Although Robert had in no sense entered the lists as one of Janet's

suitors, Cornelia instituted comparisons between him and Claude, never

to the former's advantage. She took occasion to contrast Claude's noble

bearing and look of sovereign strength with Robert's simpler and frailer

appearance. She dwelt on the cosmopolitan aura that clung to Claude,

his subtle atmosphere of wealth, breeding and high social origin, the

amalgam of gorgeous qualities that offered so much more than Robert's

radical connections and straitened financial circumstances. Her trump

card was to call attention to Claude's free and easy response to the

Lorillard conception of the rights of women and to offset this picture

with an allusion to Robert's prudent reservations on the same subject.

If these comparisons were of an offhand and haphazard sort, nothing was

thereby lost in effectiveness. Far from it. They glorified Claude by

what was carelessly said: they damaged Robert by what was carefully left

unsaid.

Although unaware of the Machiavellian promptings of which she was the

innocent cause, Janet became dimly conscious of the conflict already

sensed by Robert, the conflict between her work (which was bound up with

Robert) and her love affair (which was somehow bound up with Cornelia as

well as with Claude). She felt the tug of Robert one way and the tug of

Claude and Cornelia the other way, without fully grasping the difference

in the two directions or the final significance of either goal.

It was Claude, however, and not Cornelia, that gave Janet's friendship

with Robert an importance that none of those concerned attached to it.

Claude simply could not understand why Janet should refuse to neglect

Robert's League, whenever the work of the League stood in the way of

their outings together. Economic independence, the reason advanced by

Janet, was a reason he laughed at. The words meant hardly anything to

one who from birth had been glutted with the thing itself. Surely a few

beggarly dollars, more or less, did not adequately account for Janet's

readiness to cloister herself in Kelly's bare and sunless study! Yet

what other motive could there be, if not one of tender feeling on

Robert's part, or soft pity on hers?

Still, the rivalry that actually sprang up between the two young men was

not a rivalry in love, at least not in Robert's sense of the word.

For Robert was no fool. He was soon convinced that Claude and Janet had

surrendered unconditionally to a mutual infatuation which he was in no

position to challenge. Yet he had a magnetism of his own, a magnetism

of the spirit rather than of the flesh. To this magnetism Janet

responded. Why should he not claim the same title to Janet's response

in the one sphere that Claude laid claim to in the other?

At all events, he meant to fight for what he considered his rights,

regardless of Claude's frowns or vanishing friendship.

Between the two, Janet had a hard time of it. Claude professed to

accept free love as a new and improved social principle, and praised her

for holding it; yet he grew unmanageable the moment she gave the least

hint of exercising this freedom in connection with any other man than

himself. On the other hand, Robert rejected free love as a pernicious

Greenwich Village or Lorillard tenement eccentricity, and even severely

scolded her for entertaining it; yet his actions showed that she might

love as many different men as madly as she pleased, without causing his

friendship for her to undergo any really radical change.

To cap the oddity of this contrast, she found that Robert's unlimited

tolerance, though socially much the more agreeable attitude, was not

without its suggestion of tepidity of sentiment, a suggestion which

piqued her not a little.

The rivalry, such as it was, followed a very human course. Robert, as

an outgrowth of his work with Janet took to promoting her education in

contemporary thought and political theory. Claude, not to be

behindhand, made the most of his special knowledge of art as well as of

his wide first-hand acquaintance with the men and events that figured

picturesquely in the ruling social and political rings of Washington and

New York. In the matter of books, Claude generally took the cue from

Robert. The latter would lend her works by Shaw, Wells, Bennett,

Galsworthy, Bertrand Russell, Anatole France, Barbusse, Romaine Rolland;

Claude would follow suit with the latest fiction by Robert W. Chambers

or Rupert Hughes, his authors ranging as high as Rudyard Kipling,

Maeterlinck or Barrie. One would take her to a symphony concert in

Carnegie Hall, the other to a Sunday Pop in the Hippodrome. Robert held

out invitations to a Theater Guild's play by Masefield or Andreyev,

Claude would counter with an evening at a revival of Florodora or San

Toy. If Janet accompanied Robert to a Labor Mass Meeting at Cooper

Union or to a radical Cameraderie at the Civic Club, she was sure, soon

after, to be escorted by Claude to a Titta Ruffo recital in Aeolian Hall

or to a midnight cabaret in Moloch's Den off Sheridan Square.

To Janet, who had broken with the Barrs of Brooklyn and who was as much

on pleasure as on emancipation bent, it was not Robert's offer that

usually seemed the happier one.

Not the least of Claude's advantages was the fact that he moved in Kips

Bay as a representative of the great forces of finance and fashion. He

reflected the high lights of that glittering social system of which he

was a favorite child. Direct and intimate was his contact with the

celebrities of the day--the bankers and politicians, the diplomats and

society leaders, the cabinet set in Washington, and the inner opera box

set in New York. These were his real people; the Lorillarders were

merely the people among whom he was sowing his radical wild oats.

In short, Claude was one of the persons "in the know." He knew a good

deal more about the personages whose names were on everybody's tongues

than the public knew or the newspapers thought fit to print. He could

tell about the opera soprano of the first magnitude whose attacks of

hysterical jealousy would cause the curtain to be held down between the

acts for forty minutes, while the poor director tore his hair in

desperation. He could laugh at the "mystery" of the appointment of a

certain mediocre woman teacher to a superintendency in the city's

schools, the mystery vanishing upon his inside story of how the lady in

question "had been good" to Big Jim Connolly, a local political boss.

And he could explain the connection between the failure to float a

certain foreign loan and the omission of a well-known financier's wife

from the group of guests invited to meet the Prince of Wales.

Thus Claude Fontaine, whose handsome face and dashing airs would have

made him an idol in almost any society, enchanted his fellow Outlaws

with the aroma clinging to him from the world of fashion and the

glimpses he afforded into the secret workings of the world of power.

Small wonder that to Janet, as to the others, Claude was bathed in a

romantic glamor.

By contrast with Claude, Robert seemed to lead a decidedly work-a-day or

humdrum life. Especially so, since his newspaper employment had been

cut off and his active time given up to the League of Guildsmen. As far

as Janet could see, Robert's entire thought and energy were absorbed by

an overwhelming interest in the Labor movement. For though he had

plenty of esthetic diversions, she noticed that the books he read, the

music he delighted in, and the pictures he admired were all in some way

expressive of souls in bondage, aspiring to freedom.

Now for the time being, Janet wanted to forget about the lowly and the

oppressed. She had the same feeling towards "causes" and "reforms" that

a released convict has towards societies for Improving the Condition of

Prisoners on Parole.

It must not be supposed that Janet took an unsympathetic view of the

movements for human freedom which were convulsing society after the

Great War. She was a sincere convert to the principle of woman's

equality and she made an honest effort to be open-minded to the theories

that Robert expounded. But her heart was not in theories. Her pulse

refused to quicken when Robert told her of the new social cleavage which

was fast ranging the useful active people on one side, and the parasitic

profiteering people on the other. In common with a great many of her

contemporaries, she sat heedlessly on a volcano, enchanted by the

twinkle of the stars.

What if Robert _did_ prove up to the hilt that the world was in the

birth throes of a new social order! Youth must have its glamor. And

there is no glamor about birth throes, not even about the birth throes

of a new world.

Besides, the old social alignment in which princes of the purple and

masters of the gold ruled in pomp or circumstance over the toilers of

the factory, the office and the soil--this old alignment was much more

familiar to poor Janet (and to everybody else) than the new one

predicted. Literature and legend, the school room, the pulpit and the

press--all the regular organs of education, in fact--had mesmerized her

into viewing the practical politics and the dominant economics of the

day as splendors and glories without parallel. Was the psychology of a

lifetime to be uprooted or transformed by a few weeks of unconventional

conduct in a Kips Bay tenement, or even by a brief high-tension course

of reading in the works of Samuel Butler, Bernard Shaw, Romaine Rolland

and other prophets of the life to come?

Clearly not. And so when Claude came with his many-colored news from

the seats of the mighty, he found it easy to engross and transport

Janet. But when Robert talked to her of strikes, trade unions and labor

congresses, he left her bewildered or mystified, though seldom cold. In

short, the rivalry even for the mind of Janet was a rather one-sided

affair, Claude, the darling of the gods, holding an immense initial

advantage over Robert, the advocate of rebel causes.

*CHAPTER SEVENTEEN*

*I*

On an afternoon late in May, Claude took Janet to see the boat race

between Yale and Pennsylvania over the so-called American Henley course

on the Schuylkill. Nature was in one of her soft and sober moods. The

weather was mild, the sky lightly overcast, and the colors of the

landscape as well as of the living things upon it were toned down to

various shades of slate, dove or lavender, all blending into the serious

beauty of a dominant pearl gray.

After the race, while the crowds were melting away, the two lovers

walked into the pathway along the river. Perhaps in response to the

pallid coloring around, Claude became a prey to melancholy thoughts; and

the day, the mood and the girl impelled him to confidences about the

marriage with Marjorie Armstrong into which he felt himself being

forced.

