"Not astonishing at all," said Robert, divesting himself of the costume.

"Like most young men I have a craving for pleasure, excitement and

female society. That's what you call the devil in me. But my

observation is keen enough to show me that, under present social

conditions, I can't give this craving either a temperate or an honorable

satisfaction. So I repress it as much as common sense allows, and you

call that repression austerity."

"Cato, you ought to be writing tracts for the Ethical Culture Society

instead of newspaper articles for Hutchins' wicked _Evening Chronicle_.

What are you doing among the Outlaws instead of in a goody-goody Sunday

School?"

He took her raillery in good part.

"Every journalist is a patcher-up of unconsidered trifles," he said.

"He makes a crazy quilt of them as orderly and coherent as he can.

Well, where can I get the raw material I need in greater supply than in

this little community of criminality and sentimentality, of Radicalism

and bad debts? Kips Bay is an inexhaustible mine of police news and

town talk."

"Well, I can't say that your kind stay among us has broadened you out

much, Rob!"

"No?" he replied, amused at the shot. "I suppose I do grow more

squeamish every day. Nothing like a steady diet of police episodes for

purifying purposes. It acts the way some nauseous drugs do."

"You're perfectly detestable," she cried. She didn't like anybody but

herself to disparage Kips Bay. "You've put your mind in a prison, Rob.

Your symptoms require a drastic remedy. If I were a physician of the

soul, I should prescribe marriage."

"Don't be a Job's comforter, Cornelia. I said I wanted female society,

not female satiety. And, by the way, since when did you begin to

advocate marriage as the door to freedom? You have always denounced it

as the trapdoor to slavery."

"I don't advocate it for women, and even for men I recommend it only in

the most desperate cases."

"Well, mine isn't desperate. But Hutchins Burley's is, judging from his

conduct at the ball tonight. You might prescribe for him."

"Oh, he's past all treatment. What do you think he told me in strict

confidence yesterday? That he's weighed down by a great sorrow; too

many women find him irresistible, and persecute him to death with their

lovesick attentions."

"I call that a new form of persecutional mania."

"He was in dead earnest, Rob. He called himself a martyr to love, fancy

that!"

"Well, he seemed to be a remarkably willing martyr tonight. He buzzed

like a huge wasp from one pair of lips to another. When he got to

Mazie, who unfolds her petals so alluringly, he became quite

intoxicated."

"Which means that Mazie acted in a perfectly shameless way, as usual."

"Whose mind is a prison now?"

"I don't know what you mean," said Cornelia acridly. "Please don't

assume that, because I no longer believe in marriage, I've turned my

back on decency and good manners."

"This is breaking a butterfly on a wheel, Cornelia. The fact is, Mazie

doesn't have to _act_ to produce the peculiar behavior in men which I

described. You know that quite well. She is what Joseph Conrad calls

'one of the women of all time.' I'd call her a throw-back with the

emotions and appetites of a cave woman and the thoughts and looks of a

Ziegfield chorus girl. It's not by acting shamelessly, or by acting at

all, but by just passively being herself that she sets a man's blood

boiling."

"A man's blood boils so easily--like a kettle on a mountain!"

"Be fair, Cornelia. Some men's blood does, yes. Men on Mazie's own

level. Burley's one of them."

"Well," said Cornelia, waiving the point, "what did Hutchins do, or

rather undo?"

"I'd better not go into details. He played several questionable pranks.

Once, it looked as though he were on the point of seizing Mazie by her

locks and dragging her, stone-man fashion, to his lair. Even Mazie had

to act then, really to _act_, for she was after bigger game."

"You mean, Claude?"

"Yes. But Claude had no eyes for the woman of all time. His gaze was

absolutely absorbed by a new star of the first magnitude, a star not

charted in the heavens before."

"And this starry wonder?"

"Was Janet Barr."

He tried to say the name casually, but Cornelia's jealous ear detected a

caressing tone.

"Hard on Mazie, wasn't it?" he pursued.

"On Mazie least of all," she said pointedly.

The shaft missed.

"Yes, Burley got the worst end of it," he went on innocently. "I dare

say Mazie consoled herself easily enough. But Burley's aspirations have

met more than one jolt to-night. When he made a dead set at Janet--that

was another rebuff."

Robert described the riotous scene outside the gypsy tent.

"Then, as I've already told you, Mazie gave him the slip; with the

result that I've never seen Burley more completely divested of his

first-prize bumptiousness. However, he soon pulled himself together."

"Goodness knows there must have been plenty of Outlaw girls ready to lay

balm on the big scamp's wounds."

"Yes. And I needn't remind you that many of these young ladies believe

in free speech, free men and free love. Well, Hutchins made the rounds

of those he knew and publicly challenged them to live up to their

pretensions. His proposals were brutally frank."

"The girls received them with amusement, I suppose?"

"They received them with scornful resentment--just like ordinary

conventional creatures. That was what was so surprising. For Hutchins

was simply a man who took their professed opinions at face value.

'Darling,' he would say bluntly, to one of his pets, 'Darling, I like

you and your ruby lips. If you like me and are not otherwise engaged,

suppose we go off to Paradise.' It was raw, of course. But you can't

say it wasn't what is called 'free love'."

"Really, Rob!"

"Exactly. They were every bit as scandalized as you are. After gasping

for breath, they called for their escorts. Whereupon I concluded that

instinct is mightier than opinion and that the beliefs we inherit are

vastly stronger than the beliefs we acquire."

Cornelia ignored this piece of satire. And Robert then told how Burley

had resumed his pursuit of Janet.

"Luckily, Claude held him off," he said.

"Another champion! Little Janet must be quite the belle of the ball."

"She's been much in demand. There was the gypsy tent, remember. When

it comes to innocent credulity, a radical's capacity is just as great as

any honest man's. So what with examining scores of palms and eluding

Hutchins Burley, Janet might have died from exhaustion but for Claude's

gallant interference."

"Just like Claude's knight-errantry," she said. "He has always had a

passion for novelties."

"And the novelties have usually returned the passion!"

Cornelia felt a twinge of jealousy. But as Janet had evidently not been

very attentive to Robert, and had even hurt his feelings, she was hardly

conscious of the emotion.

"Janet is young, impressionable and fresh from a Puritan home," she

said, with a languid air of detachment. "Small wonder if Lothario's

dash and distinction have captivated her."

They fell to talking of Janet's history, and Robert spoke of the

surprising change in her sphere of interests.

"A month ago she was demure enough to have stood model for the heroine

of _Miles Standish_. She could hardly be induced to drink at a

soda-water fountain on a Sunday. Now she is full of 'equal pay for equal

work.' And she appears to have a voice as well as a vote. I'm told

that she reads the _Liberator_ and that she broke the last Sabbath by

attending a meeting of the new Labor Party in Madison Square Garden."

"She's been under my wing for several weeks," said Cornelia, proudly.

*III*

Cornelia's assumption that she was entirely responsible for the change

in Janet's outlook on life was without warrant. Yet she was so

self-satisfied as scarcely to suspect that Robert had anything to do

with the matter; and it was interest in the man rather than curiosity

about the girl that caused her to question him about his previous

acquaintance with Janet.

She learnt that Robert's mother was not a very distant cousin of Mrs.

Barr, and that both ladies had spent their girlhood in the same

Connecticut town, where they had been friends until Mrs. Lloyd married

and went out West. When Robert left Los Angeles, he bore this

relationship in mind and, on the strength of it, paid his respects to

the Barrs soon after settling in New York.

Cornelia inferred that the young man's acquaintance with the Barrs had

continued on a very superficial footing. Robert knew better than to

undeceive her. As a matter of fact, he had repeated his visits to the

Barr household for the simple reason that there had sprung up between

himself and Janet a mental fellowship which the hostility of her mother,

the timid aloofness of her father and the envy of her sister had been

able to obstruct but not to destroy.

Janet had more than repaid him for the inhospitality of her relatives.

She in turn amused, puzzled, inspired and electrified him. So much

unsophistication in the midst of a guileful city, so much candor

surrounded by pious make-believe, above all, so much eagerness for

experience held in leash by a vegetating family routine, had filled

Robert with the hope that he might play Pygmalion to her Galatea.

Galatea, however, did not exactly go into raptures over Pygmalion.

Though her insurgent nature was full of silent sympathy with Robert, her

instincts were so much under the bondage of the Barr atmosphere as to

prevent her from fully estimating his worth. Still, she conscientiously

followed up the leads he gave her. She made her first bewildered

acquaintance with the new paintings, the new music and the new social

sciences. She began to look forward to copies of the _Republic_, the

_Nation_, the _London Statesman_; and she joined him in reading the

great contemporary writers: Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Anatole France,

Romain Rolland. In short, she ranged with silent delight through the

new world of modernity that he opened up to her, though it had to be

explored in an obstinate little way of her own.

As her unofficial pilot Robert was very happy and might long have held

the post but for a fatal blunder. Mrs. Barr learned one day that he had

tempted Janet to attend a performance of Shaw's "Blanco Posnet," given

on a Sunday by the Stage Reform Players. According to Emily, her

informant, this play was immoral, not to say blasphemous, as was proved

by the refusal of the British censor to license its performance.

Such a flagrant breach of holy writ, family propriety and the Sabbath,

raised a domestic tempest to which Janet deemed it wise to bend. Robert

was forced to discontinue his visits. What he did not tell Cornelia was

that, during the last two months, he had regularly met Janet at

Brentano's, where she had formed the habit of browsing through the new

books and magazines every Friday afternoon.

*CHAPTER SIX*

*I*

These facts Robert had his own reasons for hiding from Cornelia. To cut

the cross-examination short, he walked up to a miniature portrait that

hung on the wall over Cornelia's desk.

"Why do you keep this picture of Percival Houghton enshrined here?"

"Why not?" asked Cornelia, taken by surprise.

"It is the only picture in the room," replied Robert, evasively. "The

face is that of an esthete under the influence of paranoia. It

positively stares one out of countenance. Whenever I enter the room, I

feel as if I mustn't take a seat until I've bowed before it thrice."

"I'm not responsible for other people's erratic feelings." Cornelia

would have spoken with less acerbity if jealousy had prompted Robert's

remark. But his cool sardonic tone eliminated the theory of a jealous

motive.

"Pardon the explosion, Cornelia. But why must this man of all men be

the presiding genius of your room?"

"You know the reason very well, Robert."

"Unfortunately, yes. You won't let your friends forget it. By keeping

this portrait in evidence, you actually force the reason on people's

attention. Do take him down, Cornelia, swathe him in incense, and lay

him away amongst your most cherished souvenirs. Replace him, if you

must replace him, with a picture of Saint Francis or Savonarola."

She bristled up under his ironic words. Her craving for admiration

vanished in her resentment of disapproval.

"I am proud to have known Percival Houghton, and to have been his

friend. Thanks for your recommendation, though I'm not aware of having

asked for it."

"Don't be angry. You must own that you constantly remind your visitors

of this Houghton affair, though what advantage it is to your position

and influence, Heaven only knows. Let sleeping dogs lie. Believe me,

Cornelia, half the tragedies in life result from forgetting what we

ought to remember; the other half from remembering what we ought to

forget."

