Black Oxen by Gertrude Atherton

Three weeks passed. There were almost twice as many first-nights. "Mary Ogden," as Clavering called her for want of the truth, was at each. She never rose in her seat again, and, indeed, seemed to seek inconspicuousness, but she was always in the second or third row of the orchestra, and she wore a different gown on each occasion. As she entered after the curtain rose and stole out before it went down for the last time, few but those in the adjacent seats and boxes were edified by any details of those charming creations, although it was noticeable that the visiting of both sexes was most active in her neighborhood.

For by this time she was "the talk of the town," or of that important and excessively active-minded section of Greater New York represented at first-nights. The columnists had commented on her. One had indited ten lines of free verse in her honor, another had soared on the wings of seventeenth century English into a panegyric on her beauty and her halo of mystery. A poet-editor-wit had cleped her "The Silent Drama. " Had it been wartime she would inevitably have been set down as a spy, and as it was there were dark inferences that she was a Bolshevik agent who had smuggled vast sums of money into the country and passed it on to the Reds. There were those who opined she was some rich man's mistress, recently imported, snatched from some victim of revolution who could no longer afford her. Blonde madonnas were always under suspicion unless you knew all about them.