Janet made an ideal confidante. The exercise of putting herself

sympathetically into other people's shoes was a joy to her. Not only

did she see herself as others saw her; she had the rarer gift of seeing

others as she saw herself. In doing so, she could leave her own desires

and feelings entirely out of the prospect. Thus, the story of Claude

and Marjorie, like any other human drama, appealed to her judgment on

its merits. Nor did she disturb Claude with the intrusion of any vulgar

jealousy because the lover was her own lover and the woman was a rival

woman.

The narrative began with the tenderness Claude had conceived for

Marjorie some two years before. He told Janet how the proud beauty had

first encouraged him and then, with unexampled coolness, had allowed the

Earl of Dunbar to displace him in her favor. Later the Earl in his turn

had jilted Marjorie. Could he be asked to care for her after such an

ill-starred episode?

Unluckily, he was by now far the most desirable match among the young

men whose names she consented to put on her list of eligibles. In this

preference she had her father's hearty support. Naturally. For Mr.

Armstrong was a slave of every wish she framed. Meanwhile, his own

father had the most urgent private reasons for promoting the Armstrong

project.

"You see my horrible position," he said. "I'm expected to marry a girl

I don't love in order to get my father out of a bad box. It's like a

story of the eighteenth century; only, in those happy days, it was the

daughter, not the son, who had to pull the chestnuts out of the fire."

"But surely, Claude, not all the king's horses nor all the king's men

can _compel_ you to marry if you don't want to."

"No, but compulsion isn't the only form of coercion in the world, Janet.

Nor even the worst. Can you think what it means to have everybody in

your set _expecting_ you to do a certain thing?"

"Expecting you?"

"Yes, it sounds fantastic. But it would sound real enough if once you

had a taste of it. They show their expectations by word and deed, by

sign and innuendo. They show it constantly, mercilessly, in a hundred

small and super-subtle ways. I tell you, Janet, concerted expectation

is the strongest form of pressure that can be brought to bear upon a

man. It can bring about miracles. It can move mountains. Only a hero

or a coward can resist it."

"I suppose it's like the pressure of public opinion or of one's family,"

she said, her soft clarinet tones pouring balm on his feelings. "I know

what family pressure means. I am so sorry for you, Claude, sorry from

my heart."

"I love you for saying that, Janet! I love you for your adorable pity.

I love you for being so unlike Marjorie. She has her good points; but

fellow feeling is not one of them. You see, her social ambition and the

ease with which she can gratify her every wish have quite dried up the

tender places in her heart. She has no pity left in her nature. And

pity is always the essential thing in a woman's soul."

They sat down on a grassy slope in a secluded corner of the park. In a

lyrical mood, Claude pointed to the sun just then flaring out and

splashing a thousand colors on the livid sky.

"Look, Janet," he said, "how the whole earth thrills to its warm

radiance! Just as everyone thrills to your divine gift of sympathy."

He was lying on the ground with his head in her lap, while her hand was

gently stroking his curly hair.

"I am so happy to be in this spot with you, Claude, and to hear from

your lips the things that only you can say. When you make love to me, I

feel as though I were in some Enchanted Valley with a prince from the

_Arabian Nights_."

"Yes, and he a miracle of discretion, too!"

"A miracle of indiscretion, rather!" said Janet, as he drew her head

down to his, kissed her once and kissed her again.

He soon became pensive, however. Pursuing his former train of thought,

he declared that if he remained in New York, "public expectation" would

certainly drive him into the dreaded marriage with Marjorie. There was

only one avenue of escape. That was to go abroad and stay out of harm's

way until Marjorie should choose some one else as in due time she was

bound to do.

"But the force that holds me back," he said, "is far stronger than the

one that bids me go. I can't live without you, Janet, darling."

"Then I suppose you'll have to take me along," she said, bending low

over him.

Their lips met in a sustained and ardent kiss.

"No," he said. "I dare not assume a responsibility so great."

"If I go with you," she said quietly, "I shall go on my own

responsibility."

"Janet, it would be too wonderful. Don't let me think of it, or my good

resolutions will stand no firmer than a flag in a strong wind. But you

are an angel to offer to come. You do love me then, very, very much?"

"What a question, Claude!"

"Well, you keep a pretty tight rein on your feelings, darling," he said,

with the least trace of reproach. "Tender and true you are, I know," he

added. "But you don't say any of the things that girls say when their

hearts are in the grip of a wild, extravagant passion. Do you know that

you have never even asked me once whether I really and truly and madly

love you?"

"Whether _you_ love _me_?"

"Yes, that is the question girls ask their lovers over and over again."

"Well, Claude, the important thing to me is that _I_ love _you_."

"Do you mean to say, Janet, that you don't care whether I love you or

not?"

"I don't mean that. But what I care about most is that you are the sort

of man whom _I_ can love. That is the thing that makes me happy. It's

delightful, of course, to know that you love me in return. Still, if

you didn't love me, I don't think I should be in hopeless misery. If

you turned out to be different from what I dreamed you were, so

different that I could no longer love you, then I should be

heart-broken."

To Claude, this seemed a bitter-sweet reply. More sweet than bitter,

however, and so he did not contest it.

What a puzzling girl she was, he thought. So sensible and yet so

imprudent. And totally devoid of the instinct that induces most women

to exploit the amorous moment. Claude could not get over it. Any other

girl would have made the most of his present mood, the mood in which he

was ready to think the world well lost for love. When the blood is hot,

the tongue is prodigal of vows. Claude, at all events, was willing to

promise anything, especially as he was still in pursuit, and as his

promises were not to mature until he was in possession.

Yet Janet asked absolutely nothing! This surrender, as open-handed as

it was confiding, moved him to compunction. He sat up and put his arms

around her. Her head buried in his shoulder had the effect of seeking

refuge there. And she looked so trusting, so helpless, so innocent, that

a great love for her welled up in his heart. Ought he not to do the

noble, the chivalrous thing?

"Look here, Janet," he said, with the air of Sir Philip Sidney offering

his last drink of water to another wounded soldier on the battle field,

"why couldn't we be married? My father would get over it in time."

"Yes, your father might. But _we_ might not."

"No, no, dearest. You mustn't say that. My love is not a thing of

whims and fancies. I shall love you till life itself has passed away."

"Then what difference does it make whether we get married or not," she

said.

With infinite tact, she refrained from accepting his lofty pledge of

eternal constancy. She also refrained from a similar commitment of her

own affections.

"Don't misunderstand me, Janet," he said, as sadly as if her

disagreement cut him to the soul. "I merely felt in honor bound to

offer to marry you. I know better than you do what an unconventional

step means.

"All the more reason why I should learn by experience, then. No,

Claude. If I married you, I'm sure I should soon stop loving you. The

thought that you had a legal claim on my affection would be enough to

kill it."

"Oh, you mustn't take the law so seriously, darling. Nobody does,

nowadays."

"I know nothing about the law, Claude," she said, repudiating all

jurisprudence with one of her eloquent gestures. "Do you want us to

become a careworn, broken-spirited, isolated married couple, hating all

the other careworn, broken-spirited, isolated married couples of the

western world? Do you want me to grow to hate and despise you as my

mother hates and despises my father, as so many wives appear secretly to

hate and despise their husbands?"

"How can you say such monstrous things, Janet?"

"How can you pretend to believe that love should be free?" she retorted.

"Well," he replied, "I admit there's a lot in what you say. I suppose,"

he added with a fine masculine irrelevance, "that we can always change

our minds and get married later on if we choose to."

He could not fully persuade himself that Janet really believed in free

love. Nevertheless, he was hugely relieved to learn that, whatever her

motive might be, she had no ulterior matrimonial designs on him. If

only he could have suppressed a sneaking fear that he was "taking

advantage" of Janet, as he called it, or satisfied himself that he was

legitimately taking the good the gods provided, as the Outlaws boldly

called a step of this sort!

But Claude's Bohemianism was only skin-deep. Like a good many

Bohemians, he discarded traditional forms, costly conventions and social

restrictions, chiefly in order to extract from social intercourse and

philandering, the greatest amount of pleasure with the smallest amount

of risk. Being a Bohemian was merely a sybaritic pastime for him.

In short, Claude lacked the courage of his experiments. The only

morality he genuinely believed in was the current morality (and

immorality) of his peers. Thus loose love could be allowed to have a

certain place in the scheme of things, but free love, as an avowed

principle, was incontestably wrong. Claude might humor the model

tenementers to the extent of using their free-love propaganda for his

own ends. At heart, however, he was profoundly shocked by Janet's

stubborn contention that her views of marriage, though glaringly

heterodox, were morally sound.

As Claude had worked it out, there were two ways of getting past the

limitations of a social institution. One was to support the institution

while sneaking over the fences and enjoying the secret breach of law as

a delightful bit of "living in sin." The other way was to defy the

institution by boldly climbing over the fences and asserting the sin to

be a virtue. Surely, the first was the pleasanter, the wiser, nay, the

more ethical proceeding!

Of course Claude did not reason the distinction out as clearly as this.

But he felt its force and, for his part, was resolved to act upon it.

However, he did not attempt to convert Janet to his way of thinking.

That would have been fraught with peril to the smoothness of their

future relations. Besides, a long didactic argument would have spoiled

the tender passages in the journey home. And Claude never encouraged

his conscience to make a martyr of him.

