He shook his head.
“Not that either. Just what you might call privately. You see, when you lead a wicked life like mine, you can’t always be yourself,” he explained. “According to the job in hand, you may want to pretend to be anything, from a dyspeptic poet with Communist tendencies to a retired sea-captain with white whiskers and a perpetual thirst.”
She was studying him with candid interest now.
“Then some of that stuff about you must be on the level.”
“Some of it,” he admitted mildly.
“Most of it, I guess.” She said it herself. “I ought to have known — it isn’t the sort of thing that press-agents think up. But Jesus, you meet so many phonies in this business you get out of the habit of believing anything. I’m one myself, so I know.”
“You?”
“What do you think you know about me?”
“Let’s see. Your name’s April Quest,” he began cautiously. “Or is it?”
“That’s about as far as you’ll get, and nobody would believe that. What’s a name! Even that isn’t a hundred per cent, either. It was Quist on my birth certificate, but they thought Quest sounded better.”