“Until I prove myself essential,” insisted Miss Quinby. “When that day comes—”
At which Thurley named a day and hour and wearily rang the bell to have her shown out.
Hortense Quinby’s visit left her with a headache and no zest for her supper. The opera that night was to be “The Magic Flute,” and Thurley was at her best as Pamina. She loved the rôle and rehearsals had proceeded in excellent fashion. But the interview with Hortense had given her a fearful sense as to her own future. Would she, in turn, become furtive, restless, eager to seize upon some other new and lovely creature, with a sort of vampirish desire to have youth by feeding on youth?
She went to her room without ringing for her maid and slipped out of her brilliant afternoon frock. She rummaged in her clothes room crowded with new gorgeousness until she found a rough tweed suit and a boyish hat. Taking a swagger stick and whistling for Taffy, she wilfully disappeared out of the apartment at just the hour her schedule called for rest, facial massage and toasted wafers with hot milk!
It was rainy, and the air was unnaturally warm, the wind having died down. Her throat doctor would have come after her in an ambulance had he known she was sauntering along the river drive, pausing to look at the blinking lights on the boats or at the dark, beautiful uncertainty of what lay on the other shore.
Was she beginning to have nerves? Thurley spoke sharply to Tally, warning him to heel her or she would disown him. Nerves! She who had never in her life been prey to so much as a headache, who had laughed at throat washes and precaution against eye strain, who audaciously cracked nuts with her firm, white teeth and declared she did not know how it would feel to be even a trifle indisposed!
Not the strain of training nor the début, the unnatural life of the opera stage nor the atmosphere of crowds and tired, jaded artists who knew, too well, how it felt to be muchly indisposed had made such inroads on her Viking-like constitution as this queer woman who bounded in on her coquettish serenity and fairly startled a yes out of her. Thurley felt trip-hammer pulses beating in her forehead. She wanted to wander on and on until the dark became permanent and the traffic scarce and she was dog-tired as she used to be when she was at the end of one of her tramps with Dan and they sat under a tree to get rested up, kissing each other a shocking number of times ... strange this woman should so affect her.
She began thinking in irregular fashion, indicative of her tired brain, of the different persons with whom the new life had brought close and necessary contact ... Madame Coleno, the great Wagnerian contralto, strong and fine by birthright but with the ungovernable temper which caused her to turn on little Edith Hooker, the English girl who was her lyric soprano, slapping her face and tearing at her hair until some one interfered. She wondered if the madhouse would be this famous woman’s last abode. Some said she had run amuck through drink, others heartbreak, a few whispered insanity was in the family. Then there was Escola, the silver-throated tenor! She shook her tired head in disapproval. Escola, who was a merciless tyrant, cared for by his wife as if he were an infant in arms and who rewarded her with a new breach of promise suit as a payment! The patient wife, an Italian peasant as every one knew, made no protest, but continued her round of preparing mustard footbaths and making native dishes Escola demanded, lighting her candles before her little shrine for her master’s success!
... Now it was Dan Ruffio, the bass—what an outcast from society in Birge’s Corners he would be, openly defiant of conventions, always storming and blustering about, sneering at him or her who obeyed the law, ridiculing, fond of cruel practical joking of a low calibre, loving no one save himself, yet appearing on the stage as the most tender of lovers, the gentlest of patriarchs! And when Thurley attended the first supper party given by a famous ballet dancer, she had been genuinely and lastingly shocked at not only the conversation but the manners observed by all,—it was not the gluttony of Lissa’s parties that had been in evidence but an almost sinister fashion of wasting food and demanding bizarre, unhealthful dishes.
Nor could she forget Wimple O’Horo, who had made violent love to her and pouted when repulsed! What a wishy-washy, unreal boor he was when one knew him from behind the footlights, what a dashing, light hearted cavalier he appeared when viewed on the other side! Thurley’s lips curved in scorn as she recalled his favorite pastime of reading aloud mash notes and the signed names as well. Some said that he conducted a highbrow form of blackmail when he needed extra money with which to gamble.