Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/244

 That was absolutely for sure. But now this Lucy Claudel. That Madam joke was accidental on purpose. A tart! Fearful of exposure, she searched her memory for a clue which might connect the girl with a past shed with discarded bits of a cropped nose and disguised with the magnificent wig, both achieved in Berlin of 1922 in what was the period of her rebirth. The polite term for wig is "transformation," which accurately described the social graduation achieved by Horta Cornwallis. The winter of 1921 her Denver sporting house's most important client, a citizen of unimpeachable public character, found himself in danger of being exposed as principal in a crooked deal. The conferences in consummation of this venture had been held at Horta's house and she told Client X it was her duty to tell the federal investigators what she knew. Client X had thought it wise to buy the good will of Horta's sporting house. His only stipulation had been that she leave Denver and the United States.

In Berlin she had been welcomed as a supplementary American loan in the new role she gave herself of sympathetic millionairess which, because of the inflation, she actually was. Meeting at the Adlon war-impoverished German titles, she quickly realized she had hit the jackpot. Except for fancy manners, the desperate young aristocratic women were ready call-girls, and the men too would do anything for money. It was the same sporting-house racket but for bigger stakes: better yet, you could be a Madam in this aristocratic world and be respectable. By the time her compatriots began flocking back to European playgrounds Horta Cornwallis was an ensconced friend of international society, a woman to cultivate, particularly by those who wished to meet titles. Horta thus became a virtual one-woman exchange, being paid commissions two ways on sales of paintings, jewelry, and furniture. Clothed by leading couturiers in return for new customers, she was an honored guest at the luxury hotels she advertised to rich Americans. She helped American women to divorce millionaire husbands only interested in making dollars, and was rewarded in dollars by grateful French avocats. She shared in dowries of American girls whose mothers wished for their daughters social acceptance difficult of achievement in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and even Chicago, where the barriers were more formidable than in Paris, Berlin, and even Rome. And through it all, even when two years later she had returned to New York as familiar with the Social Register as the Almanach de Gotha, she never had been in danger of exposure until meeting this girl who surely would tell. You just don't make a Madam joke to a Madam without 232