"There's no call to make a mystery of this little Schwarzenberg affair," Singleton was saying. "The woman is better known in Brussels. Better known still in Cincinnati, Ohio." Singleton smiled. "She has a great reputation in a certain suburb of that semi-German city. The good people of New Bonn are proud of her. She has come on so."
"Oh, she began to 'come on' from the moment she arrived, twenty years ago, at the age of twelve."
"Thirty-three, to be exact. She came from a suburb of Berlin with an older sister, to help in the patriarchal family of the Cincinnati uncle and aunt."
Singleton's nod of pleasant indulgence accompanied the more exact information.
"He'd laid by money enough to start a little beer garden. The older sister soon went out to service. This one insisted on going to school. But she helped in the beer garden between whiles. Made a friend of one of the habitués, a fiddler in the local band. She sang for the beer garden customers, and they threw her dimes. At fourteen she got an engagement at the little German theater. She sent home the passage money for a brother. Instead of putting him to a trade, she put him to school. This girl of fifteen. The next year she sent for another brother. _Même jeu._ Oh, she's been very decent to her family. But the voice of great souls appears always to have been Miss Schwarz's undoing. Her voice was unformed. She forced it. Broke it. At eighteen an end to hopes of great operatic career. A year or so later she went on the stage. Played in German a couple of seasons. Graduated into English. Then there's a goodish interval which we haven't yet filled. Nearly six years, I make it. When she next comes to the surface, she had fallen in with Pforzheim at Washington, and was falling out with him in Paris. The Brussels' Secret Service had employed him on that Duc de Berry case. _She_ did the work. Pforzheim, as usual, got the credit, and naturally most of the cash. She needs an awful lot to keep her going--this woman. They quarreled over the amount. She washed her hands of the job and of him, and back she goes to America. Out of the glare and excitement of Paris and a partnership in Pforzheim's plottings, to--what do you suppose? To teach music, of all things! In San Francisco, of all places! In a private family!" Singleton laughed. "These Ellises!" He nodded at Miss Anne's letters. "Again and again we've traced Greta Schwarz doing this and that for the International Bureau, being successful and well paid, and suddenly chucking the whole thing and going back to respectability and dullness. An inversion of the desire of the moth for the flame. The desire of the butterfly to labor, to store honey and esteem!"