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But just then Elizabeth would have signed away her whole life for nothing.

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On a brilliant night in January, 1920, under the sponsorship of Oswald Kane, Mme.Lisa Parsinova made her bow to an expectant New York public.

For a long time, almost a year to be exact, Mr.Kane had been letting fall gentle hints of his discovery of a rare Russian genius, driven by the war to these shores. He was having her instructed in English, the story went, and once equal to the exigencies of emotional acting in a strange tongue, she would be presented by him to an American public which could not fail to be entranced by her great art. All this had been revealed in various interviews, bit by bit—a word here, a phrase there, a subtle suggestion elsewhere. At first he had not given out her name, had been gradually prevailed upon to do so, and by the time he announced the date of her première, “Mme.Lisa Parsinova” was on the lips of all that eager theater-going throng alert for a new sensation.