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The Girl From Colosimo> s
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osity ; I could understand what the Italians said about me — unless they spoke in dialect; and they did when they wanted to put something over.”
“I suppose that many a benevolent American gentleman offered you inducements to leave the place ?”
“I was educated,” she ironically smiles, “by everybody in Chicago. That’s what they offered me to go away, rather than jewels — education. It was my fatal instinct to betray interest when an intelligent book was named. Oh, you don’t know,” her irony goes on, “how marvelous it was to some men to run across a girl out there who had read a book!”
“Where was this proffered education to have been obtained?”
“I have been seven thousand times around the world,” she lightly laughs.
“The Mr. Cooks were generous!”
“Yes; and every Mr. Cook would assure me — ‘Now, my dear, there are positively no strings on my offer; I’ll put aside so much for your education fund. And he would warn me, as my friend, that there were terrible, hideous strings on the offers of the othei Mr. Cooks. . . . Night after night of that. Sometimes I used to wish that O. Henry could have seen and heard what I saw and heard out there when I sat into the dawn, sober, observing, thinking . . . thinking.”
“I don’t see how you stood it!”
“Oh — I always had — as a last resort” — she muses slowly — “my sense of humor.”
“How does it feel to come back to Chicago and succeed as you succeeded to-night? How does it