*II*

When they got back to Kips Bay, they found Cornelia and her Hercules in

Number Fifteen. Harry Kelly, silent and worshipful, was washing the

accumulated dishes of the day, in a supreme exhibition of devotion. His

inamorata, ensconced in state in her favorite armchair, was tacking a

blue denim smock together with bits of fancy colored worsteds.

She announced her intention of marching in the parade of the Overalls

Economy Club, an organization recently formed to protest against the

high cost of living.

Robert, it appeared, had greeted this announcement with gibes and with

an ironic contrast between her expenditure of time and her economy of

money. Nor had he confined his sarcasm to her.

"What do you suppose Cato said when I told him about the parade?"

Cornelia retailed vindictively. "He said, 'I suppose Claude will march,

too? He will have no difficulty in getting the right kind of uniform.

In the Times this morning, a Fifth Avenue store advertises overalls with

solid gold buckles from fifty dollars up.'"

"There's a typical reformer for you," said Claude, bitterly. "Always

shying bricks at the very people that want to build with them."

Hereupon, Cornelia, in the role of a loyal though long-suffering friend

of Robert's, undertook to extenuate his conduct. She observed that he

had doubtless been made angry because his work was retarded by Janet's

absences. The best proof of his state of mind was a threat he had made

to engage another secretary.

"I wish he would," said Claude, compressing his lips, while Janet tried

not to look conscience-stricken.

"Of course he doesn't in the least mean to part with Araminta,"

continued Cornelia, wallowing in the emotional effect of her news. "Not

he. Cato knows a good thing when he sees it. But he doesn't approve of

Janet's parties with you, Lothario. The principle is wrong, he claims."

"The principle is wrong!" cried both Claude and Janet with very

different inflections.

Cornelia laughed musically up and down the scale.

"Just fancy what he said: 'A friendship which doesn't grow spontaneously

out of joint partnership in work is built on quicksands.'"

"He's a fanatic," said Harry Kelly, breaking his silence and one of

Cornelia's saucers in the violence of his feelings.

"Nonsense, Hercules," she said, in a tone that poured contempt on his

vehemence. "He has simply let all the soft places grow in his head and

all the hard places in his heart."

Janet went into the next room to hang up her hat and coat. Claude

followed her.

"I think Robert's ideas are getting more and more unbalanced," he said,

dictatorially. "If I were you, Janet, I'd finish up my work with him at

once."

"It takes two to break a bargain, Claude."

"Well, you might at least keep your relations with him on a strictly

business footing--and as little of that as possible."

He ignored her slight mutinous gesture.

"He's a difficult man to get along with," he went on. "Look how even

Hutchins Burley had to fire him. And as if his dismissal from the

_Chronicle_ were not bad enough, he joins these Guildsmen people who are

trying to wreck the very basis of modern society. That has just about

dished him, as far as the Outlaws are concerned. They all cut him now."

A new imperiousness crept into his voice as he added:

"I wish that, for my sake, you would not be seen going about with him,

ever."

He accepted her silence as an evidence of tacit consent.

*III*

The very next afternoon, before a full hour's writing and typing had

been done, Robert amazed Janet by proposing that they suspend work and

take a walk.

"I want particularly to talk to you," he said.

"About what?"

"About love," said Robert, gravely.

What girl could resist an invitation like that? Despite Claude's stern

admonition, Janet did not wait to be urged.

They walked near the East River towards the gas-house district, and

presently turned into a recreation pier which was almost deserted.

Clearly, Robert was looking for a very private and sequestered corner.

On the way, every topic was broached except the one that Robert had

advanced as an excuse for truancy. Did suspense sharpen Janet's

anticipation? No. Janet was curious, but not consumedly so. She had a

marvelous power of attracting confidences and was quite used to having

young men, who had known her only a few days, confide in her their love

affairs, their religious or financial troubles, and indeed the whole

history of their lives. True, Robert might be in love, not with another

girl but with herself. Having no false modesty, Janet entertained the

suspicion for a moment. Only for a moment, however. For the

presumption against it seemed conclusive.

Meanwhile, they walked happily along, until Robert found the spot that

suited him. This was at the end of the pier farthest from the street.

No watchman being in sight, they sat down on a great terminal beam and

let their legs swing over the green and choppy water.

The Janet who laughed and chatted with Robert was a very different girl

from the Janet who was accustomed to hang romantically on Claude's lips.

Nothing, of course, could equal the magnetism of Claude or match the

fire and glory of their mutual passion. Still, in Claude's presence she

seemed constantly to be playing up to some magnificent part; she felt

like a cross between, say, the Lady of Shalott and the ecstatic lady in

the Song of Songs. Without denying that it was a rapturous game, a game

well worth the candle, she found it a trifle exhausting.

With Robert, on the other hand, the high-tension, party-dress Janet

could be put away (so to speak) and the simple, work-a-day,

blouse-and-skirt Janet substituted. Now Janet was the kind of girl who

always looked her worst in her best things and was most herself when

least dressed up. Naturally, she did not apply this symbol to her two

friendships. Being a young, rebellious, and infatuated young lady, how

could she? Besides, had she done so, she might have reasoned the matter

out to a disturbing conclusion.

"Well, Robert," she said, cheerily. "Begin, and tell me all that's in

your heart of hearts."

"It's not my heart I mean to talk about. It's yours."

"Mine! What an idea! Why, my heart's in the pink of condition.

Positively no inspection needed.

'Oh my heart is a free and a fetterless thing,

A wave of the ocean, a bird on the wing.'

I don't mean to say that it's a flighty object, though," she added, with

a smile.

"No, if it were, it would be much easier to talk to you about it," said

Robert.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, a whole century separates the Janet I first knew--the Janet who

hesitated to go to a picture play on the Sabbath--from the Janet who

reads Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell, attends labor meetings on

Sundays, and catches each newest whiff of radical opinion. The change

takes one's breath away."

"You admit it's a change for the better, don't you?"

"In every way but one."

"Which one?"

"You have taken Cornelia too seriously. Her views on sex are morbid and

totally unsuited for adoption by a healthy, inexperienced girl."

"Now, Robert, please don't begin that over again. You've said it all

before."

"I shall say it and say it again until I've convinced you. Even you

must admit that Cornelia has a chronic grudge against men."

"Well, it isn't so unnatural, after her unhappy love affair, is it?"

"Precisely. As a result of that love affair, all her sex emotions are

inverted. She sublimates her sex into acts of spite, usually

unconscious acts. For instance, she is subtly encouraging you to run

off with Claude as she ran off with Percival Houghton. Forgive me for

mentioning it, Janet. But I can't bear to see you duped. Believe me, if

you followed her example, with an equally unhappy result, she would like

nothing better."

"Claude is not in the least like Percival Houghton," said Janet coldly.

"Whatever else he may be, he isn't a cad."

"Of course he isn't," Robert hastened to say.

"Then stop making horrid comparisons. It is such an easy thing to do.

Suppose I were to say that you are like an X-ray machine, finding out

all that is bad in people, while Claude is like a magnet drawing out all

that is good in them. What would you say to that comparison?"

"I should accept it," replied Robert, with a smile. "The superiority of

the X-ray in point of social usefulness is, I think, beyond dispute."

"Oh, with you social usefulness is everything, and personal happiness

nothing!"

"Suppose Claude is a magnet," he went on, unheeding her exclamation.

"Is that a good reason for flying into his arms, like a willless iron

filing, on _his_ terms instead of on your own?"

"On my terms! What do you mean?"

"Janet, my friendship will be worse than useless to you unless I can

tell you exactly what is in my mind. I either do that or hold my peace

forever. Will you let me speak frankly?"

"Will I let the rain fall or the sun shine? I'd like to see the person

who could stop you from speaking frankly. But please don't attack

Claude."

"Have no fear. I don't intend to play the part of the heroine's second

friend confidentially warning her against the first. What I want to

urge, with all the force I can, is this: if you mean to live with

Claude, why not marry him?"

"Quite apart from my own preferences in the matter, Robert, how do you

know that Claude wants to marry?"

"Oh, no doubt he doesn't want to. In the eyes of the modern man,

marriages made in Heaven are as popular as canned beef made in America.

But what of that? Claude is young, self-willed, accustomed to get his

own way, and--he worships you. And you--well, I have no superlatives to

do justice to the case. You are you. You could marry him in a

twinkling if you played your cards right."

Janet laughed.

"Oh, the heart is a free and a fetterless thing--" she sang, saucily.

"Stop coquetting like Cornelia," he remonstrated. "You are making it

totally impossible for me to talk rationally. Are you a butterfly or a

woman? Am I discussing your glorious voice or your precarious future?

Be serious."

"How can I be serious when you ask me to be a bargain hunter in hearts

and coronets?"

"Now you're acting like one of Marie Corelli's heroines, Janet!"

"Thank you. Why are you so anxious to have me get married?"

"Because I think that your fine spirit of independence and your divine

gift of imagination ought not lightly to be wasted. Because I think, in

short, that you have a nobler purpose in the world than mere loving or

being loved."

"Than mere loving!"

"Yes. The world was not made for the gratification of our own

feelings."

