“This duchess does.  Believe me, those tarts are good enough for the Queen of Hearts, let alone a duchess, no matter how arch.  But the plot of the piece is this.  The duchess person goes to Gerbeaud’s about twice a week.  And they always spread a red carpet for her.  And Mizzi always manages to cut away in time to stand there in front of Gerbeaud’s and see her come out.  She’s a gorgeous mimic, that little kid.  And though I couldn’t understand a word she said I managed to get out of it just this:  That some day they’re going to spread a red carpet for Mizzi and she’s going to walk down it in glory.  If you’d seen her face when she said it, S.H., you wouldn’t laugh.”

“I wouldn’t laugh anyway,” said Hahn, seriously.

And that’s the true story of Mizzi Markis’s beginning.  Few people know it.

* * * * *

There they were, the three of them.  And of the three, Mizzi’s ambition seemed to be the fiercest, the most implacable.  She worked like a horse, cramming English, French, singing.  In some things she was like a woman of thirty; in others a child of ten.  Her gratitude to Hahn was pathetic.  No one ever doubted that he was in love with her almost from the first—­he who had resisted the professional beauties of three decades.

You know she wasn’t—­and isn’t—­a beauty, even in that portrait of her by Sargent, with her two black-haired, stunning-looking boys, one on either side.  But she was one of those gorgeously healthy women whose very presence energizes those with whom she comes in contact.  And then there was about her a certain bounteousness.  There’s no other word for it, really.  She reminded you of those gracious figures you see posed for pictures entitled “Autumn Harvest.”

While she was studying she had a little apartment with a middle-aged woman to look after her, and she must have been a handful.  A born cook, she was, and Hahn and Wallie used to go there to dinner whenever she would let them.  She cooked it herself.  Hahn would give up any engagement for a dinner at Mizzi’s.  When he entered her little sitting room his cares seemed to drop from him.  She never got over cutting bread as the peasant women do it—­the loaf held firmly against her breast, the knife cutting toward her.  Hahn used to watch her and laugh.  Sometimes she would put on the little black head-shawl of her Budapest days and sing the street-song about the hundred geese in a row.  A delightful, impudent figure.

With the very first English she learned she told Hahn and Wallie that some day they were going to spread a fine red carpet for her to tread upon and that all the world would gaze on her with envy.  It was in her mind a symbol typifying all that there was of earthly glory.

“It’ll be a long time before they do any red carpeting for you, my girl,” Sid Hahn had said.

She turned on him fiercely.  “I will not rest—­I will not eat—­I will not sleep—­I will not love—­until I have it.”