"I'm not ashamed of the Houghton affair, as you call it," said Cornelia

coldly. "Why should I be? It was one of those rare friendships that

are quite beyond the perception of vulgar-minded, low-thoughted souls.

What other people think of it concerns me very little."

She really believed this, although it was very wide of the mark.

"I know," she went on melodramatically, "of the spiteful gossip behind

my back. I know of the scarlet colors in which my relations with

Percival Houghton are painted by my enemies. Let them declaim against

me! To a few real friends I have told the truth. They believe me, and

that is all I ask."

She had in fact taken more than one friend into her confidence. It was

a common saying in the Lorillard tenements that the token of admission

to Cornelia's inner circle was the almost sacramental rite of receiving

her account of the Houghton episode.

The corner stone of this account--the supreme article of faith!--was the

point that she and Percival Houghton had rigorously abstained from

sexual intimacy throughout their voyage together in the same stateroom.

Not from moral scruples, be it noted, but from a desire to prove to the

world that free love and the severest tax on self-restraint were

perfectly compatible.

Cornelia held passionately to the delusion that her account was accepted

in every jot and tittle. Robert knew that behind her back, most of her

friends greeted it with a cynical smile and pronounced it a pardonable

but much too elaborate invention. When some one referred to Cornelia's

assertion that the voyage to England had involved no infraction of the

seventh commandment, the women would say contemptuously: "If you're

going to be killed for a lamb, you might as well be killed for a sheep."

The men, more vulgarly, would exclaim: "What a shame if they wasted a

chance like that!"

Hutchins Burley, in one of his most egregious moments, wagered any

amount that Cornelia wasn't half as big a fool as her story made her out

to be.

It was owing to these and other coarse pleasantries circulating at her

expense that Robert wished he could make Cornelia look the facts in the

face.

What he regretted most of all, however, was that she seemed entirely to

misconstrue the visits of the many men who sauntered in and out of her

rooms. They came with the expectation voiced by Oscar Wilde, that "she

who had sinned once and with loathing, would sin again many times, and

with joy." Clearly, they hoped to profit by the repetition. But this

was a truth to which Cornelia was obstinately blind.

"You, Robert," she said, aggrieved at his silence, "used to be counted

among those who believed."

"And I am still. Good Heavens, Cornelia, why should I, of all people,

doubt your words? Think of my situation. Here am I, alone after

midnight in an apartment with a young and interesting martyr in the

cause of free marriage. And what do we do? We discuss the subject of

sex affinities, with a complete suspension of conventional reserve. Yet

I couldn't so much as kiss you."

"Oh, couldn't you?" said Cornelia, in a half mocking, half challenging

voice.

This tremendous talk, all about herself, had completely revitalized her

spirits. She sat forward intent on Robert's every word, the movement

causing her dress to fall low in front and show all her languid beauty

at its best.

"No!" he said, gazing at her and striving hard to steady himself.

"How do you know?" she murmured, in scarcely audible tones.

"I know," asserted Robert firmly, returning to an almost inhuman

perfection. "If I began to make love to you, I'd be turned out in a

twinkling. But who would believe this? Not a soul. If you were to tell

the facts to our fellow tenementers, they would laugh you to scorn, and

if _I_ were to tell them, they would send me to the Bloomingdale Asylum.

Yet my virtue is quite safe with you, Cornelia."

"You hardly do yourself justice, Cato," she said, biting her lips, and

adjusting the neck of her dress.

"Oh, men are more or less passive agents in these matters. I'm safe with

you because your radicalism, with all its offshoots into free love, free

thought and free religion is only skin deep. You are a fascinating

instance in the flesh of the great modern feminist dilemma: the demand

for independence and respectability coupled with the fatal longing to be

a Cleopatra, 'one of the women of all time.'"

Piqued at his innuendoes, Cornelia was getting ready to launch an acrid

retort, when the door bell rang. It was one of those vicious jangles

with which only a policeman or a pedlar ventures to announce himself.

But the man who roistered into the apartment was Hutchins Burley.

*II*

It was difficult to think of this corpulent, bullying brawler as one of

the leading newspaper men of the metropolis; he looked so very much more

like a shoddy loafer from the underworld. His legs were still fairly

steady, although his head was quite the reverse. His alcoholic

exertions had been so ardent, however, that he sank on the couch with a

loud snort of satisfaction.

"Where's Janet Barr?" he demanded, after getting his breath. "I

followed her to Charlotte's flat, but she wasn't there. That's where

Lydia Dyson said she was going to, the little liar."

Cornelia shook her finger at him in mock remonstrance.

"You have seen quite enough of Janet for one night, Hutch, judging from

reports that have reached me. I'd be doing no more than was good for

you if I put Mrs. Burley on your trail."

"What d'ye think Lizzie'd do?" he roared. "She'd scratch your eyes out

for your pains!"

He gave himself up to a burst of horrible guffaws. As Robert looked at

the man's gross, overheated, pitted face and at the Falstaffian neck and

trunk, he was overcome with intense disgust.

This disgust was only in part shared by Cornelia. True, she did not

relish Burley in his present drunken condition, but ordinarily she

confessed to a curious weakness for him. "There's something about the

brute that I like," she once frankly said.

She found his grossness and animal passion a relief from the refinement

and fastidiousness of men like Robert. There was a certain quantitative

satisfaction in the spectacle of his enormous bulk at her feet. Anyhow,

all male slaves looked alike to her, the fact being that her appetite

for attention or devotion was at once undiscriminating and insatiable.

Meanwhile Burley had turned to Robert.

"Listen, my boy," he said, clamorously, "when you marry, get a good

stupid dray horse like my dame. One that'll believe in you even if God

Almighty's against you. A good plodding dray horse. That's the best

recipe I know for marital felicity."

In an explosion of repellent laughter he roared out his self-applause.

"You know as much about women as about this tunic I'm cutting out," said

Cornelia, rebuking him mildly with her voice, but not at all with her

eye.

"Well, Corny," said Hutchins, in high excitement, "I'll tell you what I

_do_ know about them." He rose from the lounge and dumped himself

amorously on one of the arms of her easy chair. "There are only three

things a man need do to make a hit with women: give 'em food, give 'em

clothes, give 'em hugs. It's a sure-fire rule for managing them, too."

He roared louder than ever. Robert wished Cornelia wouldn't encourage

him under a pretense of doing the reverse.

"Now, Hutch, go home, please," she said, prompted by his silent

disapproval. "You'll wake up all the neighbors with your loud laughter.

Remember, the walls here are as thin as cardboard."

By way of answer, the irrepressible roisterer put his arm familiarly

around her waist and tried to draw her back into the chair.

"Be human, Corny, old girl," he said. "Don't be a psychic adventuress.

I've got to stay somewhere tonight, and I might as well stay here."

Cornelia wrenched herself from his grasp and, opening the outer door

with a tempestuous gesture, told him to leave at once.

"You'd better go, Hutchins," said Robert, quietly. "Cornelia will be

more than a match for you."

Burley began to abuse him at the top of his lungs.

"For a penny, I'd break every bone in your body," he shouted.

"I'll give you twice that sum to refrain," said Robert coolly.

Burley's latent bestiality was now thoroughly aroused. Breathing

threatenings and slaughter, he advanced towards Robert, working himself

into a greater passion and shaking his fist more savagely every step of

the way. Cornelia screamed and threw herself in the huge man's path.

After a tussle of a few seconds, during which her cries rang through the

open door, he shoved her forcibly aside. Robert's slim stature was

already poised for the uneven combat, when a tall, agile, coatless

figure dashed in from the adjoining apartment and deftly arrested the

fist that Burley was sending with considerable momentum towards Robert's

pale face.

"This way out!" exclaimed the newcomer in a voice almost ludicrously

gentle.

But there was nothing gentle about his strength. The thwarted man

sputtered abusive, incoherent indecencies. In vain. His expletives were

cut short by two hands of steel that whirled his lumbering hulk forward,

steered him past Cornelia with professional adroitness, and escorted him

irresistibly into the corridor. A moment later an inchoate mass of

humanity was torpedoed, with projectile swiftness, down the first flight

of stairs. To make doubly sure, the direct actionist followed his

missile.

Rumblings, sputterings and groans ascended discordantly up the stairway.

Presently the noise grew fitful and then more and more subdued, as if

some one had damped Vesuvius or banked its fires for the night. At

length came silence.

Cornelia had sunk into a chair over which Robert was solicitously

bending when Burley's subjugator returned. In reply to Cornelia's thanks

he blushed like a boy and hid his embarrassment by edging towards the

door.

In the hall outside he deprecated Robert's warm words.

"Just practice work," he said, in the same mild voice and Manhattan

accent. "A little trick of concentration. A man brings all his

muscular power to bear on a few weak points. _And_ joints. The Japs can

teach you. So can I."

He drew a card from his waistcoat pocket. Meanwhile, Cornelia, who had

followed Robert to the door, chanted:

"You are wonderful, Mr. Gorilla, wonderful! How _do_ you accomplish

it?"

"Ah, Miss, a child could do it. The main thing is to be a powerful

breather; you can't do much if you're only a powerful eater or drinker.

You've got to fill your lungs and your bel--your abdomen, with good

fresh wind; then you travel on velvet."

He gave Robert his card.

"Come in and I'll show you," he said cordially.

His eyes meeting Cornelia's again, the vanquished victor withdrew in

evident confusion to his retreat in number thirteen.

Robert looked at the card and turned it over to Cornelia. She recognized

with a smile the legend about Harry Kelly, the Harlem Gorilla and

Champion of the Mat.

*PART II*

*LOVE AMONG THE OUTLAWS*

*CHAPTER SEVEN*

*I*

When Janet awoke at eleven, it took her several moments to recollect

that she was in Cornelia's apartment in Kips Bay, where Claude had left

her before dawn. She could hear Cornelia bustling about in the living

room, but she stayed in bed a little longer to luxuriate in memories of

the preceding night.

She got lightly out of bed and stood before the mirror over the

chiffonier. But she was less preoccupied with the image in the looking

glass than with mental pictures of the night before.

In the bright light of day, the glamour of some of these pictures took

on the effect of tinsel. But Janet could still thrill to the excitement

of the raid on the Lyceum, the pell-mell escape, the violent dispersal

of the mobs in Murray Hill and the hurried collection of a troop of

Outlaw refugees and their nocturnal march through Kips Bay streets under

the leadership of Claude Fontaine. It had been a very festive troop,

swelled by stragglers all the way to the Lorillard tenements, where the

party camped in Charlotte Beecher's double flat.

Of the long merrymaking that followed, Janet cared to remember only the

occasions when Claude Fontaine was at her side and at her service. How

vividly she could picture him in the dashing part of Charles Surface,

his handsome face tinted with rich, young blood, and his eyes of such

brightness and depth that surely no infamy could ever dull them!

A knock cut this day dreaming short.

"How do you do, Araminta?" said Cornelia, entering melodramatically.

"And what does the Sleeping Beauty want for breakfast?"

"I'm hungry enough to eat sticks and stones and puppy-dog's bones,"

replied Janet. "But I won't murmur if you have gentler fare."