"So you are fond of saying, Robert. But, as a matter of fact, I'm not

trying to gratify my feelings. I'm trying to carry out my principles."

"The world isn't a grindstone to sharpen our principles on, either,"

said Robert, with prompt conclusiveness.

"From watching you, I rather thought it was," said Janet, stung into

sudden irony.

There was a pause. He tried to take her hand, but she drew it sharply

away, with difficulty repressing her tears. After a while, he began

again, with impetuous candor:

"Janet, don't go into this adventure with your eyes shut. Remember, you

can't give yourself up to an experiment in free love without giving up

everything else. That is the strongest argument against the step. All

your gifts, all your energy, all your purpose will be consumed in

explaining, defending, evading. Your whole life will be one long course

of swallowing the consequences and warding off criticism. Do you wish

to be a life-long martyr to free love, like Cornelia?"

"I've never posed as a martyr to anything--not even to drink," said

Janet, recovering her good humor.

"Then why become one? Martyrdom is all very well for fanatics like your

mother who enjoy it, or for idlers like Cornelia who have nothing better

to do. But you are neither a fanatic nor an idler; you are a worker."

"But when one believes that an institution has served its turn, isn't it

one's duty to destroy it?"

"Institutions are never destroyed. They are sometimes transformed, as

tadpoles are into frogs."

"Are you sure? Cornelia says that every free union is a mine exploded

beneath marriage. I think she's right."

"A mine! Better call it a squib, Janet. And all the trouble you invite

will be like laying a long and elaborate fuse to ignite the squib."

"Oh, you have no ideals left!" she cried, revolted at this demolition of

her romantic conceptions.

"I have a little common sense left," he answered. "We can't escape the

customs or the institutions of our time, however much we may disbelieve

in them. Flying in the face of a decadent institution does not destroy

it. It only gives it a new lease of life by putting the props of public

sympathy and traditional morality at the disposal of its defenders.

Look at the case of George Eliot. Did her entirely justifiable free

union help the cause of marriage reform? No. It actually turned her

into a defender of the very institution she had set out to challenge."

"What a very wise young man; this wise young man must be," she said,

parodying a line of Gilbert's.

"No side-tracking! Promise me you'll turn the matter over in your

mind."

"In my mind? Yes. But what about my heart?" she said. And with

dancing eyes she sang:

"'Oh, the heart is a free and a fetterless thing,

A wave of the ocean, a bird on the wing.'"

Her voice turned his blood to paradisaical currents.

"If you sing that again, I shall kiss you on the spot, in public or out

of it," said the tormented young man.

"Why, Robert, what abysses of passion lurk hidden in you!" she exclaimed

mockingly. "I believe you said you'd always treat me just like a man.

Do you talk like this to your male chums?" Then demurely: "We'd better

go home at once."

On the way home, she resumed the discussion. In a more earnest tone

than before, she thanked him for taking so much trouble over her and

promised to think about his point of view very carefully. She insisted,

however, that his reasoning had not convinced her. She and Claude

appeared very well suited to each other now, but who could tell what

changes a few years might not bring forth?

"True," said Robert. "But the future is dark to us in other matters

besides marriage. As things stand now, Claude couldn't do better, and

you might do worse. And if the very worst happened, you could get a

divorce."

She replied by reminding him that she and Claude were not the kind of

people who lightly repudiated their ties or the responsibilities that

grew out of them. Consequently, once married, they would probably

remain so for life. In any event, if she changed her mind, it would be

infinitely simpler to do so under the other plan.

"Say I grew tired of Claude, for instance, and quite suddenly wanted

you," she said with a mischievous look.

"Well, it couldn't be done," said Robert, decisively, her complacent

assumption jarring his pride.

"Oh, couldn't it?" She flashed him a challenging glance.

"Not in my case," he returned, in clipped tones. "Free love is the most

expensive luxury in the world. Only the very rich or the unambitious

can pay for it. As for me, I never can have anything to do either with

free love or with a woman who has had a free lover. It would ruin all

my plans."

Janet replied with the faintest shrug, whereat all his self-assertion

promptly went bang. Neither yielded a point; but they divined each

other's feelings and, as they walked on, steered the conversation into

lighter channels until they got back to the Lorillard tenements.

Standing in the dark hallway at the foot of the stairs, Janet told him

with a touch of impishness that his logic had been irresistible.

"Has it? It hasn't touched your heart," he said, somewhat dolefully.

"Ah, well, the heart is a free and a fetterless thing--"

As Janet darted up the stairs, the door of an apartment opened overhead,

and she fancied she heard Claude's voice.

*CHAPTER EIGHTEEN*

*I*

On her own floor, she halted and, with Robert's kiss still burning on

her lips, waited until he had turned into Kelly's flat. Then she opened

the door of Number Fifteen.

Sure enough, Claude was there, full of resentment at her absence on a

jaunt with Robert. She thanked her stars that Robert's visible presence

could not fan the flame. Even so, Claude acted badly enough. He was in

a vertigo of jealousy, and at small pains to hide the fact.

At first, Janet tried to carry the matter off lightly, and strove to

mollify him by saying that Robert had asked her to consider a very

serious problem. She was a little conscience-stricken over this fib,

but believed it the best thing to say. She pointed out that while it

was with Robert that she worked, it was with Claude, after all, that she

played.

At this Cornelia executed an unnecessarily tuneful laugh.

"There's nothing like a man's problem for disarranging a girl's hair,"

she observed, dropping the inevitable dress she was busy with.

"Araminta, your hat's a sight! Do look at yourself in the glass."

Naturally, Claude was more furious than ever. He sulked in silence

whilst rebuffing the advances that Janet made. Finally, maddened by

Cornelia's pin-prick innuendoes, he strode out, flashing a terrible look

at Janet as he did so.

*II*

When will the play of Othello be absolutely unintelligible? Perhaps five

hundred years from now or, let us hope, sooner. Surely, at some distant

date, the private ownership of a woman by a man or of a man by a woman

will seem as barbarous as the rings our ancestors stuck through their

noses or as unfashionable as the three hundred concubines of Solomon.

And the jealous passions arising from this ownership will be classed

with rage, hysteria and other forms of emotional disease or pathological

bad manners.

Indeed, do not the best people already look upon a pronounced fit of

jealousy as an exhibition of arrested development or mental inferiority?

If the jealous man is not destroyed, root and branch, by the

refuse-reduction plant of ridicule, he will be rendered obsolete and

perhaps extinct by the spread of the conviction that, after a human

being has discharged his obligations to himself and his obligations to

the community, he owes no other personal allegiance whatever.

Herself singularly free from jealousy, Janet was in direct touch with

three persons whom the malady afflicted sorely. Besides the case of

Claude, she had on her hands the case of Mrs. Howard Madison Grey in

business, and the case of Cornelia at home.

Cornelia, who was no believer in keeping her emotions hermetically

sealed, made her frame of mind patent to Janet on an unforgetable

occasion. It was not the first, nor was it to be the last, of a series

of blows, which were fast converting Janet to the belief that her own

opinion of Cornelia was founded on an illusion, whilst Robert's opinion

was the correct one.

For some time past it had been Harry Kelly's practice to come into

Number Fifteen before breakfast and put the two girls "through their

paces," as he called the light drill he prescribed for them. Always on

the lookout for some new outlet for his tremendous supply of energy, the

physical culture expert had hit on the scheme of improving Cornelia's

bad health by reforming her bodily habits. Cornelia, who considered

early rising bad form and breathing exercises a superstition, was for a

prompt veto of the scheme, but Janet's cordial support of it saved the

day.

So, early in the morning of the day after Claude's wrathful departure,

Kelly, in gymnasium garb, made his entrance as usual. The athlete was

not a man of many words. Words, after all, were not needed in his case,

since, as he strode along with the nervous muscularity of a Rodin

statue, his lithe, powerful body proclaimed his mission to all the

world.

"Wake up, girls," he called out, "and fill your bellies with the good

south wind."

The unvarnished word always moved Cornelia to a protesting shriek and a

well-trilled "How do you do!" Kelly enjoyed both immensely.

After throwing the windows in the sitting room wide open, he paced the

floor like a panther in his den. Janet was the first to appear. She

was still drowsy, and her short dark hair, in tight somnolent curls,

hung down her back. She wore a short-skirted bathing suit, a custom

Kelly held in high regard for the business in hand.

As she toddled sleepily towards the athlete, the energy pent up in his

frame unbottled itself on the impulse of the moment. Catching her at

the waist, he lifted her high up in the air and spun her around three

times as if she were a featherweight. Then, clasping her lightly by

shoulder and leg, he set her tenderly down again.

"Do it again, Hercules, do!" articulated Cornelia, coming in just at the

close of this maneuver, whilst Janet, still laughing and protesting, was

in the act of resuming control of her well-shaped limbs.

But as there was that in Cornelia's eye which belied her command, Kelly

was careful to make no move to execute it.

Cornelia's golden hair was done up on her head in a makeshift coil, she

herself being enveloped in a long kimono that trailed to the ground.

Kelly looked at this garment without ecstasy, a fact that did not escape

the wearer's observation.

