It was
awful."
There was one--an American prima donna--who grew pensive as the amorous
boasting increased. An opulent woman past 35, dark-haired, great-eyed; a
robust enchantress with a sweep to her manner. Her beauty was an
exaggeration. Exaggerated contours, colors, features that needed
perspective to set them off. Diluted by distance and bathed by the
footlights she focused prettily into a Manon, a Thais, an Isolde. But in
the room drinking tea she had the effect of a too startling close-up--a
rococo siren cramped for space.
The barytone leaned unctuously across the small table and said to her with
a preposterous archness of manner:
"And how does it happen, my dear, that you have nothing to tell us?"
"Because she has too much," said one of the orchestra men, laughingly.
The prima donna smiled.
"Oh, I can tell a story as well as anybody," she said. "In fact, I was
just thinking of one. You know I was in Iowa last month. And I visited the
town where I was born and lived as a girl--until I was nineteen. It's
funny."
Again the pensive stare out of the window at the chill-looking autumn sky
and the sharp outlines of the city roofs.
"Go on," her hostess cried. To her guests she added, in the social
curtain-raiser manner peculiar to rambunctious hostesses, "if Mugs tells
anything about herself you can be sure it'll be something immense.
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