She affected to consider him a reporter who had sought an interview with her.

She stood erect, facing him with one hand on a hip, the other patting and readjusting her blonde coiffure.
"Really," she began in a voice of pained dignity, "I am at a loss to understand why the public should be so interested in me.

What can I say to your readers--I who am so wholly absorbed in my art that I can't think of hardly anything else?
Why will not the world let us alone?
Hold on--don't go!" She had here pretended that the reporter was taking her at her word.

She seized him by a lapel to which she clung while with her other arm she encircled a post, thus anchoring the supposed intruder into her private affairs.

"As I was saying," she resumed, "all this publicity is highly distasteful to the artist, and yet since you have forced yourself in here I may as well say a few little things about how good I am and how I got that way.