"Hercules," she commanded peevishly, "you might close this window near

me. I've got a very bad headache from too little sleep. Do you want me

to catch my death of cold, too?"

He complied with all haste, and then pitched into his calisthenics,

Janet joining him with gusto. Cornelia followed suit, though in a very

languid spirit; and soon she stopped altogether, on the pretext of

unusual weakness.

Her chilly aloofness cut the period short. It was now time to prepare

breakfast, a task theoretically shared by all four, including Robert,

who was unaccountably late this morning. Habitually, three of them did

the actual work while Cornelia "directed," a process which, she firmly

believed, enabled the others to save time. But, as Robert sardonically

put it, "Cornelia's method of showing us a short cut is to send us round

Robin Hood's barn."

It was Kelly's special business to convert a part of the kitchen into a

dining room, and thereafter to make the toast. He had just reached this

stage, when Cornelia took another hand in the proceedings.

"Go down and get the letters for me, Hercules," she said suddenly,

relieving him of the toaster.

"Why, what's the hurry? Rob always gets them after breakfast."

"Oh, do let Harry make the toast," said Janet, chiming in with him.

She, too, had thought of the letters, and was in no hurry to bid the

devil good morning. "Nobody can eat toast the way you make it,

Cornelia. And Robert is sure to--"

"No doubt Robert will do exactly as _you_ tell him," said Cornelia,

interrupting her sweetly. "Please let Harry do as _I_ tell him.

Hercules, go _now_, please. I have a notion there'll be some famous

news for me this morning."

Kelly, having been her devoted (and despised) slave since the day he

ejected Hutchins Burley, obeyed submissively by mere force of habit. He

ran down the three flights of stairs and in a very short time came back

again with a single letter.

It was for Janet from Claude, and sarcasm was its prevailing tone.

The writer began by deploring his fatuous inability to remain away from

her side. He pointed out that, as his chance visits might take her by

surprise or catch her off guard, not to say worry her into thinking of

promises she had no mind to keep, he should take steps to rid her of his

manifestly superfluous attentions. He had accordingly arranged to spend

some time with his friends the Armstrongs, in Huntington. By doing so

he should at least please his father, which was better than nothing,

certainly better than not pleasing either himself or her.

In short, it was just such a petulant note as a spoiled woman's darling

like Claude might be expected to write. Having always received complete

submission from women, he regarded the least opposition to his

self-indulgence as outrageous and even wicked or perhaps blasphemous.

The depth and passion of Janet's nature were not easily stirred, but

this letter startled her out of her usual lightheartedness. She sat

down in a chair by the window and looked out fixedly, in an effort to

repress her feelings. Kelly, sympathetic and bewildered, gave vent to

sundry heartening murmurs and exclamations; and, as these accomplished

little, he moved dishes attractively and hopefully around Janet's empty

place.

From her point of vantage at the table, Cornelia surveyed her handiwork

with a pious simulation of sadness, surveyed it, and found that it was

not so bad.

Janet blue and still, Kelly heavily anxious, Cornelia sweetly

sanctimonious, such was the curious tableau that Robert saw when he came

in, his slender frame and vigorous movements forming a direct contrast

to the static spectacle before him.

"Now, see what you've done, Cato!" declaimed Cornelia, in one of those

complacent greetings which only she could make sublime.

She fluttered Claude's note aloft and called out the sender's name for

Robert's information.

Ignoring her, but grasping the import of the scene, Robert went over to

Janet's side and asked her in all simplicity whether he could be of any

service whatever.

But she, to hide her tears, turned decisively away from him. Robert

gave her movement a totally different interpretation, drew back, and

walked quickly out of the room.

*III*

The alarums and excursions for which Claude and Cornelia were

responsible might well have monopolized Janet's mind. But her thoughts

were kept in flux by a thunderstorm which threatened her peace from

another quarter.

The new cloud on her horizon came from no less a person than Mrs. Howard

Madison Grey, the wife of her employer.

Mrs. Grey served Janet as a symbol, a symbol opposed to the Outlaws.

The Outlaws were a convenient symbol of the world _within_ Kips Bay.

Mrs. Grey was an equally pat symbol of the world without.

It amused Janet to study her own reactions to these two symbols and to

analyze her experiences with the moral codes symbolized.

According to one of the primary conventions of the Outlaws, sex was

anybody's to have and nobody's to hold; there was no recognized private

property in sex. In Kips Bay, Janet had acted in the spirit (though not

in the letter) of this convention. And the results had been disastrous.

On the other hand, in the world beyond the model tenements, the right of

private property in sex was absolute. In Mrs. Grey's world, Janet had

acted in the spirit and even in the letter of this convention. And

again the results had been disastrous.

The second disaster materialized slowly. Its point of departure was the

visit paid by an ex-President of the United States to a performance of

Mr. Grey's third play, "The Great Reprieve."

As originally written, this was a drama in which a Vermont Yankee

resigns to a younger brother the girl he madly loves, after which lofty

sacrifice he starts life anew in the Klondike, makes a fortune there,

and later turns up for a brief visit to the old homestead. To his

dismay he learns that the girl of his dreams has been left a widow and

that, with poverty and distress staring her in the face, she has no

choice but to take up the lot of an actress in the great Subway Circuit.

Nothing but his hand in marriage can save her from the doom in store for

her! And the curtain falls on the Great Reprieve.

The play was a triumph of mediocrity in conception, construction, and

style; yet for some unaccountable reason it fell flat. The producer was

reluctant to accept the verdict of the playgoers for a fact, but a

second footing-up of the box-office revenues conquered his reluctance

completely.

Half a dozen play-surgeons--writers of Broadway successes, high-priced,

fifth-rate super-hacks, before whose names the public prostrated

itself--were hastily called into consultation and an immediate and

drastic operation was advised.

No time was wasted in thinking. All six consultants took a hand, so did

the producer, so did the favorite chauffeur of the producer's second

best mistress. Three days and three nights of heroic writing, drinking,

and rehearsing followed. At the end of this furious interlude, "The

Great Reprieve" had been whipped, or as the favorite chauffeur said,

"Goulasht" into shape.

The chief character in the revised version was a typical American boy of

fifteen (erstwhile the heroine's brother), and upon his pranks, antics,

impudence, and callowness, the play now pivoted. The lad's capacity for

noisy pertness and imbecile clownage was represented as inexhaustible,

yet even so, the producer expressed a fear that the audience might not

be equal to the intellectual pressure of the dialogue. Relaxing

incidents were introduced--a woman purring over a poodle dog, a chorus

girl spouting the real American language invented by George Ade, a

squawking parrot, and a Southern mammy (out of "Uncle Tom's Cabin")

worshipping the ground the leading juvenile treads on.

These features were warranted to give the play its "universal appeal"!

Dramatic action there was none. Why cast pearls? After all, there was

plenty of movement, plenty of "pep" and "kick" as the producer said.

All the characters made their entrances and exits with frenzied

vehemence and, whilst on the stage, jerked arms and body and legs

ceaselessly to and fro, as if in the last throes of St. Vitus' Dance.

The audience would get its money's worth of "speed"--so much was

provided for, if nothing else was. The dialogue was spoken with a

short, sharp, pop-gun explosiveness, except in the maudlin sentimental

scenes in which it was drawled out into one world-without-end whine.

Apart from these details, nothing in particular was to happen in the

play; for nothing in particular mattered. However, a squealing child

was kept in reserve, ready to be trotted out for "sure-fire" applause,

if the "action" should chance to flag.

In its renovated form, Mr. Grey hardly recognized "The Great Reprieve."

It seemed to him that his comedy had become an exact replica of each of

the other ten American comedies then playing in Times Square. This,

though Mr. Grey was no intellectual giant, made a difference to his

artist's pride. It made no difference to the Broadway theatregoers.

They fairly devoured the play. They swallowed all the old wheezes and

all the old slush and all the George Ade lingo and all the Southern

mammy stuff. They swallowed it all without winking. Despite the fears

of the producer, they proved themselves to be almost fully up to the

intellectual level of the fifteen-year-old leading juvenile. They

greeted his every act of clownage and horseplay with salvos of applause.

They laughed themselves sick over him. And when the poodle dog and the

baby appeared, the applause brought down the rafters.

To put it mildly, Mr. Howard Madison Grey was stupefied. However, the

success of "The Great Reprieve" became the talk of the town. An

ex-President of the United States went to see it and drenched his box

with the tears of hilarity and contentment. Next day, he described the

play as "a clean, wholesome play of American life, manners and

thought!--every one hundred per cent American will be satisfied with

it."

This description was henceforth underscored in every advertisement of

"The Great Reprieve." Seats were sold ten weeks in advance. The

producer and his crew of play-salvagers added another feather to their

caps. And Mrs. Howard Madison Grey began to look for an apartment on

upper Park Avenue.

*IV*

The ensuing increase in the volume of engagements and correspondence

threw Janet together with Mr. Grey for uninterrupted stretches, oftener

than Mrs. Grey thought wise.

Before long, the author's wife noted significant alterations in her

husband's behavior.

