There was a dark rumour that she had poisoned him.
True or false, the rumour persisted, and she soon became one of the most popular dancers in the Empire.

For three years she had a manager who treated her so vilely, so contemptuously that she tried to kill his wife, whereupon the unnatural husband refused to have anything more to do with her.
She was dancing in Germany when the War broke out, but succeeded in getting over into Holland within a week or two, thereby escaping what she was pleased to describe as "something zat no woman could endure, no matter how long she have live' in Russia." Paris and London had treated her kindly, courteously, but that was to be expected, she repined, because all of the real men were off at the front fighting.

Instead of being scowled at and ordered about by managers and orchestra leaders, or brow-beaten by hotel-clerks and head-waiters, she met with nothing but the most servile politeness,--due, she was prone to argue, to the unquestioned decadence of the French and English races.

They were a bloodless lot, those Frenchmen and Englishmen.
It was the same in Rio Janeiro, Buenos Aires and Santiago,--and it would be even worse in New York, Chicago and San Francisco.

The Americans, she had heard, were the worst of them all.