As Cornelia insisted that dressing should be deferred until after the

meal, Janet tripped to the breakfast table in her nightgown, her curly

hair hanging down to her shoulders. Cornelia, her figure lapped

precariously in a simple dress, which she had made and pinned together

at a cost of fifty cents all told, sat down opposite her young guest.

"This is a picnic!" exclaimed Janet. She was filled with glee at the

wrapping paper neatly spread out in place of a table cloth, at the cups,

saucers and dishes all made of agateware, and at the compressed paper

plates for the slices of bread.

"Well, it isn't a Barmecide's feast, by any means," said Cornelia, who

was amused at Janet's artless joy. "The plates may be made of paper,

but they are fresh and so are the eggs and bacon."

She set these articles on the table.

"All the principal dishes are of agateware," she said, in answer to a

question of Janet's. "I've got four of everything necessary--four cups,

four saucers, four glasses, four knives, four spoons, and so on. But

don't imagine that we have wrapping paper for a table cloth every day.

Dear, no! That's only for guests of honor and on Sundays. On week days

we use newspapers."

"That's a novel way of taking one's newspaper with one's meal."

"Oh, it's old news. I always use the newspaper of a week ago. And it's

curious how often I run across some interesting bit of politics or

scandal that escaped me a week before. Sometimes, while devouring a

roll, I catch myself in the midst of a slobbery article by Hutchins

Burley in the _Evening Chronicle_. The wretch is running a series of

articles called: 'The Soul of Woman under Freedom.'"

She gave Janet a circumstantial report of the encounter with Burley

during the night. Janet followed this narrative with sympathetic

interest, and wished that she and Claude had arrived in time to prevent

the occurrence.

"But then your knight-errant would have missed his opportunity," she

said.

"Think of the loss! By the way, I met him this morning, Araminta."

"In ambush at the door?"

"No, in the hallway downstairs. I had gone out for some cream. On my

way back I ran right into his arms."

"With what result?"

"Very little. He exhausted his eloquence in stammers and deaf mute

lingo. And when I thanked him again for last night's service, he

promptly took to his heels. It was cruel."

"The course of true love always is, Cornelia."

Cornelia, pleased at the implied assumption that she had inspired a

romance, dwelt with gusto on the hero's exploit. For the fiftieth time

she described the skill and celerity with which "the physical culture

expert" had propelled Burley from the apartment.

"At the Outlaws' Ball, Mr. Burley called Claude a diamond smuggler,"

said Janet, by way of changing the subject. "What did he mean? Do

people accuse the Fontaines of smuggling?"

"I never heard of such a thing," replied Cornelia. "Merchant princes

like the Fontaines would hardly stoop to that. Besides, it wouldn't pay

them. Did Claude notice?"

"Yes, and he seemed to mind it very much. His whole appearance changed

as if he had been stung into sudden fury. But he controlled himself

bravely."

"What else could he do with the belle of the ball at his side? He's

always a man of the world--when in the world."

"But not in private?" asked Janet, anxious to get to the bottom of this

veiled aspersion. Cornelia's reply was evasive.

"A fine summer's day will often end in a burst of terrifying thunder and

lightning," she said. "Lothario has plenty of good looks and plenty of

temper. A man who is accustomed to find people submitting to his will,

easily gets indignant when he meets with opposition."

She sighed as if she could tell much more about Claude Fontaine if she

chose.

"Well, I don't blame him for getting enraged at the abuse of that

horrible man," said Janet, sturdily defending him.

"Nor do I. Once in a while a thunderbolt will strike the wicked as well

as the good, won't it? Claude was quite justified this time, no doubt."

"How does he happen to come among the Outlaws, Cornelia? He doesn't

seem to belong to them exactly."

"He doesn't pretend to. He walks among us humble tenementers like a god

among his creatures. Distinctly Like a god, Araminta. That's the

footing on which he associates with mere human beings."

"Yet he's hail fellow well met with Robert and Mazie and the others,"

protested Janet.

"Ah, yes, but don't let that deceive you. Jupiter was hail fellow well

met with many a mortal, especially with many a mortal maiden. You

remember that he visited one earthly princess in a shower of gold. That

is what Claude does. He visits the model tenements in--or perhaps I

should say with--a shower of gold. I mean," she added, "he doesn't

think of marriage with a girl on Mazie's level. Nor with a girl on yours

or mine."

This shaft did not miss its mark. But it perplexed Janet more than it

wounded her.

"I thought that made no difference to you," she said, for she had

already been favored with some of Cornelia's destructive criticism of

the institution of marriage.

"It makes no difference to _me_," said Cornelia. "But in this stifling

room I can't explain myself as I'd like to. The spacious blue skies and

the free pure air of the Hudson will be a more fitting background for

the story I'd like to tell you. Put on your things, Araminta, and we'll

go for a charming ride."

Janet dressed with promptness and pleasure. She appeared to have

forgotten that Robert Lloyd had particularly said that he was coming

about noon in order to take her home. Her friend did not remind her.

The knowledge that Robert would go away in bitter disappointment robbed

the outing of none of its zest, so far as Cornelia was concerned.

Claude, too, had promised to drop in at Number Fifteen. This promise

Janet bore well in mind. But as his visit was not to take place until

late in the afternoon and there was thus no danger of missing him, she

joined Cornelia with enthusiasm.

*II*

At the corner of Thirty-fourth Street and Second Avenue, where Kips Bay

edges its dingy little proletarian stores into bourgeois respectability,

the two young women entered a car bound for the West Twenty-third Street

ferry. It proceeded at a jog trot along Second Avenue to Twenty-third

Street where it struck the cross-town line west.

Janet felt no annoyance at the snail's pace from which the car never

departed. Manhattan was still a novelty to her, and this section of the

East Side was wholly new.

But Cornelia made unflattering comparison between the surface

conveyances in Manhattan and the bus transportation which Londoners and

Parisians enjoyed. She was annoyed by the complacency that New Yorkers

displayed toward their street-car service and the petty provincialism

that actually led them to believe this service to be the fastest in the

world, when in fact it was the slowest. At the climax of her irritation

she gave Janet the benefit of one of Robert Lloyd's epigrams. Robert

had once said that New York "rapid transit," as it was optimistically

called, was the organized effort of the local traction magnates to

annihilate the specific advantages of modern electrical machinery.

Cornelia did not doubt that in this effort they had triumphed.

The jolts with which the car came to a standstill at each successive

street crossing, and the jerks with which it resumed its languid pace

again, would ordinarily have frazzled her nerves for the day. This

time, however, she bore the ordeal much more composedly. For one thing,

Janet's calm spirit had a soothing influence upon her. For another, it

amused her mightily to have so unsophisticated a companion to point out

the sights to. She caused Janet to observe the Italian district with

its macaroni dens along the cross streets, the Armenian district with

the Eastern restaurants parading strange Greek-lettered names, and Kips

Bay's fashionable western fringe with its Madison Avenue hotels, stores

and residential palaces.

Janet drank it all in thirstily. Not for a moment did she regret the

defiance she had flung at her mother's wishes by going to the Outlaws'

Ball. On the contrary, this act of insurgency appeared to have

heightened her perception as much as it had strengthened her

self-esteem. She saw things with different eyes, or believed she did.

The people and the shops fairly brandished a life and reality totally

new to her experience. She longed to be more than a mere spectator in

the tumultuous scene unfolded before her. She would have given anything

to be even a cog--an active cog--in this giant metropolis whose roar and

grime possessed an immense attraction.

At the North River they left the car. Three big ferry houses confronted

them and Cornelia was undecided which to take. It was a grave question

in her mind, for she staged the big scenes of her life with as much care

as a play producer. The artist in her at once eliminated the Erie

ferry.

"The Erie boats are too dinky," she said. "Shall we take the Jersey

Central or the Lackawanna?"

"Let's take the one that gives the longest ride," said Janet, for whom

the smell of the river quickly cut such minor esthetic knots.

Cornelia's first and invariable impulse towards any proposal made by

another person was to turn it down. The reasons she gave for doing so

were usually quite plausible, though sometimes cast in a rather

theatrical style.

"The Jersey's trip is a little longer," she said, "but the difference is

slight. The Lackawanna appeals to me more. Lackawanna! Don't you love

the music in that name? Besides, Araminta, the Jersey boats are painted

a sickly gray, while the Lackawanna boats are maroon. A wonderful

maroon! And they have a glorious seat on the upper deck, directly

facing the bow."

"Very well, let's take the Lackawanna," said Janet, to whom it was all

one.

They were soon ensconced in the very seat on the top deck which Cornelia

coveted.

But if Janet had any hopes of hearing a great deal more about Claude

Fontaine, she was soon disillusioned. She did not yet understand her

friend, to whom the world was an audience at a stage play in which

Cornelia Covert had the star part. She speedily learned that Cornelia

had not gone to all this trouble to analyze the love affairs of other

people. No. The moment had been chosen and the stage had been set to

make Janet the recipient of the sacred narrative of Cornelia's

experience with Percival Houghton.

The tale did not begin until the boat was well under way, so that Janet

had an opportunity to revel in the swell of the mighty Hudson and to

contrast the differing aspects of the two banks. The Palisaded Jersey

side was almost hidden by huge ocean steamers, except at the spot where

the Castle Point Terrace of Stevens Institute rose serenely above a

forest of quivering masts.

Janet thought the heights of Hoboken quite dwarfed by the towering

office structures of lower Manhattan. Cornelia interrupted her

ineffable story long enough to repeat another opinion of Robert's

without acknowledgment. It was to the effect that the commercial

skyscrapers on the Hudson were as grimly symbolic of ownership as the

castles that overlooked the Rhine. Did Janet realize that the lords of

these skyscraping fortresses were the masters of the river and thus of

the country on which the river's port had a strangle hold? In each of

the big business edifices, thousands of mercantile retainers served

their liege lords with pen or typewriter as industriously as ever

men-at-arms flourished crossbow or arquebus in the brave days of old.

Only, the economic factor in the comparison was all in favor of the

industrial barons of today. Their armies, opulence and power were of a

magnitude that would have caused the robber barons of the Rhine to

expire with envy.

*III*

With these brief interruptions, Cornelia pursued the even tenor of the

story whose narration was the seal and token of her friendship. What

moved her to tell it to Janet was not the idea of self-defence, or the

hope of softening the shock a friend might receive on learning the

details from a hostile critic. Quite the contrary. She was

inordinately proud of her intimate connection with a man as famous as

Percival Houghton; and she was altogether anxious that her friends

should know of this connection in the form in which she wished it to be

known and hoped to make it remembered.

Two years had passed, she told Janet, since Percival Houghton came to

the United States. He was a young Englishman, well connected, who had

gained an immense vogue as an illustrator. He was said to have

"isolated" several rare types of French and English female beauty, and

fabulous sums had been paid for his portrait studies in pastel. His

press agent having in advance widely advertised the artist's announced

purpose of adding the American girl to his pictorial conquests, his

arrival was extremely good copy for the newspapers.

Hutchins Burley, with an eye to the _Evening Chronicle's_ large feminine

clientele, did not let the opportunity slip by. He assigned Cornelia,

then attached to his paper, to interview the ambitious Englishman. In

her own words, "she went, she saw, she conquered."

