“Whose divorce?”
“No one you know, honey. A lady I toured with two seasons ago.”
Lizzie and Berwick listened. I had never heard him do anything else. Before I came to live here if I had been told of the excellence of his vocal performance and then seen him I would have shaken my head and said: “That’s not the man.” A winter at Mrs. Bushey’s has taught me that the artist does not have a brand upon his brow like Cain.
His listening was of a glowering unresponsive kind; Lizzie’s was all avid attention. It was the first time since her illness that she had shown any animation. A faint color came into her face, now and then she halted Mrs. Stregazzi’s flow of words with a sharp question. The projected tour was the thing that absorbed her. She kept pulling Mrs. Stregazzi out of the scandals back to it. There was no envy in her interest. It was to me extremely pathetic, she, the failure, speeding Berwick on his way to success. As might have been expected he was stolidly indifferent to it, but I was amazed to see that Mrs. Stregazzi, whom I was beginning to like, was untouched or was too engrossed in her own affairs to notice anything else.
Outside at the head of the staircase she paused, and giving a glance at the closed door, said in a lowered voice:
“Where’s Masters?”
Berwick had gone on ahead, the little girl with her arm hooked over the banister was slowly descending. Mrs. Stregazzi’s eye, holding mine, was intelligent and questioning. I saw that she knew and took it for granted that I did.
“He doesn’t come any more. They’ve had a difference—a quarrel, I think.”
“Left her!” She raised her painted eyebrows, and compressing her lips, looked down the stairs and emitted a low “Umph!”
A world of meaning was in that sound, a deep understanding pity.