Clipped Wings

Sheila saw the anguish of dread cover his face like a sudden fling of ashes. He handed the telegram to her, and she put her arms about his shoulders to uphold him and shelter hi...

The next night Eldon reached the theater in a new mood. He had been promoted. He still felt sorry for poor Tuell. The grief of the wife whom he had met at the train and taken to...

The proud lady in the new runabout was homeward bound from a shopping raid. It was her first voyage down-town alone with the thing. She guided the old family horse up to her cur...

The play that Sheila was surrendered to, “A Friend in Need,” proved a success and raised its young author to such heights of pride and elation that when his next work, an ambiti...

The betrothed couple had no opportunity to seal the engagement with the usual ceremonies. When they met again, fully clothed, she was so late to her luncheon that she had to fly.

The house itself sat well back in its ample green lawn, left fenceless after the manner of American village lawns. In the rear of the house there were many acres of gardens and...

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 le...

In the eyes of the playwright Sir Ralph Incledon, as in the eyes of the early Spaniards, the Americans were savages with unlimited gold to exchange for glass beads. He had a nob...

Winfield determined to go, anyway—and to surprise her. He set out without warning and flew to the theater as soon as he reached New York. The tip-loving doorman declined so fier...

Vickery went to his sister’s house and sat up all night, working on his play for Eldon. For months he toiled and moiled upon it. Sometimes he would write all day and all night u...

Mrs. Jerrems and Mrs. Burbage knew each other only slightly and liked each other something less than that. Yet Tommy and Sheila had arranged that Mrs. Burbage and her husband an...

The notifying of their parents was one of the unpleasantest of tasks. They put it off till the next day. Sheila’s father and mother had already begun their tour to the Coast and...

Sheila had earned a vacation. And she had nearly a thousand dollars in bank, which was pretty good for a girl of her years, and enough for a golden holiday. But her ambition was...

There will always be two schools of preventive hygiene for women. One would protect girls from themselves and their suitors by high walls, ignorance, seclusion, and a guardian i...

The big young man with the shoulders of a bureau would never have been taken for a student if he had not been crossing the campus with a too small cap precariously perched on hi...

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 he...

That night Sheila went to bed to sleep out sleep. When Pennock asked, on leaving her arranged for slumber, “Will you be called at the usual hour, please?” Sheila answered, “I wo...

Paris fashions rarely get a good word from men or a bad word from women. The satirists and the clergy and native dressmakers who do not import have delivered tirades in all lang...

Though there was a telephone in their rooms, Bret went down to the public booths. He remembered Eugene Vickery’s tirade about the crime of Sheila’s idleness. He telephoned to Vi...

Eldon resumed the livery of the taxicab-driver and spoke his two lines each night with his accustomed grace, and received his accustomed tribute of silence. He arrived on the st...

It must be a strangely thrilling thing to be a woman and meet a man who has been so impressed by oneself in childhood that he has never forgotten—a man who has indeed devoted hi...

Meanwhile Sheila was immured with her husband. She sent Pennock away and locked the door, pressed Bret into a chair, and knelt against his knee and stretched her arms up.

As Eldon’s words echoed back through his ears he knew that he had said too much and too soon. Sheila was afraid to speak at all; she could not improvise the exquisitely nice phr...

Eldon was unaware that his light was out. He was unaware of almost everything important. He forgot his opening lines and marched across the stage with the granite tread of the s...

or something infectious. It was both, but there is no inoculation, no antitoxin, yet discovered to prevent the attack on a normal being. The mumps, scarlet fever, malaria, typho...

He led the way into the lobby. She was intensely disturbed, but she could not find the courage to quarrel with him in the presence of the hall-boys. Those who had suites of room...

The morning after the Jim Greeley adventure Sheila went back to her children and the seaside. She had no energy and everything bored her. The shock of the surf did not thrill he...

Sheila wept more as Pennock helped her to undress and drew the sleeve tenderly over the invincible elbow. She wept into the bath and she wept into her pillow. She ran a gamut of...

It was thus that Eugene Vickery found them. His gasp of astonishment ended in a fit of coughing as he came forward, trying to express his amazement and his delight.

When Sheila reached the home of her father and mother she spent her first few days renewing her kinship with them. They seemed older to her, but they had not aged as she had. Th...

