Page "belles_lettres" Paragraph 1296

Lewis's remarks about his marriage were suggestive enough to induce American reporters to invade the offices of Harcourt, Brace & Company for information, to pursue Mrs. Lewis to Cromwell Hall, and, after she had returned to New York, to ferret her out at the Stanhope on upper Fifth Avenue where she had taken an apartment.

There, to the Evening Post, she emphatically denied the divorce rumors and explained that she had stayed behind because of the schooling of their son, which henceforth would be strictly American.

These rumors of permanent separation started up a whole crop of stories about her.

One had it that a friend, protesting her snobbery, said, `` But, Gracie, you are an American, aren't you ''??

And she replied, `` I was born in America, but I was conceived in Vienna ''.

Lewis himself furthered these tales.

He is said to have reported that once, when she went to a hospital to call on a friend after a serious operation, and the friend protested that it had been `` nothing '', she replied, `` Well, it was your healthy American peasant blood that pulled you through ''.

With these and similar tales he was entertaining his English friends, all of whom he was seeing when he was not showing Blackman the sights of London and its environs.