“Oh, that—simple enough! Randolph remarked the night of your première that there was an aura of romance about artistes from the other side, particularly when they [36] ]hailed from Southern Europe; sort of Oriental, you understand. The next day I went to Fernald. ‘Can’t you change me to something Italian?’ I said. ‘Seabury’s a rotten name for an opera singer.’ Well, he did it. Of course, I make no attempt at accent—I couldn’t handle that job in conversation. But the people I’ve met don’t look for it; they understand the fact that I was brought up in England. All I have to be careful of is my grammar.”
They laughed together. As her laugh bubbled girlishly into the quiet night, she halted it with a swift movement of hand to lips and once more sent that look of caution at her chauffeur’s back.
He reminded her of his dinner engagement with Randolph. “He’s made up his mind to know you informally. And that’s all he has to do to get what he wants. He’s a human dynamo, that man. Never knew anybody with his finger in so many pies and able to put over whatever he tackles. Sooner or later you’re bound to meet him in his own way. Might as well be to-night.”
“What good would it do? He’ll never know me—the real me.”
“He’ll know a fascinating woman, any way you look at it.”
But she dropped him at the bachelor apartment on Park Avenue in spite of his pleas.
“Come and see me, Lou, often,” she murmured, giving him her address as he stepped out of the car. “You don’t know what a joy it is to play at being myself.”
[37]
]CHAPTER IV
It was inevitable that Parsinova should meet Hubert Randolph, as Lou Seabury had prophesied. It was not inevitable that he should prove to be the man whose intent gaze had held hers from the first row. But when one considers that Randolph had determined from the moment he saw her to know her in an unprofessional capacity, his accomplishment of that end was in the natural order of things.
Hubert Randolph was not a self-made man. He had succeeded, made his name stand firm in the humming world of finance, in spite of the handicap of having been born to the purple. Early in his boyhood he had started out to forget that he was a Hamilton Randolph and he had been forgetting it satisfactorily ever since. At Harvard he had become the pal of men who tutored in their leisure hours, thereby improving his mind. Also, he had never taken the trouble to inform them to which particular Randolph family he belonged. It was unimportant. He had spent a winter in a shack in Arizona, partly for his health, but largely to familiarize himself with the workings of a matrix mine in which the Randolphs had an interest. He had chummed with the miners, chewed tobacco and acquired a red-bronze that had never quite worn off.