s not to shrink from sticking long
Havanas into their coat pockets and cigarettes into their cases. There
was design in this. Every now and then he would take a reporter aside to
force upon him information regarding Ingigerd's past, her birth, her
rescue, her father, her European success, and the way in which her talent
had been discovered. It was a rather garish mixture of truth and fiction.
Lilienfeld knew that this story of her life would appear in the New York
newspapers that very same evening in connection with the report of the
audience in the City Hall. He had brewed the concoction according to his
own recipe from various details that he had heard, and he felt certain of
its effectiveness.

Ingigerd looked very tired. But she had received orders to be as lavish
as possible with her amiabilities so long as a single reporter remained
in the house. Frederick felt sorry for her. He saw that her severe
professional duties had begun.

Mrs. Lilienfeld was a calm, refined woman of nearly forty, with a look of
suffering on her face, yet extremely attractive. She was dressed with
tasteful simplicity. One got the impression that her husband worshipped
her blindly and was accustomed to act, or to refrain from acting,
according to a scarcely perceptible glance from her soft, grave eyes. For
all his noisiness the bull-necked man, coarse, brutal, sensual, was like
a timid child before her.

She devoted herself for a while to Frederick, who felt he had found grace
in the lady's eyes and that for some reason she wished to be helpful to
him in leading him away from the aberrations of his passion. Had he not
had a sense of security in the firmness of his decision, he might perhaps
have given more serious attention to her searching questions, which
showed that she had done some thinking about him.

Her method was far from flattering to Ingigerd. With an infinitely
disdainful smile, she called the girl, who was chattering nonsense to a
circle of flirtatious reporters and was overwhelmed with their tokens of
approval, "a mechanical doll with a light head of porcelain filled with
sawdust."

"A good plaything," she said, "a plaything for a man, an article of
merchandise, but nothing more. She may be worth money, but she is not
worth anything else. She is not worth more than any piece of emptiness,
any trifle, or knickknack."

Ingigerd, moved perhaps by a little wave of jealousy, came up and asked
Frederick, without suspecting the