There was nothing spectacular or startlingly precocious about Sheila's
development during the next few years.
On her seventeenth birthday, her frocks were lowered to her slender
ankles; on her eighteenth, she permanently assumed the dignity of full
length skirts; on her nineteenth, she lifted her hair from its soft,
girlish knot on her neck to a womanly coronet upon the top of her head.
But despite her regal coiffure, she remained very much of a child.
Mrs. Caldwell had achieved the apparently impossible; she had
eliminated the role of the "young lady" from Sheila's _repertoire_. At
nineteen the girl was ready, at the touch of fate, to merge the child
in the woman; but there was nothing of the conventional young lady
about her, though she led the same life as other girls in Shadyville, a
life that abounded in parties---in town through the winter and at the
country houses in the summer--and little sex vanities and love affairs.
Sheila herself had never had a love affair. She was a charming young
person--not quite pretty, but more alluring in her shy, wistful
fashion, than handsomer girls--so it followed that susceptible youths
sued for her favor. But they sued in vain. She smiled upon them until
they said some word of love, and then she was on the wing like a wild
bird.
Whatever ardor there was in her she had expended thus far upon her
ambition to write. Under Peter's restraining tutelage, she had long
since foresworn odes to the evening star for prose fantasies, and these
were in turn being superseded by what promised to become a clean-cut,
brilliant gift for narrative. She had a rich imagination, an unusual
facility for characterization, a certain quaint, whimsical humor--that
she never displayed in her speech; all of which raised her work, crude
though it still was, distinctly above the level of the commonplace.
She had recently sold a little sketch, in her later and better manner,
to an eastern magazine with a keen eye for young talent, and the event
had been to her as truly the pinnacle of romance as a betrothal would
have been to another girl. It had shed a veritable glory over life for
her, and all her dreams were now of further triumphs, of approving
editors and an applauding public. She would be a famous woman, she
told herself, with the naive assurance of youth. That was her destiny!
So it was small wonder, after all, that Shadyville lads had not induced
her to regard them seriously. She would marry some time, of course.
Everyone married--at least in Shadyville, where the elemental
simplicities of existence prevailed for very lack of its complexities.
There was really nothing to do in Shadyville except to participate, in
one capacity or another, in birth, marriage and death. Sheila
therefore considered marriage an inescapable end, but she thought very
little about it along the way thither.
And yet, when the hour of sex romance finally struck for Sheila, when,
for the first time, she realized love's moving power and beauty, her
surrender to it was tenfold quicker and more unquestioning than would
have been that of a girl who had dallied with sentiment from the days
of her short frocks. Her very years of indifference were her undoing.
Owing to them, love came to her with the shock of an instant and
supreme revelation; she who had been blind suddenly beheld a whole
undreamed of world, as it were, and the vastness of the vision
inevitably dazed her to a degree that made clear perception of it
impossible.
Perhaps Sheila would have been less ingenuously innocent, and more
effectually prepared for this crisis, had Charlotte Davis been at hand
during the formative period of her girlhood. But Charlotte had been
traveling in Europe for a couple of years, and her letters--clever,
witty, worldly-wise--were too infrequent to equip Sheila for the
defense of her heart. So she went forward--profoundly unconscious,
pitifully unready--to capture.
She was nineteen years old, and the season was summer, and the moon was
shining--when it began. And summer is an opulent thing in Kentucky; a
blue and golden thing by day; a thing of white witchery by night; and
whether in the burnished glamour of the sun, or the pallid glamour of
the moon, too sweet, too full-blooded, too poignant with the forces and
the purposes of nature to leave the pulse unstirred.
Sheila, restless with this earth-magic, was standing at the garden gate
one evening, when a young man came up and paused, smiling, before her.
At first glance, and in the uncertain moonlight, she thought him a
stranger, but a second look revealed his sturdy identity.
"Why, _Ted_!"
And Ted he was; a Ted grown to a fine, vigorous manliness--the
manliness of a thoroughly healthy body and a cheerful, literal mind.
It was obvious at once that there was not a subtlety in him; that, in
his early maturity, he was of the same substantial quality that he had
been as a child.
