Don’t mind me. I’m old-fashioned. I believe that a good home with a loving husband and some nice kids is good 
 
enough for a good woman. I believe that such a life is a success. Where should a wife be but at home?”
 
“That depends on the wife, Bret. Most wives belong at home, yes. Most men belong at home, too. They are born farmers and shoemakers and school-teachers and chemists 
 
and inventors, and all glory to them for staying there. But where did Christopher Columbus belong? Where would you be if he had stayed at home?”
 
“But Sheila isn’t a man!”
 
“Well, then, did Florence Nightingale belong at home? or Joan of Arc?”
 
“Oh, well, nurses and patriots and people like that!”
 
“What about Jenny Lind and Patti?”
 
“They were singers.”
 
“And Sheila is a singer, only in unaccompanied recitative. Actors are nurses and doctors, too; they take people who are sick of their hard day’s work and they cure 
 
’em up, give ’em a change of climate.”
 
“Home was good enough for our mothers,” Bret grumbled, sinking back obstinately in his chair.
 
“Oh no, it wasn’t.”
 
“They were contented.”
 
“Contented! hah! that’s a word we use for other people’s patience. Old-fashioned women were not contented. We say they were because other people’s sorrows don’t 
 
bother us, especially when they are dead. But they mattered then to them. If you ever read the newspapers of those days, or the letters, or the novels, or the plays, 
 
you’ll find that people were not contented in the past at any time.
 
“People used to say that laborers were contented to be treated like cattle. But they weren’t, and since they learned how to lift their heads they’ve demanded more 
 
and more.”
 
Bret had been having a prolonged wrestle with a labor-union. He snarled: “Don’t you quote the laboring-men to me. There’s no satisfying them!&rdqu............