JANE SHORE
boy he had put into a fiddle; and he still played it secretly, with much melancholy feeling, but no technic. Hence his original venture with the Hungarian violinist whose art he had appreciated instantly when he heard him in an East Side café. Hence, also, his visits to Jane Shore's apartments, where her friend played the violin and Jane sang to the piano.
"He was in love with me, I know," Jane has since confessed, "but I found out that he was mad about his mother, and she was so orthodox that it would have killed her to have him marry a Christian. And he never even hinted at anything else. He's really rather a dear. It's his mother's fault—the way he's going on, now, with chorus-girls."
There is no doubt that Jane Shore's beauty and culture and air of "class" reached some early marrow of subservience in his bones. When he was with her, as one of the company expressed it, "he looked as wistful as a sucked orange."
Her success with the star was another matter. "All he wanted," she says, "was a mirror"—a flattering feminine regard before which he could pose and admire himself. "He never talked; he boasted. He boasted of how much money he'd made with his other plays. How much he'd won on the stock-market. How he'd picked a twenty-to-one shot on the races. How he'd told Augustin Daly what he thought of him. How he'd pulled
[ 63 ]
