That lady still sat with her head in her hands. As they looked she raised herself slowly and gazed from one to the other. A nasty glint came into her eyes. She sprang to her feet so suddenly that she overturned the chair in which she had been sitting. She swept a long arm out in front of her body and shook it at them both in turn.
Jimmy instinctively put up his guard. E. Cartwright’s face paled.
“You have come, eh?” screamed Madame Stephano, “you are both here. You have come to let me tell you what I zink of you, eh?”
Her voice was stridently intense and her whole face was ablaze with uncontrolled fury. Her accent was more marked than usual. She poured out her words with a rapidity that was amazing.
“You have come to let me tell you both zat you have insult Olga Marie Stephano and zat Olga Marie Stephano does not let herself be made ze target for ze insult. You poor leetle fool, you”—this to Jimmy—“you have meex my name up with zis crazee pastree pie announcement. Am I to have no deegnety. Is Olga Marie Stephano a cook or an actress—wheech? And you, Meestaire Cartwright Jeenkens, your paper it preent zis crazee theeng, it preent it and it make me into one great, beeg, foolish crazee—what you call?—what you call, I say?—one great, beeg, foolish, crazee dam fool. Eet ees too much, oh, much too much. Mon Dieu, mon Dieu—eet ees too much.”
She paused, her bosom heaving like a prima donna’s after an aria. Her two visitors began to back gingerly away. She looked from one to the other and then there slowly broke upon her face, a smile. It came like a blessed benison, and it presently merged into a laugh, light and silvery at first and then hearty and uncontrolled.
“Gentlemen,” she said sweetly when the laughter had died down, “excuse me, please, eef I make such a laugh. You look so funee. Pardonnez moi, pardonnez moi. Eet ees just my leetle joke, gentlemen, just my leetle joke. I have here one grand surprise for you. Voila!!”
With all the easy grace and dexterity of a prestidigitator she reached toward the table and plucked a napkin off a dish in the centre. To the astonished eyes of the press agent and the dramatic editor there was revealed an apple pie that transcended in appearance even that famous piece of pastry which had met with such a disastrous end in the Star office a few days before.