Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Minor Chord: A Story of a Prima Donna
In the zenith of my career as a prima donna, known in the foyers of every great city, the cynosure of the glow of the footlights, the plaudits of audiences in both hemispheres, the appreciative praise of great critics and the esteem and adoration of a host of admirers I am alone with my memories.
Like the wife of Midas who, with her pretty Grecian mouth buried in the grass-roots, whispered the shameful secret Midas has asses' ears, I must tell the story; and so I have begun a long-debated purpose, the recital of a tale of the Middle West in the early seventies.
My real life history has been too common place to appear romantic; my manager's version has over-gilded humble conditions which must never be revealed until my stage career is over. And so, in all my triumphs, though known everywhere, yet I am unknown, miserably unknown, except to those whom I have loved - and lost.
Full well I know that, like the Grecian queen, my confidence may be betrayed, my secret escape me. Even as the very grasses and lowly wild?owers whispered to the zephyrs, and the zephyrs carried it to the clematis and laurels until the whole vale was susurrant and murmuring with the sibilant refrain, Midas has asses' ears, so any accident, the curiosity of a maid, yes, or the malignity of a rival, would make these avowals a reef on which to wreck my career, perhaps my reputation.
Men of genius in all ages have sought to dissect and analyze the heart of woman and to lay bare its mysteries in song and fiction, painting and sculpture; but the greatest men who weigh the emotions and hearts of their fellow-creatures as in a balance fail in the study of the feminine heart to enter its holy of holies and to carry away with them the secret key of a woman's soul.
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