She laughed then, her low, rich contralto. “That was all his plan. I was as amazed when he told me about it as if he’d asked me to change my skin. He’s never told [31] ]me why he did it—he doesn’t trouble to tell you why. But I suppose he thought the public needed a thrill, something new, something different. And my impersonations gave him the idea. I think I might have made good if he had let me go on as just plain Parsons. But of course, not half the hit that Parsinova has made.”
“They sure are crazy about you. I wondered often how you were getting on.”
“You didn’t guess that somebody was making a new woman of me, did you?”
His gaze, as it traveled from her dark-rimmed eyes shadowed by the drooping hat, to the long white hands and slim black-swathed body, held the same look of awe it had worn the night he had seen her make up.
“Lordy, girl!” he gasped. “How you must have worked to accomplish it!”
“Work!” came in a breath. “I worked like a galley slave—never stopping, except for sleep. Even while I ate I studied—Russian and French, and gesture and movement. I even learned to eat herring. And all the time he was teaching me to act. In four years—almost—I’ve seen no one, talked to no one but him. I’ve had to obliterate self completely. He has in reality created Lisa Parsinova.”
“He had to have the material to do it. The stuff was there.”
“But he is a genius, Lou. He knows his public just as a magician knows his bag of tricks.”
The traffic at Thirty-fourth Street halted them. They spoke in whispers, and every now and then her eyes [32] ]rested with a look of caution on the inexpressive back of her chauffeur.
“Do you think he can hear?” she asked.