After the flattering notice in the _Chronicle_, Percival Houghton sought

her out and attended her devotedly. Cornelia dwelt on the warm

friendship that sprang up between them and on her own quick subjection

to his great personal charm.

"He was a wonderful man, Araminta. He had a great leonine head with

wild flowing locks; there was fire in his eye and music in his voice;

and he had that imperious way with him that opens a path straight to a

woman's heart."

The week before his departure, he made an avowal of his passion. And

she was in a paradise of ecstasy until the next day, when he sent her by

mail a piece of information he had not had the courage to give her in

person. He confessed to a wife and two children living in England. In a

moment of impetuous boyish idealism--like Shelley's, he said--he had

married a girl who was intellectually (though not financially) his

inferior. Worst of all, she shared none of his tastes or aspirations.

He assured Cornelia that every day of his married existence had been a

lifetime of exquisite torture.

This confession, Janet heard, was the prelude to many hours of bitter

torment. Cornelia said that the one good outcome of this evil period

was that she began to think of the realities of life for the first time.

She was led to question the moral conventions which she had always taken

for granted and which, she now saw, encrusted the conduct of most of the

people around her. Under the tutelage of Percival Houghton, who

proclaimed himself a free thinker, as well as a free lover, she became

alive to the absurdity of regarding the conventions of an age as

immutable laws for all time.

Naturally, at this time, her logic was concentrated on the convention of

marriage.

Percival read out many passages from the great writers of

today--continued Cornelia--from Galsworthy, H. G. Wells, Havelock Ellis

and Gilbert Cannan; and these passages exposed the unalterable belief of

the writers that marriage, in its existing form, was wrong, conclusively

and crushingly wrong.

Wrong, she hastened to explain, in so far as it was a contract that was

held to be binding even after the death of the love on which the

contract was based.

She developed the logic of the situation at some length in arguments

with which Janet was greatly impressed.

"You own mother and father hate each other, Janet," she pointed out.

"The result is the cat-and-dog, bite-one-another's-head-off relationship

that passes for family life in your home. Do you see?";

Janet saw, or thought she saw. Anything that could plausibly be shown

to be responsible for family life among the Barrs was sure to receive

her cordial detestation. Cornelia, certain of her auditor's sympathy,

continued her story. Percival Houghton's solution of the difficulty

caused by his rash attachment was a highly quixotic one. He proposed

that Cornelia accompany him to England, so that they might together lay

the facts before his wife and beg her to sue for a divorce after he had

furnished her with funds and with technical grounds for the suit. They

were to be open and aboveboard in urging the right of true lovers to be

free from all the shackles of law and tradition. His wife was not

ungenerous, he declared. Moreover, she had never really loved him; and

he persuaded himself and Cornelia that, face to face with an

overwhelming passion, she would readily consent to an act that was to

liberate three lives.

This, he insisted was the only honorable course to pursue. It had the

precedent of such great names as Ruskin and Millais. Besides it was the

only course that would not seriously affect his career or completely cut

him off from his children.

What could Cornelia do but yield? He engaged passage to England for

two, and--she emphasized this detail again and again--though they

occupied the same stateroom, their union was a union of two souls and

nothing more.

Without giving Janet time to grasp the logic of this behavior or of its

explanation, she continued:

"Percival said it behooved us to show that free love could rise above

the lustful impulses of the flesh. We were to come to each other clean,

so as not to do the cause of free love an injury."

England had been the Paradise of her hopes, but it proved their

sepulchre. Scarcely had they docked in the Mersey when reporters

representing news associations accosted them for information about their

"elopement." The news had been cabled from New York, where they were

featured as "elective affinities." In London, too, they found

themselves headliners in the yellow journals. Needless to say, the most

extreme construction was put on their journey together. And the

escapade of "affinity Houghton" became an international sensation.

"How did it leak out, Cornelia?" exclaimed Janet. "Had you told anyone

you were going together?

"Not a soul. But my connection with a newspaper was fatal. A woman

journalist is subject to more gossip than an actress. Every time she's

seen with a new man, she's reported to have ensnared a new lover."

As a result of this glaring notoriety, Cornelia went on, Houghton's

manner toward her underwent a radical change. He remained kind and

courteous, but his manner grew cool. He urged one pretext after another

for postponing what was to have been a historic interview with his wife.

In London he took her to a hotel and left her there alone.

Two days later she received a letter from him, in which he said that his

wife was unalterably resolved to contest a divorce on any ground, and

that the newspaper gossip had almost irretrievably injured his

prospects. He added that he was as devoted to her as ever. He was, in

fact, broken-hearted, but his clear duty to his family, his children and

his career demanded that they should never meet again.

In spite of this note she made several attempts to see him once more.

She confessed to Janet that she had been ready to accept any terms he

might make, if only he agreed not to part from her forever. It was for

love and not for marriage that she had sacrificed herself. It was not

marriage but love that she demanded. But he sustained his pitilessly

inflexible attitude. Almost prostrated by the notoriety which the

experience had thrust upon her, she made a heart-broken return to the

United States.

"I landed in New York without hope, without health, and without a home,"

said Cornelia, dramatically. "But I had vindicated my belief that love

should be free."

To forestall a social boycott, she had proudly decided to shun all her

former friends. To this end she rented a flat in the Lorillard

tenements. And here she had remained in eclipse, and in receipt of a

small allowance from a brother who was a leading politician in a Western

State.

Latterly, old friends of hers, members of the fellowship of Outlaws, had

drifted into her rooms in Kips Bay; and so she had been

dragged--unwillingly, she alleged--from her retirement.

She asserted that she had no ill-will for Percival Houghton, who would

always be the one man in the world for her. After all, he had sold his

birthright for a marriage of convenience, and he might well feel that he

ought to stick to his bargain, cost what it might. She was persuaded

that his coldness to her in London was merely an iron vizor clamped upon

his real feelings by the ruthless institution of matrimony. She also

appeared to derive some comfort from the thought that though he was "a

soul pirate," though he had "stolen her soul," his own had been damned

in the process.

"Yet I shall always love him," she said, with tragic resignation. "I

shall never love anyone else. And I shall never marry. I've suffered

enough from marriage as it is."

The ferryboat docked at the Lackawanna Station. Janet, who had been lost

in a reverie, mechanically followed her companion's suggestion that they

take the same boat back. Cornelia's story--the vivid story of one of

the principals--had a very different coloring from the account of the

"affinity Houghton" scandal which had filled the front pages of the

evening newspapers two years ago. Janet could still recollect the

headlines, the pictures, and the expansive gossip; also the strange

mixture of curiosity and pious disgust with which she had followed the

reports.

Could the horrified Janet Barr of that dimly remembered time be the same

girl who was now sitting in the closest intimacy beside the leading

female in the case?

On the return across the river, Janet had several questions on the tip

of her tongue, but Cornelia's manner seemed to discourage inquiries of a

too personal kind. However, Janet did get in:

"What was Percival Houghton's excuse for refusing to see you once more?"

"He said we could meet only in secret; but that any continuation of the

secrecy was more than he could endure."

"Do you think that excuse rings true?"

"Why not? I suppose I should say it rings falsely true, as faith

unfaithful always does."

"I think it was the evasion of a coward."

"Perhaps. But, Araminta, _all_ men are cowards, moral cowards, I mean.

They face bullets sublimely, but they shiver and shake before an

argument. They gayly lose their lives for a hunting trophy or a

football triumph, but they can't bear to lose their dinners for a

belief."

Janet, thinking of her father, was inclined to agree with this view.

"Is that why men let women keep up the marriage system?"

"My dear, it isn't the women who keep up the marriage system. It's the

men! Women just fall into a system that's ready made for them. Most

women are all body and no soul. Give them the choice between marriage,

which provides for the body while starving the soul, and some other

condition which provides for the soul while starving the body, and of

course they'll choose marriage. They prefer to hold a man by his lusts

rather than by his spiritual impulses. But the men keep the system up,

my dear. Because of the children they want."

"But, Cornelia, I thought it was the women who wanted children!"

"So we do. We want them because life demands them through us; for are

we not the mothers of the race? But that is not the men's reason. It

isn't the race that is calling through them for immortality. Heavens

no! It's their boundless male egotism. And since they know that they

can't live forever in their own selfish little bodies, they hope to get

a new lease of life in the bodies of their sons. That is why they have

built up an institution in which they can keep their women wedlocked and

can make sure that their children are their own."

"But perhaps marriage is necessary for the children, Cornelia. They are

the better off for it, at least when they are very young."

"Are you so sure? Remember, loveless marriages seldom result in healthy

offspring. Look at Percival Houghton's two children. One is a girl

with hip disease, the other is a feeble-minded, flabby anaemic boy. Yet

the parents are both physically sound. Do you think _I_ would have had

such children?"

Her vehemence was over-awing, almost over-bearing.

"I'm not sure I can judge from one case, Cornelia," said Janet, her firm

voice and clear distinct utterance betraying a will of her own. "But

I'm sure that people who marry and find that they are mistaken in each

other, ought to be able to rectify the mistake. It's horrible to think

that they can't."

"Ah! Now you've come to it. If people find that they are mistaken in

their butchers or grocers, they experiment until they find the right

one. They won't go on eating bad steaks forever because luck or

inexperience landed them in a poor shop at the first try. But do they

take as much trouble to get the right husband or wife as they do to get

the right mutton chop? They don't. Whatever partner luck or

inexperience hands them at the altar, they put up with for the rest of

their lives."

"I wonder why we don't experiment in marriage as in all other matters?"

asked Janet thoughtfully.

"My dear, it's been proposed often enough. By men, of course. You are

too young to remember the furor that followed when George Meredith

proposed trial marriages. It's an easy thing for the men to propose,

since it's the women who must risk the beginning. The question is, who

is to begin? The plain women daren't, because the risk is too great;

and the fascinating women needn't, because they get what they want

anyway, within the law or beyond it. Now if ever girls like you,

Araminta, on whom the eye rests with delight, began to experiment--"

"What then?"

"Oh, I've no right to urge my views on individuals. Besides, you are far

too young and inexperienced, my dear, to be one of the first. Though

I'm sure nothing would suit men like Claude Fontaine better."

"There, Cornelia, you're making innuendos about Mr. Fontaine again,"

said Janet. "It isn't fair. If you mean to take me into your

confidence at all, you might do it all the way through."

"Not another word will you get out of me now, Araminta," replied

Cornelia, with one of the queer laughs she gave whenever she blocked

people's wishes.

However, fearing to weaken the hold she had upon Janet, she added:

"I'm too famished to talk. Here we are, landing at last. Come, we'll

get a nice lunch. I know you're dying to talk about the irresistible

Claude. I promise to tell you Lothario's whole history over our cups of

tea."

Janet begged to be taken to the Y.W.C.A. Cafeteria, whose good food,

self-service and picturesque quarters she had heard Cornelia extol.

When they reached the restaurant, they saw a very long line of waiting

customers.

"This will never do," said Cornelia, disgustedly. And, quite unwilling

to sacrifice comfort in the cause of self-service, she dragged the

reluctant Janet to a French pastry restaurant on Fifth Avenue.