Eugene Vickery’s sister Dorothy lived in Blithevale. Having lost her first choice, Bret Winfield, to the scintillating Sheila, she had sensibly accepted the devotion of his riva...

Sheila was passing through the meanest phase of play production when the first enthusiasms are gone and the nagging mechanics of position, intonation, and speed are wearing away...

Now that the cat was out of the bag, and the husband out of the closet, Sheila decided to produce Bret at the train the next morning. He was about to get a taste of the gipsying...

The car was a handsomer car than their own, and in the quietest taste. Polly had somewhat softened the truth in the matter of its tender. Roger had protested mightily against of...

The next morning Pennock did not call Sheila till the last moment. Then her breakfast was on the table and her bath in the tub. The old dragon had again forbidden the telephone...

When they were alone Bret explained his decision and the heartbreaking time he had had arriving at it. He would not debate it again. He permitted Sheila the consolation of feeli...

Eight o’clock and a section of Broadway is a throng of throngs, as if all the world were prowling for pleasure. At this theater or that, parts of the crowd turn in. Where many g...

Sheila was late at the rehearsal the next morning, and so dejected that she hardly felt regret at hearing Vickery tell her how many of her favorite scenes had to be omitted beca...

The last days of Sheila’s presence with the company were full of annoyances. There was little opportunity for communion with Floyd. Mrs. Vining was invincibly tenacious. All day...

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 a...

When Eldon, dazed almost to unconsciousness, gathered himself together for self-defense and counter attack, the stage was revolving about him. Instinctively he put up his guard,...

The weather of the rehearsal week for the Vickery play was barbarously hot. The theater at night was a sea of rippling fans. The house was none the less packed; the crowd was al...

But she leaned on him, and when he led her back to bed she fell into her place like a broken tree. She was stricken with a chill and he bundled the covers about her, spread the...

Deprived of its ringleaders, the mob fell into such disarray that it was ready to be cowed by the manager of the theater. He had waited for the police to remove the chief pirate...

Eldon was at a loss for what to say to this. Suddenly Batterson was clinging to his arm, and sobbing with head bent down to hide his weakness from the passers-by.

Eldon climbed the three flights of iron stairway to his cubby-hole more drunkenly than Crumb. The opportunity he had counted on was his and he was afraid of it. This was the sor...

Dulcie had plotted it all for her own personal entertainment. Like a mad King of Bavaria she commanded the actors before her. She had caught sight of Sheila, and she knew who Br...

For many months Sheila was royally entertained by what she called “the merry villagers.” She was the audience and they the spectacle. She took a childish delight in mimicking od...

That was a tremendous week for the children of Braywood. As some quiet bayou harbors for a time a few birds of passage restlessly resting before they fly on into the sky, so the...

The most thrilling first night of Sheila’s life was her debut as a mother. The doctor and the stork had a nip-and-tuck race. The young gentleman weighed more than ten pounds.

The evening sheets were sure to make a spread. The actors were bound to gossip, and the stage-hands. Somebody would tell some reporter and gain a little credit or a little excit...

The house seemed still to quiver after the neighbors’ young had left. Mrs. Vickery moved about restoring order. And Dorothy bustled after her, full of talk and snickers. But Eug...

Gradually the company worked a zigzag passage to Chicago, where it was booked for an indefinite stay. If the “business” were good, it would be announced that, “owing to the unpr...

Were it not for hours like these, the hope of them or the memory of them, few people would continue to trudge the dolorous road of the playwright. Such hours come rarely and the...

Some of the provincial cities said the play was disgustingly immoral and the police ought to stop it. The accusation hurt. Was it immoral? A certain clergy man said the play was...

Sheila went to the theater with the joyous haste of a child going up to the teacher’s desk for punishment. She wondered how Reben could have learned of the marriage. She wished...

A honeymoon is like a blue lagoon divinely beautiful, with a mimicry of all heaven in its deeps; blinding sweet in the sun, and almost intolerably comfortable in the moon.

That morning Reben had wakened early with a head full of inspirations. He was fairly lyrical with ideas. He wanted to talk them over with Sheila. He called up her room. Pennock...

In a similar tempest of infinitely much ado about next to nothing the distant Bret Winfield was browbeating himself silently, pleading with himself not to disgrace himself by ru...