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 Famous! she repeated. Besides which I was having a grand time. The young men were not much on brains, but they were long on looks and they danced like Fred Astaire. When I went to bed at night I felt more bitter than ever about all those wasted years in Kansas City. Why, if I'd stayed there another six months I'd have become a withered old lady as conventional as the next one! I tell you I love to realize that I had nerve enough to break away!

She paused to light a cigarette before she went on: I hadn't been going out for much more than a minute before the boys began to ask me if I were in the movies. I laughed scornfully. Me in motion pictures! How could they think such a thing! Nothing, I assured them, would induce me to cheapen myself to that extent. The idea appalled me. If I said this to one man I said it to forty. The women—she made a grimace—did not seem to be so curious. Well, in a few days I became a fable, a legendary character: the only pretty girl in the United States who didn't want to be a motion picture actress. It was unheard of! It was epic!

Ambrose was impressed by the magnitude of the impression he was certain she must have produced.

Then one day at the Montmartre, a handsome roughneck was introduced to me. It was Martell