"I _do_ like a waiter and a table cloth," said Cornelia, as she

contentedly resigned herself to these dubious luxuries. "And I _don't_

like to scramble for my napkin and my glass of ice water."

"What a strange thing for you to say," said Janet, puzzled. "It sounds

as though, in spite of your advanced views, you might at heart be

thoroughly in love with conventional ways."

"Don't put such ideas into your head, silly!" said Cornelia, giving a

high-pitched, self-conscious, stagy laugh, with which she shut off

further personal questions.

During lunch, Cornelia contrived to say curiously little about Claude

Fontaine, Janet learning hardly anything she did not already know.

Claude was heir to the great Fontaine jewelry establishment. He was a

social swell. He was very handsome. And he was trying equally hard to

dabble in modern paintings and not to dabble in modern amours.

His success in both attempts was dubious, according to Cornelia.

Particularly in the matter of the amours. He was, of course, the

greatest catch of his day. In his own circle, every mother had marked

him for her daughter. And it was to escape the conspiracies of

matchmakers that he had taken up with the Outlaws in the model

tenements. In their unconventional atmosphere, he had hoped to move and

breathe more freely. But if every girl in his own set was willing to

become his wife, every girl in the Lorillard tenements seemed willing to

become his mistress.

It appeared that Mazie Ross had been particularly shameless in setting

herself to catch Claude. Somehow or other, the conversation pivoted

chiefly on Mazie, her selfishness, her neglect of her fair share of the

work in flat number fifteen, and her willingness to sell herself. This

last was the fault which Cornelia proposed to take most exception to.

"I wish I could get rid of her," she said. "Then you could come and

live with me, Araminta. It would be like exchanging a room that smelled

of last night's stale flowers for a garden perfumed by fresh roses."

*CHAPTER EIGHT*

*I*

No sooner were they back in their Lorillard tenement, than Robert Lloyd

came in.

"Well, Cato, where did you drop from?" said Cornelia, who was lazily

tidying up the rooms while Janet was doing the breakfast dishes.

"From the Harlem Gorilla in the flat next door."

"Really! And what did _he_ have to say?"

"Not much. He isn't a talker like me. He's a doer. He tried to

explain a few tricks in gymnastics to me. But every second sentence or

so the word 'Cornelia' crept into the explanation. It was decidedly

confusing."

"Pray what has the word 'Cornelia' to do with the subject of

gymnastics?" asked the owner of the name.

"Ah, what! I asked the Gorilla that question myself. But he simply

repeated the name adoringly and looked all sorts of unutterable things.

Beware, Cornelia. He thinks the sun rises in one of your eyes and sets

in the other. I believe he is planning to carry you off by main force to

his cave, his gymnasium cave."

"A lot he is! He couldn't carry off a buttercup against its wishes.

Really, Araminta, he's the gentlest and shyest 'wild man' you ever laid

eyes on. How he ever came to take Gorilla for a nickname, I can't

imagine."

"Nor I," said Robert. "But don't forget that he has learnt the art of

concentrating his enormous strength on one or two crucial points.

Certainly he treated Hutchins Burley to a good exhibition of his

mastery, didn't he? For all that, he's a very singularly gentle sort of

Hercules. If I had to provide one for you, Cornelia, I'd get a much

more ferocious specimen, if only to pay you out for kiting away with

Janet, after promising me you'd both stay in. I've been waiting for you

since noon."

"Poor Cato, I'm terribly sorry. In the excitement of having Janet here,

I clean forgot you were coming. Waiting since noon, were you, poor boy!

There's devotion for you, Araminta. Never mind, Rob. Here she is, now.

And all's well that ends well, I hope."

"I thought you'd like company on your way home, Janet," said Robert to

her directly.

"Thanks very much," said Janet, not wishing to lose Robert and yet not

caring to say that Claude had promised to call for her, if he could

possibly get away from business. Before she could say more, Cornelia

interposed. She had not expected Robert to wait and had not quite

swallowed her chagrin over this surprise.

"How do you happen to be off duty, Rob?" she asked. "Does the _Evening

Chronicle_ stop work for you on Saturdays?"

"No. I've stopped work for the _Evening Chronicle_ on Saturdays and all

other days."

"What! Don't tell me Hutchins has discharged you!"

Cornelia gave up the last pretense of working, and sank aghast into an

armchair.

"I didn't give him a chance. I discharged myself."

"If he had--" she began, setting her teeth vindictively.

"Exactly. In his sober moments, Cornelia, you are apparently the only

mortal soul he stands in some fear of. It was only because of a sneaking

affection he has for you that he hesitated to fire me."

"Well, why throw a good bargain away?"

"A nice position it would have left me in. That of an understrapper for

Burley to play cat and mouse with. Not if I know it! Burley likes to

torture the people in his power as much as you do, the only difference

being that his weapon is coarse brutality while yours is insidious

charm."

"Your comparisons, Cato, have the merit of being as unambiguous as they

are rude. I trust you gave Hutchins Burley the benefit of a few of

them."

"Oh, no, I always forgive my enemies. Nothing enrages them more. I

left Hutchins stunned. But I've no doubt he recovered in time to

appoint the successor that I sent him."

"That you sent him?"

"Yes. You don't know him, but Janet does. Janet, do you remember the

tall, thin, aristocratic chap who was always mysteriously turning up and

who stopped Burley at the tent?"

"Of course I do. He wore a quaint stand-up collar with two points

sticking into his neck. It was he who warned Claude about the raid."

"Oh, did he? Well, when I was on my way up the stairs here at noon, he

suddenly appeared, like a ghost stepping out of the stone wall. It gave

me quite a start. I asked him where he was bound for. 'Nowhere in

particular,' was his answer."

Robert had got to talking with the mysterious one, who confessed that he

had just rented a flat in the model tenements. On Robert's alluding to

the severance of his connection with the _Evening Chronicle_, his new

acquaintance had asked permission to apply for the vacant place. He

claimed to have an ear for news and remarked casually that information

was always drifting his way.

"As if I had any permission to give!" continued Robert. "I warned him

what he'd be up against in the person of Hutchins Burley, and bade him

Godspeed."

"He's either a detective or the Prince of Zenda in disguise," said

Janet. "Which do you think, Robert?"

"From the speed and completeness with which he obliterates himself, I

should favor the detective theory. On the other hand, there's his

get-up! That melancholy, drooping mustache, that semi-clerical collar,

and that comical tip-tilted chin! The fellow's simply unforgettable.

He must be a prince incognito."

"Yes, we'll have him a prince!" exclaimed Janet, who, at twenty-four,

had a normal craving for romantic illusion. "But I should like him in

any part."

"A prince! Nonsense, children!" interjected Cornelia, in her most

languid cadences. "He's probably a burglar."

"A burglar!"

"Certainly not a detective. Detectives don't obliterate themselves.

They don't know how to. And they never look like princes in disguise.

They're not clever enough. All the detectives I ever saw looked like

butchers on a strike. The only man, rich, skillful and bold enough to

take his fellow man at a right royal disadvantage is a first-class

burglar. A Raffles, for instance, might be a prince 'incognito.'"

Cornelia's wits could work brilliantly under the stimulus of a new

friend like Janet.

The door had opened while she was speaking.

"Here's a prince, Araminta!" she continued, in the same musical vein.

"Not incognito, either, to judge by his handsome motor coat."

Claude Fontaine came in, and the sheer sweep of his personal

attractiveness made Cornelia's slightly ironic phrasing sound quite

empty. Janet thought that many a titular prince might be glad to

exchange his coat of arms for Claude's conquering air.

*II*

Her heart beat faster for more reasons than this. How was she to let

Robert down gracefully and without hurting his feelings, after having

more than half accepted his offer to accompany her home?

As if in total ignorance of her dilemma, Cornelia, who had begun

sketching a design for a new dress, intoned:

"Admirers never come singly. Choose your escort, my dear. Which is it

to be? Cato and the subway or Lothario and a limousine?"

They all dissembled very poorly.

Claude, who had not expected rivalry, looked displeased; Robert, though

he had already made up his mind to withdraw, felt uneasy; and Janet

stood up between the two young men, embarrassed and confused.

Cornelia alone seemed wholly unmoved. She went on sketching

imperturbably. But Robert was quite certain that she was not

unconscious of the tableau. Janet broke the painful silence.

"Let's all three go together," she said, with one of her quick graceful

gestures, half conciliatory, half pleading in its effect.

"Certainly, if Robert would like to come," said Claude, politely, but

without enthusiasm.

Robert declined promptly. He explained that he had really been free

only for the morning, and that, as long as Claude was to see Janet home,

he had better utilize the late afternoon to hunt up another position.

There were newspaper offices at which he ought to call. Before supper,

he had a speech to rehearse. Perhaps Cornelia would be good enough to

let him say it over to her.

"What kind of a speech am I letting myself in for?" asked Cornelia, half

flattered, half nettled.

"Wait till you hear it."

"A sermon, I'll be bound," chanted this languid lady.

Yet, not at all languidly, she put her sketch aside and rose, adding:

"A sermon from Cato is as sweet as a _billet-doux_ from any other man.

Come, Araminta, let's show these men how quickly we can get ready."

They went into Cornelia's bedroom, leaving the two men alone. Claude

said:

"What's this about hunting up a new position?"

Robert recounted his farewell interview with Hutchins Burley.

"You're well rid of him," said Claude. "What do you think the swine

called me at the ball? A diamond smuggler. In front of everybody, mind

you!"

He paced the room indignantly.

"I tell you, Rob, if these were the good old days of duelling, I'd have

run his fat carcass through with a rapier half a dozen times before

this. And done it with relish, too. Nowadays, worse luck, it isn't

even good form to give him a thrashing, though Heaven knows he's the

sort of brute that understands no argument but a blow."

"Blows would only sharpen his wits against you, Claude. Curs bite, as

bees sting, by force of nature. The only thing to do is to get out of

their way."

"I'm not in the habit of getting out of any man's way," said Claude,

haughtily. "However, don't let's talk about the beast. I'm extremely

sorry you're out of a job. Tell you what, Rob. Come up to my office on

Monday, and we'll talk the situation over and see what can be done.

You'll find me in the galleries on the top floor."

"Thanks, Claude, but Monday is impossible," said Robert, glad of the

excuse, for he scented patronage in his friend's manner. "I'm giving a

talk on 'Unemployment under the National Guild System' before the Guild

Study Club. When I arranged to speak on Unemployment I had no idea I

should do so as an experienced hand."

Possibly Claude was dimly conscious of his friend's sensitiveness. At

all events, he said:

"Well, come on your first free day. I'm always there afternoons. You

_must_ come, if only to see my two new Cezannes. I've just induced

father to buy them. By the way, old chap, what on earth are National

Guilds?"

The return of the ladies cut off a reply. Janet's natural grace

redeemed the hang of a not too well-tailored suit. Cornelia was all

aglow over a mandarin coat she had put on. It was a wonderful dark

green silk with dull gold embroidery. Her clothes had a remarkable

effect of clinging to her contours. "Look at me," her body seemed to

call out through its vestments, "did you ever see anything so

ravishing?"

