This statement was followed by indignant protest from American actresses and the sort of heated dramatic controversy that delighted the soul of Oswald Kane.
She received all reporters in her dressing-room at the theater. If any one save Kane knew where she lived, no one had ever crossed the sacred threshold.
“I live two lives quite a-part,” she said. “One in my home which is for me a-lone. And one in the theater which is for my dear public.”
Mr. Kane amplified this by stating that her hours at home were spent in study. Others intimated that her hours at home were given to some mysterious romance.
In spite of which she was not a hermit. Society, with [26] ]a capital S, sought the privilege of entertaining her. Occasionally she accepted a dinner invitation—never on any day but Sunday, however—or permitted a tea to be given in her honor. She went nowhere during the week.
Her dressing-room was always fragrant with flowers. Kane had had it done over when she took possession. An alcove had been cut off for her make-up table, and the orchid silken drapes, black rug, suspended lights and carved chairs of the outer room gave it more the impression of a salon. Here she held court. Here she read the hysterical notes of matinée girls, the pleas of dilletanti youth that she dine or sup with them, the tributes of actors, the encomium of the world in general. Here, every week or so, she went into tantrums, threatening to kill her maid in a voice that caused the stage hands to tremble, until Kane himself had to be called to calm her. Here she smoked Russian cigarettes and looked over the urgent invitations that piled mountain high upon the bronze tray.
It was only at home in a cretonne hung bedroom, furnished with a rigid fourposter and dotted swiss curtains through which sunlight flowed, that she wept and sometimes felt lonely.
She played of course to packed houses. The S. R. O. sign was a common occurrence. More than once in that same place in the front row, the footlights illumined the face of the man whose intent gaze had fastened on hers the opening night. He seemed never to tire of her art.
Early in March Mrs. Collingwood Martin gave a reception for her. Mrs. Julian van Ness Collingwood [27] ]Martin flattered herself, with justification, that in her wide old house facing Washington Square she maintained the nearest approach to a salon that could be found this side of Paris.
Her high drawing-room brought together leading spirits of the professional, business and diplomatic worlds, and her gracefully tinted head was never troubled with fear that the wrong ones might meet. All those on her selected list were the right ones, each interested in what the other represented. Many a little coup between the artiste and the financier is consummated under the guise of drinking a cup of tea or punch. And more than one professional has amassed a neat little fortune by making wide-eyed queries of the Wall Street man about his end of the game.