"Dear me. That's rather gruesome, isn't it?" shivered Tony. "I'm glad I'm not a celebrity. I'd hate to be stuck down on your old flies. Will I get on Alan's card if I keep on flirting with him?"
"Good Lord! I should hope not."
"I suppose I wouldn't be in very good company. I don't mean Alan. I mean—his ladies."
"Tony! Then you know?"
"About Alan's ladies? Oh, yes. He told me himself."
Dick looked blank. What was a man to do in a case like this, finding his big bugaboo no bugaboo at all?
"I know a whole lot about Alan Massey, maybe more than is on your old card. I know his mother was Lucia Vannini, so beautiful and so gifted that she danced in every court in Europe and was loved by a prince. I know how Cyril Massey, an American artist, painted her portrait and loved her and married her. I know how she worshiped him and was absolutely faithful to him to the day he died, when the very light of life went out for her."
"She managed to live rather cheerfully afterward, even without light, if all the stories about her are true," observed Dick, with, for him, unusual cynicism.
"You don't understand. She had to live."
"There are other ways of living than those she chose."