Janet walked over to Robert's side and sought forgiveness without asking

for it. And he forgave her without saying so. Her soft, flexible,

thrilling voice disturbed him sorely, and he wondered whether its

sustained riches were as illusory as he judged the mysterious depths of

her gray eyes to be.

Meanwhile, Claude was telling Cornelia in all sincerity that she had

never looked more enchanting.

"Flatterer!" she said. "To how many girls have you said that today?"

"Facts don't flatter, Cornelia. They simply cry out the truth."

"Lothario, it's all a matter of the science of pinning and the art of

dressing. Or rather, of _not_ dressing."

For the hundredth time, she assured Claude and Robert that she never

wore corsets or underwear, and didn't believe in these accoutrements.

"What, nothing?" exclaimed Claude, perhaps to see Janet blush.

"We are an art-hating people with ugly ideas," continued Cornelia,

unheeding his interruption, "and so we grow ugly, unsightly bodies.

That is why modern fashionable dressmaking has but one aim: to conceal

deformities. But dresses that conceal women's bad points are sure to

conceal their good points, too. A tragic loss! Janet is young and

charming; she can stand this loss. I'm on the wrong side of thirty; I

can't."

"Are you poking fun at my Brooklyn clothes again?" asked Janet. "If you

go on like this, I shall have to ferret out all the secrets of your art,

in pure self defence."

"We must all take a hand in educating you," said Cornelia, grandly. "My

part will be to make you see life as a world of beautiful lines,

rhythms, and colors."

"What will mine be?" asked Claude.

"Yours? To make her see life as a vale of Cashmere--all roses and

wine."

"And Rob's?"

"Rob will make her see it as a vale of tears--all sermons and social

problems. He'll be a necessary corrective to you."

"And to you, too," said Robert, quickly, amidst a general laugh.

Janet was now ready to go. As she and Claude left, Cornelia kissed her

tenderly and said:

"Remember, if anything serious happens at home, _I_ want you, Araminta."

*III*

Claude instructed his chauffeur to drive across Manhattan Bridge through

Prospect Park and along the Coney Island Road until the signal should be

given to turn back to Janet's home in the Park Slope section. Then he

took his seat in the closed car beside his companion.

It was a warm spring day, and an agreeable wind from the bay blew upon

them through the open windows as they crossed the East River. The

breeze, the river, and the motion joined to chase from Janet's mind the

shadow of the scene that awaited her at home.

Besides, there was the god at her side. Nearness did not rob him of his

divinity, it did not make him grow commonplace. And although some of

the glamor of his strangeness wore away, she liked him all the better

for being a human god and for having human weaknesses that caused his

diviner side to seem all the more real. Janet never gushed, and even

her most fervent adorations were shot through with a cool streak of

matter-of-fact perception.

Claude was very happy, too. Philandering had few new sweets to offer

him. Yet Janet was a novelty in every way. What was unique in her was

her disinterestedness, a quality he did not consciously credit her with,

however, since he did not believe that any woman possessed it. All the

young ladies he had ever known had either struck attitudes at his social

position or groveled more or less openly before his wealth. According

to his view of women, their one aim in life was to get money out of him;

by marriage if possible, by fouler means if not.

But Janet was different.

She might have fawned upon him, or thrown herself unblushingly at his

head, or used a frigid hauteur to emphasize the point that her station

in life was better than appearances indicated. The girls he knew

invariably pursued one of these courses. But Janet didn't. Her whole

bearing permeated the atmosphere with a suggestion that Claude was a

very wonderful being, dashing, handsome, divine. A most agreeable

suggestion! But, since it takes a goddess to detect a god, it was clear

that she was quite a wonderful being, too. And what is a matter of

divinity among the gods on Olympus. It is like a title among peers of

the realm.

It was her simple, natural, unaffected behavior, in short, that kept his

fancy intrigued. Without knowing it, his suspicion of women was almost

completely disarmed.

Cornelia's parting words to Janet had given him some concern.

"You're not thinking of going to live with Cornelia?" he said.

"I may soon be glad of the chance."

"Why?"

"Because my mother threatens to put me out of her house."

"But what for?" he said, looking at her in amazement.

"I don't look like an incorrigible, do I?" she said smiling. "But my

mother thinks me one for associating with people like you."

"With people like me?"

"Well, like you and the other model tenementers."

"But I'm _not_ like them," he said, half amused, half annoyed.

"No? Do you know what I've noticed? All the people in the model

tenements say they are 'not like them.' Cornelia says so, Robert says

so, and now you say so. Each one thinks _he_ is different, unique."

"Well, I'm sure that _you_ are," he said, rather seriously. He added,

lightly. "That's why it would be fatal if you went to live there. Do

try to patch it up with your mother, Janet, and give up this plan of

Cornelia's."

"Patching it up with my mother means complete submission. Her motto is,

'bend or break.' And I've bent long enough."

She tried briefly to give him an idea of her mother's domestic tyranny

and of her own rebellion against it.

"You don't know what it is to live in my mother's house," she said.

"I've heard what it is to live in Cornelia's house," he retorted. "She

casts a spell over young girls before they know her well. But she is

selfish and moody. Her friendships always end in violent quarrels. She

is now on the verge of a break with Mazie Ross."

"She may have very good grounds for the break."

"Oh, she's never at a loss for grounds. That isn't the point."

"What _is_ the point?"

"The atmosphere of the Lorillard tenements. It isn't made for you to

breathe in. Have you any idea what the people there are like?

Gangsters, anarchists and fake artists or writers, with a very small

sprinkling of well-meaning idealists, most of whom are cracked on social

questions. The men are all out of business, the women all out of

marriage. On the loose, every one of them, either in their actions, or

in their beliefs."

"You mean they don't believe in marriage? Well, after all I've seen of

family life, I don't believe in marriage either."

This was a confession which, by way of bait, many another girl had made

to him.

"That's the sort of thing for a girl like Mazie to say," he said coldly,

"but not for a girl like you."

Concern for himself had rapidly taken the place of concern for her.

"Mazie's way doesn't impress me any more than the way of all wives," she

said, with a delightful gesture of candor. "I think she is more of a

slave to men than most married women are. I want to be mistress of

myself."

His doubts were allayed again. The spring sunshine and Janet's subtle

charm were too strong a team for suspicion to hold out against. As the

car sped on through Prospect Park, a delicious breeze, laden with the

perfume of flowers and the rising sap of trees, cooled their faces, and

fanned their senses warm.

"You are a dear little theorizer," he said in a tender vibrating tone.

"But theories have no interest for me now. I'm too happy to think about

them. I want to think only about you."

"Impossible. You don't know enough about me. We've only just met."

"Absurd," he said, taking hold of her hands. "We met when the wood

nymphs first danced to the pipes of Pan, when the starlight first threw

its enchantment on youth, when lovers first threaded their way over wild

hills and woodlands by the rays of the crescent moon. We have known

each other for ages."

"As long as that? Dear me! What an experienced person I must be."

Had her acknowledged objection to marriage affected him, after all?

"All experiences are nothing to this experience," he said, putting his

arms around her and trying to kiss her.

She resisted him with a quick, firm movement. All he could do was to

seize her hands and give them the rapturous embraces intended for her

lips.

"Claude!" she called out, more in shyness than reproach.

"But I love you!" he cried, retaining her hands by main force.

"Since yesterday?"

"Yesterday! A million years ago. The moment in which I felt I loved

you, Janet, was a world-without-end moment. That is love's way."

"Don't profane the word love," she said, her voice rich and thrilling.

"You can't love a girl you don't know."

"Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?" he said, quoting the

line reproachfully, and releasing her hands as he did so.

"Do you believe that love always happens at first sight? What about the

feeling that takes hold of us as we slowly learn to know another's

splendid character? The feeling of tenderness and adoration. Isn't

that love, too?"

"No, a thousand times, no! Call it friendship, comradeship, esteem, if

you like. Call it glorified toleration. But don't call it love. Love

doesn't come like that. It comes like the swift lightning that embraces

a cloud."

"How I should love to love like that!" she exclaimed, with a mischievous

imitation of rhapsody.

"Then you don't love me?" he demanded.

She refused to admit that she did. He pressed her for an answer.

"Don't, Claude," she said at last, disturbed. "I must keep my wits

about me today, or I shall be as putty in my mother's hands."

He was bitterly disappointed. Her use of his name was some solace,

however; for, as her soft, flexible tones prolonged it, the sound was

music to his ears.

"Is that why you won't let me kiss you?" he pursued hopefully.

"No. I'm not used to it yet," she said, quite simply.

"Not used to it! You mean you haven't been kissed by men before?"

"Nothing so silly. I haven't been kissed by you before."

"Ah, I might have known the reason wasn't inexperience," he said, with

incipient jealousy. "Then why balk at me?" he went on, seizing her

hands again.

"As I said," she replied, calmly matter-of-fact. "I haven't had time to

think of it. At least, not much nor for long," she added impishly. "I

must first see whether I can get used to the idea."

"Indeed! But getting used to the idea won't get you used to the thing

itself. Only practice makes perfect."

"A rehearsal in dumb show is not to be despised," was her response.

And so they bantered on and made pretty speeches, while Claude's car

bucked the wind until they turned into President Street and stopped at

the corner of her own block.

As Janet got out, she was hard put to it to conceal her sense of loss.

At parting, all her matter-of-factness deserted her; for a few seconds

she felt like a prisoner half awakened from an idyllic dream.

The car drove away with Claude less triumphant yet more satisfied than

he had ever felt towards a charming girl before. He was profoundly

stirred by the magic of Janet's genuineness, and her rich, clarinet

tones lingered disturbingly in his mind.

*CHAPTER NINE*

*I*

Thoughts of home had flitted intermittently through Janet's mind during

the afternoon's ride. But her faculty for living securely in the

present had been strong enough to send the omens flying as fast as they

came. A domestic crisis now confronted her, however, and she knew it

could not be evaded. As she crossed the threshold, there was a sudden

bristling of her nerves, a parching and aching of her throat, and a

sense of utter misery.

From Laura, the maid, she learned that her mother had been ill all day,

and had kept to her bed. As this was Mrs. Barr's invariable practice

when any member of the family displeased her, Janet was not surprised.

She crept quietly upstairs to her room at the top of the house. On the

second floor she passed her sister's room. Through the open door Janet

could look into a mirror which reflected an image of Emily, dressing for

the evening. She called to her sister with an assumed cheeriness.

Emily answered stiffly and without stirring an inch.

Janet, catching the unfriendly glance from the mirror, continued on her

way, hot indignation kindling her blood. She could invent excuses for

her mother's hostility, unreasonable as she considered it, but Emily's

censorious manner was altogether intolerable.

In her own room she changed her costume to a simple black skirt and a

plain white blouse. Claude and Kips Bay receded to another world while

she nerved herself for the coming ordeal.

In about half an hour, the maid came up with a message that Mr. Barr

wished to see Janet in the back parlor. She promptly went downstairs

and discovered her father pacing the floor in agitation. It was hard to

believe that this tall, imposing man was a moral weakling or that his

eagle's bearing concealed a pigeon's heart.

"Jenny," he said, on the thinnest fringe of reproach, "thank Heaven

you're back!"