Mrs. Howard Madison Grey was nothing if not scientific. She believed

religiously in the scientific method and applied it to all her

activities, even to her excursions in jealousy. As she hadn't read

"Science and Power" by Fitzfield Tyler, the efficiency engineer, for

nothing, she understood thoroughly that the proper method for scientific

research proceeds by three stages, namely:

One: Observing facts, without any preconceived notion.

Two: Imagining a general explanation or hypothesis that establishes the

relation of cause and effect between two groups of facts.

Three: Verifying this hypothesis, a process of determining by means of

personally conducted observations, whether the hypothesis fits the facts

it proposes to explain.

Observing, imagining, verifying--these were the three stages the trained

investigator had to grasp. And Mrs. Howard Madison Grey grasped them

with considerable kinetic energy.

In the first place, observation of the library during work time ceased

to reveal Mr. Grey in the careless act of dictating in shirt sleeves and

suspenders or of puffing cigarette smoke unconcernedly towards Janet's

innocent lungs. Instead, it disclosed him in a handsome velvet smoking

jacket and betrayed the astonishing fact that from the very moment the

smoking jacket was exhibited the smoking habit was suppressed. Clearly,

Mr. Grey's behavior in the past and his behavior in the present showed

the existence of two utterly different groups of facts.

To imagine a general explanation which should connect these two groups

of facts was the second and by long odds the easiest step. Mrs. Howard

Madison Grey formulated the hypothesis that some perverse piece of

femininity had lost her head over Mr. Grey's resplendent fame and

fortune, and had set out to tempt him into the primrose path of

dalliance.

The third step was to verify this hypothesis with a series of

experiments.

Mrs. Grey began by putting Janet through a systematic cross-examination.

Didn't she think men looked revolting in shirt sleeves and suspenders?

Quite so. Frankly, hadn't she simply longed to know a great literary

genius intimately? Naturally! And what might be her views on the

subject of nicotine? She thought smoking a disgusting habit? Ah, well!

These answers were supplemented by scraps of information obtained, it

must be confessed, by experiments that might have daunted any but a most

dispassionate investigator. Disregarding ethics, it is an open question

whether a personally conducted observation is better served by studying

truth face to face or by studying her through a keyhole. Mrs. Grey's

contribution to the answer was to adopt the latter plan on the principle

that all is fair in love and science.

She ratified the somewhat precarious keyhole method by the surer method

of sudden sallies into the library. She heard Mr. Grey addressing his

secretary in musically resonant tones, and saw him showing undue

solicitude for her comfort. Nay more, she surprised them in animated,

unworkmanlike conversations. True, she did not get the precise drift of

these talks, but she was morally certain that the talkers were

discussing six of the deadly sins and wishing the seventh. Though

further proof was scarcely needed, she found the straw that topped the

climax. Mr. Grey offered to double Janet's salary without request. The

conclusion forced itself on Mrs. Grey that her hypothesis was

incontestably established. It brought light out of darkness and order

out of chaos, besides fitting all the facts it proposed to explain.

She lost no time in acting on the verified conclusion.

One Monday morning before Howard Madison Grey returned from a week-end

on the New Jersey coast, she intercepted Janet.

"The new play," she said accusingly, "isn't progressing very fast."

"No," admitted Janet, "it isn't. So many topical matters have had to be

disposed of lately that the final copy of the play has been held back."

Janet could scarcely dwell on her employer's growing penchant for

conversation with her when his wife was presumed to be securely

occupied.

"Mr. Grey," said his wife, half reflectively, "Mr. Grey has the creative

temperament."

She frequently aired this phrase; it had, she believed, the ring and

tang of distinction. Privately, she thought that the artistic

temperament incapacitated a man from the sane discharge of his most

elementary duties.

"The creative temperament," she went on, "is too fine to cope with the

details of business."

She gave Janet to understand that it was imperative that the success of

"The Great Reprieve" should be followed up without delay.

"Mr. Sarsfield, the manager," continued Mrs. Grey, "has just telephoned

anxiously for the next manuscript."

"Mr. Grey is still working on the revision of the third act," said

Janet. "As soon as he finishes it, I shall rush the whole play through.

Of course, I can type the first two acts at once."

"Yes, do. But can you work uninterruptedly here? Perhaps you could

finish it faster at home--instead of coming here?"

Janet jumped at the chance. "Certainly," she said, "I can finish it at

home in half the time."

Mrs. Grey was taken aback. On second thoughts, she put Janet's

eagerness down to the new feminist strategy.

"There's the risk," she said, uneasily picturing the precious pages at

the mercy of the New York transit services.

Anxious to escape the assiduities of the wife, if not of the husband,

Janet gave reckless assurances of her devotion to the manuscript.

Mrs. Grey finally assented to the arrangement. Janet was to take the

manuscript in sections and, if the scheme worked well, she might do all

future typewriting for the playwright in the same way. She need come to

the Greys' house only for the dictation.

"I hope Mr. Grey will be satisfied," Janet could not help saying, once

the bundle of papers was safely tucked under her arm.

"I hope so," said Mrs. Grey meditatively. "But who can fathom the ways

of the creative temperament--?"

She left an eloquent hiatus.

From which Janet inferred that the shortest way with that particular

temperament was to let the explanation follow the act.

*V*

This bout with the green-eyed monster had taken place shortly before

Claude's petulant flight to the Armstrong estate in Huntington. To

Janet the whole affair was very ludicrous, and none the less so in that

she had given Mrs. Grey little cause for anxiety.

Not for a moment had the newspaper acclaim of Howard Madison Grey

imposed upon her. Having measured her own wits with the playwright's,

she had formed an estimate of his talents which caused her to reject

with contempt the fantastic eulogies of him in the press. She continued

to see in Mr. Grey what she had always seen, namely, a decidedly

middle-aged man with a bald head and a graceless figure, a man whose

amorous pleasantries and elderly sentimentalism inspired her with the

same distaste as the odor of stale tobacco smoke with which his person

seemed to reek.

She knew quite well that she had captured his emotions and his

illusions, but as she had found no difficulty in keeping his advances

within bounds she had seen no reason for giving the matter serious

thought.

On the day of Mrs. Grey's interference, Janet returned to Kips Bay in

high feather. This had mystified Cornelia, who could not see in her

friend's recital of events any great cause for congratulation. She

gloomily predicted that Janet would soon lose her position altogether.

Janet said she didn't care. A change was the only stimulant she ever

took or needed. And any change, even a change for the worse, would

serve the purpose admirably.

Cornelia wondered what was back of all this optimism until Janet pointed

out that, with her new program of work, she could repay Robert for his

many services to her. The firm of Barr & Lloyd could now carry on

business in the mornings as well as in the afternoons, Robert sharing

with her the work that came in from the Greys and perhaps from other

authors, just as she had shared with him the work that came in from the

League of Guildsmen. This statement was received in silence by

Cornelia, who drew her own conclusions and communicated them only to

Harry Kelly.

Janet's offer to pool her secretarial jobs from all sources with her

typewriting for the League had been very welcome to Robert. His funds

were running uncomfortably low just then. The reason was that the

League was not a paying concern. The economic changes advocated by the

Guildsmen were so drastic in character and called for so much discipline

and far-sighted cooperation on the part of the working classes that the

very people whom they were intended to benefit fought shy of them.

Leaders of labor received the Guild proposals coldly, and the rank and

file gave them little sympathy and less support.

For several mornings Robert and Janet pitched in with a will on the

typewriting of Mr. Grey's manuscripts. In the afternoons they had

continued the League work. Their comradeship was a happy and an

intimate one, how happy and how intimate Janet did not fully realize

until long after it was over. Perhaps the most delightful periods were

those in which they proofread the manuscripts they had finished. They

took turns reading aloud, and endless was the fun they extracted from

the lines of Mr. Grey's new play. More delightful still were excursions

into the fields of literature and economics, the play or some Guild

pamphlet furnishing the starting point.

Thus the partnership of Barr & Lloyd had gone on swimmingly for two

weeks, until the afternoon on the recreation pier, the memorable

afternoon that had begun with the long talk about free love, and had

ended in the model tenement with Robert's kiss and Claude's sulky fit of

jealousy.

*VI*

On the morning after this fateful day, Janet had to go to the Howard

Madison Greys' to return some finished manuscripts.

She had gone there for this purpose some two or three times a week,

since the last arrangement with Mr. Grey. On these occasions, the

playwright himself met her. And usually he spun out the interview as

long as possible, due regard being had to the prudent Mrs. Grey who,

hovering watchfully in the background, reminded Janet of a quiet but

overcautious museum attendant.

Mrs. Grey would frequently contrive to come into the room for the

undisguised purpose of glancing at or even criticizing Janet's

typewriting. The expectation of such a visit made Janet, on this

particular day, decidedly nervous. For, what with her distraction by

Claude's anger, and a sudden crotchiness that had overtaken the

typewriter, her papers bore the glaring evidence of innumerable

corrections and erasures.

However, Mrs. Grey seemed for once to be off duty. So at least Janet

concluded from the fact that the author himself received her with much

less than his customary constraint and far more than his ordinary

enthusiasm. And not only was he in the best of spirits; he was groomed

to perfection. He had put on a suit cut in a fashionable English mode,

with quaint cuffs on the sleeves of the coat as well as on the bottoms

of the trousers.

