Chapter II rejected another offer today. I hope it will be the last one. J.K.L. Wood, a journalist and editor of The New York Herald, stared at me with genuine astonishment, tore up the cheque he had been pushing around the table for over half an hour and concluded drily: “Sir, you’re not a businessman.”
That, I am not. But the thought that I could pour my heart out in a magazine and tell them the whole story seems totally absurd. I hadn’t been forgiven for robbing the music hall of the sensational number “Arabela and partner”, J.K.L. Wood had told me, a show that took 620 dollars a night, plus expenses. The public demanded to know exactly why I had thrown it all away. They wanted to know where Arabela was and – if possible – why I loved her and why she loved me.
I have, in the drawer to
