“You know, the only way I remember places in Europe is by the things we had to eat at them! Take Stratford-on-Avon, for instance, I always appear animated when it is mentioned, but not because of the Hathaway woman or Bill Shakespeare, but the wonderful gooseberry tarts ... then Rome—what cheese! And Moscow—with its caviar and cordials—and Amsterdam with boiled beef and a delectable shrimp sauce,” she halfway closed her eyes as she sipped the rest of her absinthe and rebuked Thurley for refusing it.
“Perhaps you smoke?” she suggested. “My throat won’t stand for it and I take sweets as a consolation.”
“No, thank you—at least not yet.” Thurley wondered if she would ever cease meeting famous persons and going to wonderful houses where she had an entirely new scheme of life handed to her stamped with a seal of approval!
“Do have a chocolate,” Lissa pressed them on Thurley. She had a sort of, “May I—oh, may I?” air which Dickens’ Mr. Pumblechook possessed when asking for the pleasure of merely shaking hands.
Thurley took one but laid it aside. “Mr. Hobart forbids it,” she said.
Lissa made a little moue. “The world does not obey Bliss Hobart, even if it does consult him. For my part, we are cordial enemies, both knowing the other’s weak points. After all, Bliss was never cut out for anything more extraordinary than a first husband. But of course he will never marry,” the green eyes watching Thurley carefully.
“Why not?” Thurley was unconscious of her betrayal.
Lissa gave a contented purr; she would have something to tell Mark! “Because, although no one really knows much about it, he disappears very mysteriously every summer for weeks at a time. He cannot be reached by letter or telegraph, I’ve heard, and of course, in this day and age, as in any other, he does not go alone.”
“Not—not that sort of thing,” Thurley was too angry to conceal the fact.
“Why not? Every one knows that Bliss Hobart, whose mother was an Italian and father an American, was born and brought up in Italy where he acquired the romantic tendencies of that land. Some say he sang well when he was twenty, but something happened and he had a fever which took his voice and turned his hair gray and then he came to America where he has been a clever but presuming person with the aroma of mystery to make him all the more enticing. You will find out, Thurley; wait until he vanishes around the first of June.”