These and other details of sartorial artistry were probably lost on

Janet, but she was sensible enough of the general effect to surmise that

her employer had dressed himself to conquer. This surmise would have

forced itself upon her in any event, for Mr. Grey soon launched into

repeated hints looking to an assignation with her outside his home,

hints that presently crystallized into a direct invitation to a dinner

at Sherry's.

According to the principles of Kips Bay--and Janet at this time

subscribed to these principles--there was absolutely no reason why Mr.

Grey should not invite her and absolutely no reason why she should not

accept. But the heart has a reason to which reason must bow. Janet's

heart was in submission to but one law, and that was the law of her

integrity. She could no more strike up a friendship with a man to whom

she was not naturally, spontaneously drawn than she could fly. And she

could hardly pretend to be drawn to Mr. Grey. No, not even for the

pleasure of giving the suspicious Mrs. Grey something to be suspicious

about.

Besides, the man was too cocksure. He appeared to share Mrs. Grey's

conviction that the slightest nod on his part would incline Janet (or

any other woman) to follow him to the ends of the earth. This was

amusing. But it was also irritating to one's pride of sex.

The trouble with Mr. Grey was that, having realized the first of the two

ambitions which governed his desires, he felt satisfied he was about to

realize the second. As an author, he had conquered the public; as a

man, he now meant to conquer women.

To Janet, Mr. Grey's illusions about himself were as transparent as his

illusions about her. It was plain that he took with the utmost

seriousness the greatness that had recently been thrust upon him. His

reasoning was quite simple. If success in pleasing the crowd and its

leaders did not imply the possession of superior gifts and of a masterly

technique in exploiting those gifts, what did it imply?

This reasoning struck Janet as puerile. Yet Mr. Grey could hardly be

expected to share her view that talent and superb execution had never by

themselves attracted the plaudits of the crowd, or that the only man who

could please the million was the man born with the taste of the million.

Mr. Grey had been lucky enough to inherit this taste. Why demand that

he look a gift horse in the mouth?

But the judgment of youth is direct and pitiless! It seemed nothing

less than ridiculous to Janet that Mr. Grey should seriously pose as a

fount of the divine fire, and calmly invite her to become a ministering

angel to the sacred fount. What was still more ridiculous was that he

disguised his offer in weird, roundabout phrases calculated to enable

her to "save her face."

He was still confidently urging the project, when Mrs. Grey swept in and

fell upon them like a moral landslide.

Mrs. Grey did not stop to account for her unexpected return, to disclose

how long she had been eavesdropping, or to listen to Mr. Grey's

stumbling and embarrassed explanations. Her belligerent manner left no

doubt that she put the very worst construction on what she had heard.

Ignoring Janet altogether, she opened her batteries full on her husband

and discharged a broadside of questions, short, sharp and desolating.

Her questions were entirely rhetorical.

Was this the loyalty he had sworn to her, when she picked him out of the

gutter of obscurity and married him? Had she not, all along, suspected

that he was plotting an affair with this girl? No doubt the girl had

been setting her cap at him, but was that a legitimate excuse for

inconstancy? At his age, he ought to be beyond a desire to sow wild

oats. Didn't he know that a mature man sowing his wild oats presented

as idiotic a spectacle as if he were sucking his thumb? She didn't know

or care what _his_ family would think, but was he proposing to besmirch

the unstained record of _her_ family with a divorce scandal? And so on--

Janet listened in icy humiliation whilst the storm broke over and around

her. She expected every moment to be caught up in it, whirled into its

vortex, and destroyed.

What actually happened was that Mr. Grey played a ghastly imitation of

his masterful hero in "The Klondike Mail," until his lady, infuriated by

even this shadow of defiance, reached a degree of tension that would

have burst a twelve-inch gun. Death and destruction were almost afoot

when she spied the typewritten papers which Janet had just returned.

She pounced upon these papers and violently projected them to a point

within three inches of her spouse's nose, after which she regaled him

with a description of the flaws in the typewriting and the deficiencies

in the typist.

This description was pithy, elaborate, exhaustive, but it was not

exactly verified.

Followed an effective oratorical pause. And then Mrs. Grey begged to be

informed whether the quality of the work was not ample evidence that the

worker came for no good and sufficient business reasons. No one

venturing to reply, she hurled the manuscripts at the head of Mr. Grey's

rapidly retreating form and, as her aim was marred by a trifling

miscalculation, she picked up another document and took a shy at Janet.

While Janet was warding off this missile, the playwright made good his

escape.

"Really, Mrs. Grey," said Janet, standing her ground boldly as her

indignation got the better of her fright, "you are behaving worse than a

fishwife."

Mrs. Grey sobered down with incredible suddenness.

"My poor girl," she said, solicitously, "did I hit you?"

"You came within an ace of knocking out one of my eyes!"

"Just so. Within an ace. That was my intention, precisely. I aimed

for effect, not for damage. I assure you I'm a first-rate shot."

Mrs. Grey had now composed her feelings and her dress, both of which had

been considerably ruffled.

"A husband is hard to get nowadays," she went on, smiling, "but he is

even harder to keep. When a charming girl makes this comparative

difficulty a superlative one, she does a wife grave wrong. Still, under

the circumstances, I forgive you."

"You mustn't presume too much on my wickedness," said Janet, smiling at

this strange turn of affairs. "I'm disgracefully inexperienced."

"Inexperienced! Ah, well, men have an amazing weakness for some kinds

of inexperience--in a girl. In a wife they're not so keen on it. My

dear, if unmarried girls would only put themselves in a wife's place,

what a lot of trouble they'd save--for us now and for themselves later

on. But of course, they can't do it. They think marriage is a picnic on

a motorcycle with the bride in the carriage attachment. What a dream!

Marriage is more like a tennis game with the two players facing each

other across the dividing line of sex. You'll find that out the day

after the wedding! You'll know then that the only way to manage a

husband is to discover his weakest point and keep driving at that until

the game and the set are in your hands. Mr. Grey's weakest point is his

horror of facing facts. He dreads a fact the way a boy dreads soap. I

discovered that at our honeymoon hotel when we debated how to stop the

waiter from serving us with cold soup. Rather than compel the waiter to

change it, Mr. Grey tried to prove that the soup was really quite hot.

No, I'm not the tartar you think I am. I don't object to a man having

his fling now and then, provided it's a short fling. But I can't let him

get into the grip of a girl of your sort, the permanent sort. That

might introduce fatal complications, and I don't mean to take any

chances."

"Then why did you let me come here in the first place?"

"Because you took me in completely," replied this astonishing woman.

"You had none of the obvious female ways. You were almost pathetically

businesslike and you seemed to be--well--no beauty. Excuse me for being

frank."

"The excuses are all on my side, I'm sure," said Janet, highly amused.

"Not at all, my dear. I'm convinced I was quite wrong. You grow on one,

even on a woman. I soon found out that beneath your dovelike innocence

there was a serpentine wisdom. It's a magic combination. No man can

resist it."

"Thank you, Mrs. Grey. This flattery is more than I deserve, but--"

"It's no good protesting. There is a devilish fascination about you.

If I'm beginning to feel it myself, what must poor Mr. Grey feel?"

And with a gesture which betokened that, in these matters, feelings

transcended verbal arguments and oral contracts, she paid Janet what was

owing to her and made it clear that she need not come again.

At the door, she wished Janet good luck.

"My dear," she said, "as a typist you cut rather a poor figure. But

that combination I spoke of--it's worth a fortune--"

Janet went away not knowing whether to laugh or to cry. A good cry

would not have come amiss; and yet, as she counted up the fortunes of

the last two days, she could not help observing that her mishaps had

trod on one another's heels in a procession that was well-nigh comic.

Claude's letter and flight, Cornelia's bad temper, her own involuntary

rudeness to Robert, the crop of errors in the playwright's manuscript,

Mrs. Grey's impertinences, and the crowning loss of her position--here

was a downpour of calamities amounting to a regular deluge!

And not a single ray of sunshine in sight, either.

On second thoughts, she had to admit that this statement was not

strictly true. For Robert would probably be home, and what an immense

relief it would be to tell him all that had happened to her! At the

same time she would be able to obliterate the effect of yesterday's

rudeness.

For she guessed that Robert's feelings had been deeply hurt by her

gesture of withdrawal from him. But she felt no doubt of her power to

conciliate him or to conquer his just resentment. In fact, she had so

little doubt of this power that, the nearer home she got, the more she

looked forward to the prospect of exercising it.

Ah, yes, it would be simple and sweet to make up with Robert, and they

should spend a very jolly afternoon together, working over sundry papers

and planning new activities for the firm of Barr & Lloyd.

And (such is the peremptory, indomitable influence of the heart!), her

spirits rose again. In the full flush of agreeable anticipation, she

began to turn the day's adventures over in her mind. As she did so, she

gave them a humorous twist, for she meant to relate them to Robert

entertainingly, in return for his expected concession to her.

*CHAPTER NINETEEN*

*I*

On reaching her own street, Janet had to plough her way to the Lorillard

tenements through shoals of children that scampered about as derelict as

herself. She felt the keenest pity for these little tots who came from

the very immodel tenements not far away, where five or even eight people

existed in a single room, defying the decencies of life by day and

mocking them by night in order to live up to "the highest standard of

living" in the world.

