Veronica smiled serenely. “I’m not going to be taken ill to-night, aunty dear,” she replied. “I’m going to be like Katherine, who can eat forty lobster croquettes without getting sick.”
“Remember the mixtures we used to cook up in the House of the Open Door?” she asked, turning to Katherine. “They were lots worse than lobster croquettes, if the plain truth were known. You wouldn’t worry at all, aunty, dear, if you knew what we used to eat at those spreads without damaging ourselves!”
Katherine was completely carried away by Veronica’s vivaciousness and temperamental whimsies. If she had admired the fiery little Hungarian in the days of the House of the Open Door, she was now absolutely enslaved by her. To plain, matter-of-fact Katherine, Veronica, with her artistic temperament, was a creature from another world, inspiring a certain amount of awed wonder, as well as admiring affection.
“What are you going to play at the concert to-night?” Katherine asked respectfully.
Veronica’s eyes began to glow, and she pushed aside her plate, leaving the second croquette to grow cold while she spoke animatedly upon the subject that lay ever nearest her heart.
“I’m going to play a cycle from Nágár, a Roumanian Gypsy composer,” she replied. “One of the pieces is the most wonderful thing; it’s called ‘The Whirlwind.’ It fairly carries you away with its rush and movement, until you want to fly, and shout, and go sailing away on the wings of the wind. Another one is named ‘Fata Morgana.’ You know that’s what people call the mirage that we can see out on the steppes—the open plains—of Hungary.”
“Yes?” murmured Katherine in a tone of eager interest. She loved to hear Veronica tell tales of her homeland.
“Many a time I have seen it,” continued Veronica, her eyes sparkling with a dreamy, far-off light, “a beautiful city standing out clear and fair against the horizon; and have gone forth to find it, only to see it vanish into the hot, quivering air, and to find myself lost out on the wide, lonely steppe.”
Katherine listened, fascinated, while Veronica told stories of the curious mirage that lured and mocked the dwellers on the lonely steppes of her native land, and so deep was her absorption that she absent-mindedly ate up Veronica’s croquette while she listened, to the infinite amusement of Mrs. Lehar.
“Aren’t you going to play any of your own compositions?” asked Katherine, when Veronica had finished talking about the Nágár cycle.