Sheila had not seen him for a long time--as time is measured at
nineteen--for during his first year at college, his family had removed
to Lexington, and neither they nor he had ever returned. But it seemed
as natural to her to have him there as if they had parted only
yesterday, as natural to have him, and as natural to admire him. She
had admired him devoutly when she was a little girl, though she had
sometimes had disconcerting glimpses of his limitations. And she
admired him now. Instantly she felt that splendid, radiant materialism
of his as a charm.
She walked up the path to the house at his side, in a flutter of
girlish delight--all sex, all softness, the weaker, the submissive
creature. So he had dominated her in the past--except in her rare,
"queer" moments when the wings of her quick fancy had lifted her on
some flight beyond his reach. Her wings did not lift her now, however;
they were folded so meekly against her shoulders that they might as
well not have been there at all.
They sat down on the veranda together, and a climbing rose shook down a
shower of night fragrance upon them, and the moonlight streamed over
their faces as if with the intent to glorify each to the other.
Mrs. Caldwell was playing whist at the house next door, so Sheila and
Ted were there alone, save for the cook's tuneful presence in the
kitchen. Her song floated out to them in her warm, caressing negro
voice--"Weep no mo', my lady! Oh, weep no mo' to-day!" And suddenly
Sheila felt that she would never weep again--life was such a joyous
thing!
Ted sat on a step at her feet, and he leaned his head back against a
pillar of the veranda as he talked. She noticed how crisp and strong
his fair hair was, and the sense of his vitality weighed upon her like
a compelling hand.
He was telling her what had brought him back. The editorship of the
_Shadyville Star_, the town's semi-weekly paper--the editorship and
part ownership in fact--was open to him, and, alert as ever, he was
seizing the opportunity.
"It's a chance--a good chance--to go into the newspaper game as my own
boss, or as part proprietor anyhow," he explained. "Mr. Orcutt is
making the _Star_ into a daily, and he wants a live man--a young
man--to take charge of it. Father's let me have a couple of thousand
dollars, and I've borrowed three thousand more, and I'm going in with
Mr. Orcutt as a partner. It's a big thing for me if I can pull it
through. And I _will_ pull it through. I was editor of our college
magazine, and I've worked on one or another of the Louisville papers
every summer, so I know a little about the game--and I like it
tremendously. Oh, I'll succeed all right!"
"Of course you will!" she agreed heartily. At the mere sound of his
bright, confident voice she believed in his ability to succeed in
anything whatever.
"Yes, of course I will. And it's nice to have _you_ say so. The only
question about it," he pursued, "is whether it's a big _enough_
opportunity for me. But I'll _make_ it big enough. I'll make the
paper grow--and the paper will make the town grow. See? All
Shadyville needs is enterprise--enterprise and advertising."
"Yes," she agreed again. An hour earlier she would have been ready to
protect Shadyville's sacred precincts from the vandals of "enterprise"
and "advertising" with her own slim fist, but here she was handing over
the keys of the town to modern commercialism without a qualm of
hesitation. "_You're_ just what Shadyville needs, Ted," she added
earnestly.
"I thought you'd feel that way about it!" And his voice was exultant.
"You always were a good pal, Sheila!"
And at the tribute Sheila had a swift conception of woman's mission as
the perfect comrade. Oh, that was a mission to thrill and inspire one,
to move one to high and selfless endeavor! And she dedicated herself,
in the secrecy of her own mind, to the cause of Ted and the _Shadyville
Star_.
Throughout the next few weeks she was, indeed, the perfect comrade.
She who had never before been interested in the spectacle of actual,
contemporary life, flung herself now, with a fervor which not even her
personal ambitions had excited, into the business of life's presentment
through the daily press, and in particular through the medium of the
_Shadyville Star_. She read newspapers avidly; she suggested subjects
for editorials to Ted; she came down to the office of the _Shadyville
Daily Star_--under Mrs. Caldwell's reluctant chaperonage--to see the
linotype machine which had been installed in honor of Ted's reign. She
even read proof on the tumultuous day which preceded the transformed
_Star's_ first appearance.
Peter watched her in amazement. "But I thought newspapers bored you!"
he exclaimed one afternoon when, coming to read his beloved Theocritus
with her, he found Sheila immersed in a whirlwind of New York papers,
from which she was industriously clipping items for reprint in the
_Star_.
