“You have a very agreeable and well trained voice.”
“I’m afraid you are incorrigible. You ought to have said that I sang better than I danced, and the fib would have pleased me immensely; we women like to hear ourselves praised for accomplishments we don’t possess. No, my dear, rule art out of the cast and substitute advertisement. Did you notice a dowdy creature who was lunching with two men on your right? She wore a brown Tussore silk and a turban—well, she writes the ‘Pars About People’ in ‘The Daily Journal.’ I’ll bet you a pair of gloves that you will see something like this in to-morrow’s paper: ‘Lord Archie Beaumanoir entertained a party of friends at the Embankment Hotel yesterday. At the next table Miss Millicent Jaques, of the Wellington Theater, was lunching with a pretty girl whom I did not know. Miss Jaques wore an exquisite,’ etc., etc. Fill in full details of my personal appearance, and you have the complete paragraph. The public, the stupid, addle-headed public, fatten on that sort of thing, and it keeps me going far more effectively than my feeble attempts to warble a couple of songs which you could sing far better if only you made up your mind to come on the stage. But there! After such unwonted candor I must have a smoke. You won’t try a cigarette? Well, don’t look so shocked. This isn’t a church, you know.”
Spencer, who had listened with interest to Miss Jaques’s outspoken views, suddenly awoke to the fact that he was playing the part of an eavesdropper. He had all an American’s chivalrous instincts where women were concerned, and his first impulse was to betake himself and his letters to his own room. Yet, when all was said and done, he was in a hotel; the girls were strangers, and likely to remain so; and it was their own affair if they chose to indulge in unguarded confidences. So he compromised with his scruples by pouring out a glass of water, replacing the decanter on its tray with some degree of noise. Then he struck an unnecessary match and applied it to his cigar before opening the first of the Denver letters.
As his glance was momentarily diverted, he did not grasp the essential fact that neither of the pair was disturbed by his well meant efforts. Millicent Jaques was lighting a cigarette, and this, to a woman, is an all absorbing achievement, while her friend was so new to her palatial surroundings that she had not the least notion of the existence of another open floor just above the level of her eyes.
“I don’t know how in the world you manage to exist,” went on the actress, tilting herself back in her chair to watch the smoke curling lazily upward. “What was it you said the other day when we met? You are some sort of secretary and amanuensis to a scientist? Does that mean typewriting? And what is the science?”
“Professor von Eulenberg is a well known man,” was the quiet reply. “I type his essays and reports, it is true; but I also assist in his classification work, and it is very interesting.”
“What does he classify?”
“Mostly beetles.”
“Oh, how horrid! Do you ever see any?”