The self-enchanted : Mae Murray : image of an era (1959)

That witch of yours tried to tell me you were picking posies in Central Park." She laughed. "I walk to rehearsal, Jay. It gets me ready. Even dragonflies know how to dance." "I was calling to ask when you plan to marry me. What day." She tried to laugh it away. "Don't ever laugh at me!" He gave her a frightening look. "Don't ever laugh at me." Luckily, they were interrupted. She stood, shaken, while the dark young dancer bowed over her hand. "Rodolpho di Valentina," he said. "Do you care to tango?" She slipped into his arms quickly, avoiding the eyes that knew too much. She was bewildered by Jay's fury. At first she couldn't hear the music. But how this young man danced! The real tango, heels kneading the floor, the street dance as she'd seen it in Paris. He said nothing. He gave himself to the dance as if his sole joy was to dance, and with her. Rodolpho Alfonso Raffaelo Pierre Filiberti Guglielmi di Valentina d'Antonguolla had been in America a year and a half. Unlike the young American girls who wished to forget their origins, this Italian boy was fastidious in remembering his. He'd arrived on the liner Cleveland, with 800 British pounds and a letter to the Commissioner of Immigration explaining that he'd been graduated from the Royal Academy of Agriculture and what his value might be as a landscape gardener. But he didn't deliver that letter, not right away. First, he engaged a room with an Italian family, the Giolottis; then he walked about the city and made his first attempts at communicating in English — so homesick, so lonely that two days later, on Christmas, he cried himself to sleep at Bustanoby's restaurant where the waiters at least spoke French (Rudy spoke French, as well as Italian and Spanish). His first friends, actually, were Count Alex Salm, Count Otto Salm and George 3*