“If I knew how to be gallant in your Eastern fashion, I might remark that Jack has lost a lot, then. I wonder if you’re one of our leading actresses? Jack seems to know so many stage people.”
“I’m not even the greatest motion-picture star yet discovered; and you know there are thousands of her. I’m just an ordinary woman.”
“Not ordinary!” protested Mr. Morton. “I suppose— But, of course, this curiosity of a provincial must be offensive to you?”
“I did not know that a Chicagoan ever admitted himself a provincial.”
“Call it the prying curiosity of an old father. That’s just as bad.”
“A father should be curious,” Mary said evenly.
“I was about to say that I suppose you are a native New Yorker?”
“Not in the sense that you probably mean—that I am of an old family here, and have a lot of relations.”
“But you are a New Yorker?”
“I was born here. But a large part of my life I spent in France—where,” she added, “both my parents died.”