The mere sight of his favorite daughter cooled his phantom anger. All

he wanted now was to see his wife placated at any price. For he, poor

man, always became the scapegoat, no matter who the criminal was.

"How could you give us such a fright, Jenny?" he continued, referring to

her absence.

"Really, father, I can't send you hourly bulletins of my whereabouts,

can I? It's not my fault that I've outgrown childhood. It's a law of

nature."

"You don't consider your mother," he said, plaintively. "You know how it

upsets her to be disobeyed."

"I'm sorry, father. But mother will have to get reconciled to the facts

of biology. When the young of animals grow up, instinct makes them

follow their own bent, even at the cost of disobliging their parents."

Janet felt rather proud and a little surprised at hearing herself talk

in this bold, scientific style. She wished she could repeat it to her

mother, but secretly doubted her ability.

"That may be," said Mr. Barr, on whom her biological views were

completely thrown away. "But remember that she has been sick all day,

sick with worry over your escapade!"

"Nonsense," replied Janet, unmoved. "My escapade had nothing to do with

it. Her bad temper has made her ill. It always does, and nobody knows

better than she how useful the weapon is. When everything else fails,

she gets sick with rage, and takes to her bed until she gets her own way

to the last dot. We cringe and cower before her sham illnesses--"

"Janet! You mustn't speak of your mother like that. She _is_ ill. She

lay awake the whole night and didn't touch a morsel of food all day."

"No doubt she enjoyed tormenting herself and blaming the result on me.

But I don't believe that my absence was really a source of worry to

anyone."

"Janet, I stayed up until three o'clock for you. And that was after

leaving the bank late and stopping at the Montague Library to get the

books you wanted."

"Of course, you did, you foolish old dear," said Janet, in an access of

remorse.

She put her arms affectionately round his neck. It was not easy to get

over her childhood idolatry of him.

"Kindness is a bad habit of yours, papa," she said. "You take to good

deeds as some men take to gambling or to drink."

He smiled and patted her cheek tenderly. Her remark was not far from

the truth. His morbid (and never wholly gratified) passion for approval

made him intemperately anxious to please, and caused his good nature to

be freely exploited by unscrupulous people, who repaid him with nothing

but their contempt.

"That's like my own little Jenny. Now go up to Emily's room and make

your peace with mother."

"Is that in my power?" said Janet, flaring up again and disengaging her

arms from him.

Mr. Barr was torn between fear of his wife and affection for his

daughter.

"Simply keep quiet and don't answer her back when she speaks to you," he

urged pacifically. "After all, she's your mother, she has a right to

criticize you."

"I refuse to acknowledge the right."

"Now, don't be obstinate, girlie. She can't help lecturing people.

It's a habit she acquired in her missionary society. Doesn't she lecture

me? If I submit, surely you can."

"I'm neither a heathen nor a husband."

"There now," he said, pleading with her. "Don't spoil everything by

standing on your pride. What will you gain by defying her? Nothing!

Then why do so? I tell you, Jenny, your mother may be a little hasty,

but she's a very clever, strong-minded woman. In the long run, she is

always in the right."

"How can you cringe to her even when her back is turned," cried Janet,

revolted. "You know the truth as well as I do. She has terrorized all

of us as cruelly as ever her Puritan ancestors terrorized Roger Williams

and Anne Hutchinson."

"Now, that shows how unfair you are," said Mr. Barr, eagerly, in a

vibrant voice, as rich as Janet's own. "Only two nights ago, your

mother was reading to me from John Fiske's colonial history. She came

across this very case you mention, the case of Anne Hutchinson. And I

distinctly recall that she condemned the persecution severely."

Disdaining to reply, Janet walked away from his side. In that moment,

she hated him. It was incredible that he could be such a willing,

subservient dupe.

She looked hostilely at his magnificent exterior. He had also inherited

a lively wit and considerable mental dexterity. Had he possessed any

force of character he might have been a great financier or statesman

instead of a petty manager of a small branch bank. And Mrs. Barr's

temper might have been kept within bounds, and the Barrs might have

enjoyed a happy home, instead of becoming a phantom replica of a bigoted

Boston family in the high and palmy days of Cotton Mather.

He misinterpreted her silence.

"You need merely say that you are sorry," he urged, "and that you'll

never stay out again without her approval. That will patch up

everything."

"Father," she cried, exploding. "I can't say that. Because I simply

don't mean it. From now on, I'm going to have my own way about some

things, even if I have to leave the family. Mother may grind you to the

very dust. Marriage seems to give her that right, and you seem to enjoy

the process. But she shan't do so to me."

"Good Lord, what will happen next?" exclaimed the unhappy man, appalled

at the collapse of his plan of conciliation. "The house has been like a

funeral all day. Would to Heaven _I_ were the corpse."

But his daughter did not hear this pathetic wish, for she was already on

her way upstairs.

*II*

In Emily's bedroom above the parlor, Mrs. Barr was reclining in an

invalid's chair. Illness had not softened the rigidity of that too, too

solid flesh. She was pale, but her pallor merely accentuated the iron

lines of her face.

Emily, more matronly than ever, hovered about her mother in unctuous

solicitude, while Laura, the maid, busied herself setting chairs and

knick-knacks wrong, in order to set them right again. Mrs. Barr

disliked to have anyone about her unoccupied.

When Janet entered, her mother greeted her coldly, and then dismissed

Laura with studied sweetness. She was actually much kinder to her

domestics than to members of the family. Servants were hard to get and

harder to keep.

"I'm sorry you have been ill," said the impenitent, politely.

"Sit down, my child. I'm getting better now, thanks in part to Doctor

Hervey."

"What did the doctor say?"

"That it was to be expected under the circumstances," interposed Emily.

"He thought it better for mother not to go to the missionary society

tonight."

This was ominous news. Janet recollected that her mother had not missed

a missionary meeting in two years.

The pause was filled with a battery of silent criticism. Usually Janet

dispersed these terrible silences with a torrent of impromptu apologies.

Today, however, she held her peace. Though every muscle in her body was

taut, she felt care-free.

Yes, at this supreme inquisitorial moment, she felt surprisingly

care-free. Except that, in response to Emily's allusion to

missionaries, an old jingle ricochetted weirdly through her mind. It

ran:

Oh, to be a cassowary,

On the plains of Timbuctoo,

Chewing up a missionary--

Skin and bone, and hymn book, too.

Outwardly, she was as impassive as a Chinese joss.

"Well, Janet?" said Mrs. Barr, outfought with one of her own weapons.

"Yes, mother?" replied Janet, demurely interrogative. She folded her

hands innocently in her lap, and looked with a show of impersonal

interest at Emily's new pumps.

"Have you nothing to tell me?"

"Not unless you wish to learn about the ball I went to yesterday. Are

you interested in that?"

Emily gave a scornful laugh.

"I'm not interested in the ball," said Mrs. Barr, "and no one knows it

better than you. What I am interested in is your attending the ball

against my express wishes."

"Mother, in the twentieth century--"

"Are the ways of God less valid in the twentieth century than in the

tenth?"

In disputes with her children, Mrs. Barr always invoked God first. This

failing, she took stronger measures.

"Why do you always make poor God responsible for your severity, mother,"

said Janet. "It is not His way you want me to follow, but your own.

Indeed, whenever you accuse me of disobeying the will of God, it is

because I have really disobeyed your will, which you identify with

God's. I wonder whether He likes it?"

"I don't propose to discuss the Deity with you. You have studied your

Bible so little that you are apparently unable to give any opinion on

the subject which is not blasphemous."

"As far as I know, the Bible does not prohibit dancing," said Janet,

shifting the defensive attack so as to bring matters to a head.

"The Bible _does_ say, however, that a child must obey its parents. I

don't wish to be harsh, Janet. I believe that you have no just ground

for accusing me of severity. I say now, as I have said before, that if

you must dance, you may go to the affairs that are given at the church."

"Thank you!" cried Janet, ironically. "But I don't like a Sunday School

atmosphere or a Sunday School man."

"I thought as much!" said Mrs. Barr, her eyes like points of steel.

"You prefer to associate with unprincipled men who, having no religion,

lead lives of pleasure and dance the lascivious dances of the time.

"Mother, I don't dance anything but thoroughly ancient and respectable

dances. I've never had a chance to learn the modern steps. I dance

very rarely, anyhow."

"Emily _never_ dances," said her mother, cuttingly.

"No, she is rather heavy and men are so lazy nowadays, and so tender

about their toes."

Some demon had made Janet spring up and stop reflectively in front of

Emily. The latter's podgy bulk became a size larger by contrast with

Janet's mobile slenderness.

"Oblige me by not arguing," said Mrs. Barr, coming to her elder

daughter's rescue. "I tell you I won't tolerate anyone in my house that

openly flouts her mother, spends whole nights with a woman of evil

reputation, and deliberately wastes the Lord's time."

In her agitation she rose halfway from her chair. But rage and lack of

food had so weakened her that she sank back limply. Emily, looking

unutterable things at Janet, implored her mother to be calm in tones

that invited her to be just the contrary.

Mrs. Barr hardly needed this spur. She sincerely believed that she was

fighting the evil one for the possession of Janet's soul. Revived by

this conviction she bravely returned to her task.

"See the condition to which you've brought me," she said, the angry

tears welling up in her eyes. "What with watching and waiting and

praying for you all night, and fretting about your safety--"

She instinctively followed a religious appeal with a sentimental one.

But her speech had so much anger mixed with the pathos, that it left

Janet cold.

"I hope you won't get upset about me again, mother," she said,

unemotionally. "I'm quite old enough to take care of myself--"

"You'd better go to your room, Janet!" exclaimed Emily, "before you kill

mother with your cruel selfishness."

"I'm not aware that I'm under orders to you, Emily, or that you've the

right to play the Pharisee because you're content to lead a stagnant,

hole-in-the-corner life. If you wanted anything you'd disobey mother

fast enough. Only you happen to _have_ no wants. And you make a virtue

of your necessity. I have plenty of wants. And you persuade mother

that my necessity is a vice."

"Be as theatrical as possible, Janet!" said Emily. "Why don't you add

that I poisoned mother's mind against you?"

"You didn't have to carry coals to Newcastle, Emily. You merely had to

fan the flame in your own sweet, sisterly way."

Mrs. Barr checked them both with an autocratic wave of her hand.

"You need not abuse Emily, or me either," she decreed, black-browed.

"There is absolutely nothing more to be said. Either you respect my

wishes about your comings and goings, or you leave my house."

"Mother, do you really propose to put me out for refusing to submit to

an arbitrary wish?"

"I should think I had fallen far short of my duty, if I did not guard my

children against sensual folly--"

"By showing them the door?"

"If you leave your home, it will be by your own choice and not by your

mother's command," said Mrs. Barr, emphatically. "This is your home.

It will remain yours so long as you keep Christian precepts. But a

mother must hold the family hearth inviolate against evil doing. I

cannot condone a wicked waste of the Lord's time simply because you

describe the practice as a wish to be free. If you don't value a good

home, you are certainly quite free to choose another."

"Why must I adopt the habits that suit your tastes and Emily's, but that

are hateful to mine?"