"Oh," she cried, in the rapturous voice of the devotee, "I didn't
understand how wonderful newspaper work could be! Why, Peter--I've got
my finger on the pulse of the world!"
At which Peter put his Theocritus back into the safety of his pocket
lest even its tranquil spirit be corrupted by the fever of journalism.
To Ted Sheila's magnificent energy in his behalf, her unflagging
comprehension and sympathy, were steps by which he mounted blithely to
his goal. How _could_ he fail with Sheila to stimulate him, to assist
him, to believe in him?
And indeed, the _Star_ did reward the efforts of both its new editor
and his silent partner. It made a triumphant debut, and it continued
daily to fulfill the expectations which that debut had aroused.
Toward the end of the summer, Ted at last drew a breath of complete
security. He was on Mrs. Caldwell's veranda at the time, and he and
Sheila were alone together. It was just such a night as the first one
of his return to Shadyville; the moonlight poured prodigally downward
upon them, showing to each the other's face, silver-clear; the scent of
the climbing roses stole to them on the light wind; from kitchenward
came the soft notes of black Mandy's song as she finished her evening
tasks--"Weep no mo', my lady!"
Everything was as it had been on that first night two months
before--and yet everything was different. Within those two months Ted
had proved himself as a man--a man who could do his chosen work. And
Sheila--Ah, what had she not taught him--what had she not taught
herself--of the woman's part in a man's work--a man's life? The same?
No, everything was different!
Ted was sitting at Sheila's feet, in what had become his accustomed
place. He glanced up at her, sweet and serene in the moonlight, and
something rose within him as resistlessly as a mighty tide.
"I'm winning!" he said triumphantly, "I'm winning! But I couldn't have
done it without you. Oh, Sheila, you've been the making of me! What a
girl you are!--what a woman! _You'd_ always back a man up in his
undertakings--if you loved him--wouldn't you?"
"Oh--if I loved him!--" And she looked past him with dreamy eyes. She
had never looked like that before, though love had been named to her by
others and in more persuasive language. To back up a man in his
undertakings--because she loved him-- Why, that would be _life_!
Ted had never had the superfine discernment of natures more delicately
wrought than his, but he had the discernment of sex--as all young and
healthy creatures have. He saw her dreaming look, and he knew
something of the kindred thought.
"Sheila"--and his voice was less sure and bold--"Sheila, have you ever
been in love? Is there--anybody else?"
"No," she answered simply. And she drew her gaze down from the stars
to his upturned face. That which was in her eyes made him catch his
breath and close his own for an instant; but she was unaware of the
shining thing he had seen--the soul, not only of one woman, just
awakening, but of all womanhood, at once innocent and passionate, brave
and piteous. He had not needed any subtlety to perceive that--so frank
and beautiful was its betrayal.
"Sheila"--and he fixed his eyes upon her now--"Sheila, maybe the town
does need me--as you said when I first came back. I'll do my best to
make it need me. Because--because I want to earn the right to a home.
I want to be able to--marry!"
"To--_marry_?" she whispered.
He leaned forward and laid his hands upon her wrists--importunate hands
that sent the blood swirling through her veins.
"Oh, Sheila--don't you understand? _I_ need _you_!"
For a moment the world swayed around her. Her heart was beating, not
in her bosom, but in her throat--up, up to her dry and quivering lips.
To back up a man in his undertakings--because she loved him!--that was
what Ted was asking her to do for him--to do for him always. Yes--and
that was life!
Then, slowly, the world grew still once more; the night wind blew down
the fragrance of climbing roses; again she heard the familiar
refrain--"Weep no mo', my lady! Oh, weep no mo' to-day!"--and now it
seemed tender with the tenderness of insistent and protective love.
And all the while Ted's hands were on her wrists, silently imploring.
This was life! Oh, she would never weep again--never again in her joy!
"Sheila?"
She bent toward him--as irresistibly as the rose above her head was
drawn to the wind--and smiled.
"Oh, Sheila!--_when you look at me like that_!"
And then Ted's face was against her breast, his arms around her. She
would never weep again--for _this_ was _life_!