In a room at the Auditorium Hotel a group of men and women connected with
the opera were having tea. As they drank out of the fragile cups and
nibbled at the little cakes they boasted to each other of their love
affairs.
"And I had the devil of a time getting rid of her," was the motif of the
men's conversation. The women said, "And I just couldn't shake him. 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 Thaïs, 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. Go on,
Mugs." Mugs is one of the nicknames the prima donna is known by among her
friends.
"We went to school together," the prima donna smiled, "John and I. And I
don't think I've ever loved anybody as I loved him. He used to frighten me
to death. You see, I was ambitious. I wanted to be somebody. And John
wanted me to marry him. Somehow marriage wasn't what I wanted then. There
were other things. I had started singing and at night I used to lie awake,
not wanting to sleep. I was so taken up with my dreams and plans that I
hated to lose consciousness. That's a fact.
"Well, John grew more and more insistent. And one evening he came to call
on me. I was alone on the porch. John was about twenty-three then. That
was about twenty years ago. He was a tall, good-looking, sharp-faced young
man with lively eyes. I thought him marvelous at the time. And he stood on
the steps of the porch and talked to me. I never forgot a word he said. I
have never heard anything so wonderful since."