"My child, you are flesh of my flesh--"

"All the laws and all the prophets can't justify the narrow, friendless,

joyless, medieval life that you wish me to lead," cried Janet, in a

passion of insurgency. "When you were young you led no such life

yourself. Aunt Mary, your own sister, told me that you were the

flightiest girl in the family. Your girlhood was a perpetual round of

balls, theatres, parties and flirtations. Do I ask for a life of

pleasure like that? No. I simply want to choose my own friends, trust

to my own instincts, and follow my own bent."

This reference to her mother's youth was not a happy one. Mrs. Barr

looked back on her younger days as a period of godless frivolity for

which she had largely atoned by enduring with a contrite heart the

double affliction of a weak husband and a wilful daughter. Her duty, as

she saw it, was to keep Emily and Janet out of the primrose paths which

she herself had trodden with such levity and with such disastrous

results. Accordingly, Janet's presumptuous allusion merely stirred her

fanaticism to its iciest depths.

"You either obey me or go," she said, with pitiless brevity.

"Oh, very well," said Janet, affecting a blitheness she was far from

feeling, "I'll go."

Without another word, Mrs. Barr, weak as she was, rose and walked with a

firm step to her own room. Emily, not altogether pleased with this

climax, followed her immediately, giving a flabby imitation of her

mother's really magnificent exit.

Janet stood nonplussed for a few seconds. Then she went upstairs to the

inward refrain of:

"Chewing up a missionary

Skin and bones and hymn book, too."

Her inveterate evenness of spirit amounted almost to a failing; but now,

for the first time, she became conscious of latent impulses of a

vindictive and murderous kind.

Back in her own room, she hastily packed a suit-case with her most

necessary belongings.

*CHAPTER TEN*

*I*

About a week later, a tall, thin, immaculate gentleman, in a suit of

neutral taupe, entered the offices of the _Evening Chronicle_. A

stand-up collar slightly tip-tilted his chin. But his expression was a

friendly, not a haughty one. His small roving gray eyes looked around

with a humorous inquisitiveness, as if they wondered what their

immaculate owner could possibly hope to find in such a sloppy,

disorderly place.

In due time, a slovenly office boy stopped pounding on a typewriter and

showed the stranger to an inner office. Here Hutchins Burley penned

those inimitable effusions on "the ethereal feminine" which gave the

Saturday special half a million female and male readers. It was an army

that ran the _Saturday Evening Post_ brigade a close second, and

rendered Burley's professional position unassailable.

The roving gray eyes saw the swollen bulk of Mr. Hutchins Burley,

squatting like a giant toad behind a roll-top desk and pawing over a

visiting card.

"Well, Mr. Pryor?" said the pillar of the _Evening Chronicle_, with no

waste of civility. "What d'you want?"

"Frankly, I want Mr. Robert Lloyd's job."

"How do you know it's vacant? Are you a friend of his?"

"Hardly that. The information just drifted my way."

"You handed me that stuff at the Outlaws' Ball. Who the devil are you,

anyway?"

Whenever Burley spoke vehemently, he shoveled the words from the left

side of his mouth, a process that contorted his face into the exact

likeness of a cartoon by Briggs.

"You might be a spy," he added, putting a cigar in his mouth and

scowling horribly at his visitor.

The latter replied in a quiet and dignified but judiciously injured

tone.

"Mr. Burley, you have my card. Go into my personal history all you

like. But first, let me refer to the service I did you at the ball. It

was a small matter--"

"Don't get puffed up about it then," growled Burley, with much less

hostility, however.

"No fear," continued Mark Pryor, as terse as his host and much more

urbane. "I mention it only because an ounce of action is worth a ton of

talk. Or a cartload of stuffy introductions. The point is this.

Having learned that you had discharged Mr. Lloyd--"

"Who says I discharged him?" Burley noisily cut in. "He discharged

himself."

"Oh, did he?"

"Yes, damn him. I wasn't good enough for him, I suppose. You know his

kind, brains, fatted brains. But no guts! Sticks his nose up at

everything and hangs out with a lot of super-highbrows--New Republic

gas-bags."

"The sort that cut a pie from the periphery to the center?"

"Yah! That's their lingo. Still, Lloyd's got a head on his shoulders.

I'll say that for him. And I don't fire a man that's worth his salary.

Why should I?"

"You believe in keeping your grudges out of your business?"

"That's me. I could have given him his walking papers for a hundred

good reasons. But I didn't. And what thanks did I get? He left me in

the lurch. That's what he did. Left me on his own hook at a damn

critical time."

"A case of bad conscience, perhaps."

"You said it! He'd done me all the harm he could. He and Claude

Fontaine who put him up to it."

Burley enlarged on his two-fold grievance. First, Robert and Claude had

circulated a malicious story about Harry Kelly (a professional bruiser)

making a punching bag of him; this story had ruined his prestige among

the Outlaws of Kips Bay. Then, they had freely slandered him in

Cornelia Covert's inner circle, with the result that Cornelia's friend,

Janet Barr, had conceived an insane and utterly baseless dislike of him.

His story was full of evasions and suppressions. Thus he forgot to tell

Mark Pryor that he had twice waylaid Janet on the street and had been

coldly repulsed each time. It was clear that these repulses had added

fuel to his hatred of Claude and Robert, the two men who found favor in

her eyes. Against them, rather than against her, he vented his spleen.

When he spoke of her, his diatribe degenerated into a whine.

"I know," said Pryor, laconically, cheering him up. "You have that

'nobody loves me,' feeling. Nastiest feeling in the world. We all get

it once in a while. I find there's only one remedy for it, and that's

to stop bullying people."

"Bullying people!" shouted Burley, jumping up and glaring at his

visitor. "Say that again, if you dare."

Mr. Pryor smiled faintly and sat unmoved, save that his neck seemed to

rise a very little out of his stand-up collar, as the eye-piece of a

microscope rises out of the tube.

"I'm a plain man, Mr. Burley," he said, imperturbably. "And I speak

plainly. If you don't like plain speaking, I'd better withdraw my

application."

"The hell you'd better!"

Mr. Pryor got up, everything quiet about him except his eyes.

Burley looked as if he were about to launch a thunderbolt. But the

roving eyes of his visitor were now fixed upon him like points of steel.

"Sit down," said Burley, suddenly limp.

Mr. Pryor sat down very quietly, without taking his eyes off Hutchins

Burley, who sat down, too, almost as if mesmerized.

"Tell you what," he said, after a while. "I need a sort of confidential

assistant. A man who can keep his eyes and ears on the jump, and his

pen and tongue under lock and key. Get me?"

He went on to tell Mr. Pryor that he was willing to try him out and that

faithful service would meet with very big rewards and with increasingly

confidential commissions. For the present, his newspaper duties were to

be subordinated to the one task of keeping track of the Lorillard

tenements.

"Trust me," said Mark Pryor.

He did not think it necessary to explain that keeping track of the

Lorillard tenements was precisely what he had been doing for purposes of

his own.

"And glue an eye on that fellow Fontaine," added Burley.

"To get a line on the diamond smuggling?" asked Pryor, with the most

casual air imaginable.

Burley straightened up with a yell of suspicion.

"What in blazes are you talking about?" he said.

"Merely what you yourself talked about, my dear sir," said Pryor

soothingly. "At the ball you called Mr. Fontaine a diamond smuggler.

More than one person will remember that remark."

Burley's suspicions were disarmed.

"Forget it, my friend, forget it," he said. "A man says a good many

things under the influence of liquor that he has no call to say. I

don't suppose the Fontaines are less on the square about their

importations than the other big jewelers are. That's no business of

mine or yours, however, is it?"

He declared emphatically that his interest in Claude Fontaine's doings

had a totally different basis. On three occasions Fontaine had come

between him and a woman. He did not hesitate to name the ladies. One

was Lydia Dyson, another was Cornelia Covert, the third was Janet Barr.

He had said nothing about the first two. He was not a greedy man.

Anyhow, according to the ethics of Kips Bay, Lorillard females were

nobody's property. That was no blasted secret, was it?

"But this Janet Barr's no Lorillard female," he said, bringing his fist

down heavily on the desk. "Any fool can see that. And I'm man enough,

to refuse to stand by while Fontaine dirties her good name."

"You don't mean to say that he has--"

"He'll do it, all right. Or why did he pick the girl up, when he's just

got engaged to Armstrong's daughter?"

"Armstrong, the financier?"

"Yes. And Dupont Armstrong won't stand for a man who isn't on the level

with his girl. Just put that in your pipe and smoke it."

"I know a safer place," said Mr. Pryor, gently tapping his head. "Where

it won't go up in smoke."

He rose and, after coming to a few necessary understandings with Burley,

took his leave.

As he walked rapidly along Broadway towards the subway, he felt that he

had done a very good morning's work. He was satisfied that Hutchins

Burley knew more about the diamond smuggling than he cared to admit.

The puzzle was that, although Burley obviously connected Claude Fontaine

with the smuggling operations, he was unwilling to give the connection

away. What was the motive that restrained him from exposing a man he

bitterly hated? Clearly, either a lack of proof, or some consideration

of a more personal kind.

Reminding himself of his maxim that two and two never make four except

in vulgar mathematics, Mark Pryor left the subway at Thirty-fourth

Street, the Kips Bay station nearest the Lorillard tenements. Then he

went directly to his flat.

*II*

Incoming or outgoing denizens made barely a ripple on the surface of

Kips Bay. The district was used to a shifting population. Even the

colonization of Sutton and Beekman Places by Pierian millionaires "cut

no ice." Honest men and thieves, artists, criminals and Bohemians, idle

paupers and rich idlers, all these floated in and floated out, but the

net hodge podge was much the same. Bomb makers might come and gunmen

might go, but Kips Bay went on forever.

The Lorillard tenements, the hub of the district, had experienced their

fair share of changes during the week of Mark Pryor's advent. Robert

and Janet were among the newcomers. Robert, thrown on his own scant

resources, had secured a nook in Kelly's flat, Number Thirteen, his

berth there being the fruit of Cornelia's good offices. And Janet had

come to live with Cornelia in flat Number Fifteen.

This last event was at once followed by a break in Cornelia's

partnership with Mazie Ross. The three small rooms and kitchenette were

not large enough for more than two people. And pretty, slovenly Mazie,

her early enthusiasm for Cornelia cooled, had lately spent more and more

time on her own appearance and less and less on her companion's wants.

Cornelia always got rid of a companion the moment a better one turned

up. A "better one" usually meant one who could do more of Cornelia's

housework, or could look after her creature comforts more diligently, or

could give her more of that flattering attention of which she never had

her fill. Whenever the time came to change partners, Cornelia would

send the old one flying without the smallest compunction. Nor was she

ever at a loss for a good excuse.

Janet's first day in Number Fifteen was Mazie's last. When Mazie came

home that night, "instead of poppies, willows waved o'er her couch."

The crash came after supper, while Janet was out shopping with Harry

Kelly, who had quickly become a steady visitor at his next-door

neighbor's flat. As a pretext, Cornelia chose the matter of Mazie's

easy friendship with Hutchins Burley, a friendship reported to have gone

as far as was possible, since the recent ball.