She did not expect Robert until two o'clock, when he regularly returned

from the League of Guildsmen. In the interval she looked, as a matter

of course, under Cornelia's alarm clock, where the four friends were in

the habit of putting brief communications for one another. She found

the following note addressed to her in Robert's painstaking hand:

Dear Janet:

Forgive me for not being on hand this afternoon. During the next few

days, and perhaps longer, I shall be in Pittsburgh. For some time,

therefore, the whole burden of the firm of Barr & Lloyd will have to

rest on the shoulders of one partner. Lucky that this partner is so

thoroughly staunch and dependable, isn't it?

What is taking me out of town is the strike in Pittsburgh. Thousands of

steel workers have laid down their tools in protest against the

conditions under which they are obliged to work. The contest between

these men and their all-powerful employers is horribly uneven, and the

apathy of the general public towards the issues at stake is appalling.

Naturally, every agency that is pledged to the success of a healthy

labor movement must pitch into this prickly business. For the strikers

need all the help they can get, whether of a material or a moral kind.

It is on the moral side that our League of Guildsmen comes in. The

recent war has filled the earth with indescribable bitternesses and

resentments. It has also given sovereign strength to the idea that

henceforth the control of the world's affairs must be taken away from

the idlers and profiteers and given to the workers and producers. At

every turn, omens of a vast incalculable change force themselves upon

our senses.

Clearly, those who don't want a bloody revolution have got to work tooth

and nail for a pacific one. Now the Guildsmen, being advocates of a

change that shall be peaceful though drastic, have a vital interest in

drumming it into people's heads that violence can never breed anything

save violence and violence again.

You see, don't you, that I am needed there far more than here? Please

believe that I'm sorry in the last degree to upset our joint business

plans and to hold up "The Klondike Mail" on the typewriter at just the

critical moment when Mr. Grey's double-dyed desperadoes are holding it

up in the middle of the third act. It makes me feel like an accessory

to the crime, all the more so in that it gives you, at the secretarial

end, the task of foiling one more villain.

Arrangements have been made at the League office for the delivery to you

of another batch of Mss. Could you call in there tomorrow afternoon?

More later, as soon as my plans are surer.

Ever yours,

Robert.

P.S. On second thoughts, it seems a shame that you should be saddled

with a partner who is bound to be more or less on the jump. I recall

the plan you confided to me last week, the plan of turning Barr & Lloyd

into a real secretarial business on an extensive scale. With this on

your mind, you may well fear that my haphazard movements will prove

ruinous to any settled policy. If so, and whenever you can find a more

stable associate, please have no compunction about making a change. We

must not let sentiment stand in the way of good management.

"He can't even say good-bye without delivering a lecture," said Janet

bitterly.

She felt aggrieved. Just when she needed Robert most, he left her in

the lurch. True, his direct connection with the labor movement made his

departure inevitable. But did he have to rush off to Pittsburgh the

very moment the strike broke out? She supposed his haste was partly

prompted by his injured feelings. If not, why had he so needlessly

offered to dissociate himself from her, why, indeed, had he written such

an entirely cold, unsympathetic letter?

"Like his cold, unsympathetic views on love," she said to herself,

recalling with some scorn his severe, intolerant pronouncements on the

free love theme.

She reviewed the business-like contents of the letter with a growing

sense of desolation. It looked as though she were in for a dismal

evening, one of those dismal evenings that are enormously good for us

_afterwards_, because at the time they so thoroughly plough up our

deepest feelings.

*II*

But the facts of the present were too disturbing to permit her to

extract much consolation from a philosophy of the future.

For Janet's difficulties were by no means entirely sentimental.

Much as Claude's anger and Robert's coolness tortured her feelings, it

was the destruction of her plans that chiefly occupied her thoughts.

These were the plans that Robert had referred to in his letter.

Ably assisted by Cornelia, whose power of sketching the most imposing

schemes quite exhausted her capacity for executing even the humblest

ones, Janet had mapped out a very ambitious career for herself. Her

intention was to make the most of her stenographic foothold; to

accumulate enough resources to permit a spur, so to speak, to be run

into the domain of the law; and eventually to reach a point where the

secretarial specialty and its legal intertwinings should be united in

one occupation.

It was, as Cornelia all aglow remarked, a time when women were not only

casting down the barriers raised by men around the old professions, but

were actually bestirring themselves to carve out brand-new professions.

What Cornelia put into enthusiasm, Janet proposed to put into cold

deeds.

As a first step in this direction, she resolved that the firm of Barr &

Lloyd, which had been born in jest, should be reared in dead earnest.

Her work for Mr. Grey, a certain amount of casual work which she was

getting from friends of the playwright, and such odd jobs as Robert

brought from the Guild League--these three sources were to form the

basis of a secretarial office dealing with authors' manuscripts in

relation to typing, revision, criticism, and so on.

In short, Barr & Lloyd (Barr first, because Robert, as an advocate of

the absolute equality of men and women, insisted that the correct order

of precedence was a strictly alphabetical one)--Barr & Lloyd were to be

manuscript specialists, handling every conceivable matter linked up with

the preparation and sale of manuscripts and the protection of authors'

rights.

From Robert, Janet had extracted a promise to supervise the department

of criticism and revision. Claude (this was before his flight in a fit

of pique) had refused to take the project seriously. Cornelia, in her

most pronounced _bel canto_ style, had volunteered to "lend a helping

hand" to the typewriting department and to give her moral support to

most of the other departments. As Janet's last illusions about Cornelia

were being speedily dissipated, and as she judged that some birds in a

bush are worth ten in the hand, she contracted for Cornelia's moral

support and nothing but her moral support in all the departments.

Then, as regards the legal department. Janet held that, in order to

round out her business in the most complete way, one member of the firm

ought to be equipped with a first-hand training in jurisprudence. She

saw nothing for it but to be this member herself, and accordingly she

had already made arrangements to attend the coming fall sessions of an

Evening Law School. Needless to say, this part of her dream had not

been so much as breathed to Claude.

Janet intended, as soon as she had passed her bar examination, to

specialize on all points of law bearing on literary and dramatic

productions, the rights of authors, and the relations between the buyers

and sellers of manuscripts. She had been put onto this idea by a popular

short-story writer, one of Mr. Grey's friends. This man had assured her

that the literary field, on its legal side, was practically a virgin

field. Merchants, inventors, landlords, captains of industry and the

like could, where the law touched their spheres of influence, find

appropriate legal specialists with all the precedents, traditions,

decisions, appeals, evasions, etc., at their fingers' ends. Authors

alone were in no such happy case. The legal background of authorship

was a vast morass of contradictions, quibbles and uncertainties. Authors

were frequently at sea in respect of their rights, constantly

handicapped in the matter of expert advice, and always liable to be done

in the eye by the more unscrupulous members of the fraternity of

editors, publishers, managers and agents.

This, then, was the field that Janet meant to conquer. She had a roseate

vision of Barr & Lloyd occupying a suite of offices on the lower end of

Madison or Park Avenue. If fortune favored her, these offices were to be

staffed with ambitious young women assistants whom she would help to

useful and honorable careers (as far as male prejudice and

discrimination would allow). Barr & Lloyd, in other words, besides

their primary business as manuscript practitioners, would have a

secondary mission, namely, that of multiplying the avenues along which

woman might march towards economic equality with men.

Such was the purpose which Janet had already begun to work for. She now

saw all her plans collapsing like a pricked balloon. The action taken

by Mrs. Grey meant the loss of much potential custom which she had hoped

would grow by recommendation out of the Grey patronage. The most

galling, stabbing fact in all this sorry business was the reflection

that she had failed not merely in her human and business dealings but in

her workmanship. If only she hadn't made a mess of those last

manuscripts for the playwright, the ones she had prepared under the

strain of Claude's tempestuous displeasure! Mrs. Grey's taunt still

rankled in her ears: "As a typist, you cut a very poor figure--"

True, Mrs. Grey had tacked on another phrase--the one about her "magic

combination." But what did this trumped-up compliment weigh against the

maddening behavior of Claude and Robert?

Both of them had deserted her!

Janet was not addicted to the windy heroics cultivated by the Outlaws of

Kips Bay, but for once she believed herself entitled to indulge in them.

She really felt deserted. By Claude, by Robert, by Cornelia and, of

course, by her family.

"How naturally I think of the family when I'm glum!" was her silent

comment.

Her thoughts ran back to the time when she had left home in defiance of

Mrs. Barr's ultimatum.

Since then, her mother had written one letter full of that spirit of

Christian forbearance that has driven so many people into the devil's

camp. After that, not another word from her. But there had followed a

steady stream of appeals from her father, imploring her to come back at

any price, swearing that life at home was not worth living without her,

and promising to do anything in the wide world she demanded (except, as

Janet sardonically observed to herself, damp down her mother's tyranny a

trifle. He had never had, and he never would have, the nerve to do this

or to put up the least show of fight.)

As a last effort, her sister Emily had paid a visit to the Lorillard

tenements--partly perhaps from curiosity. She affirmed that she had

come of her own free will, and probably believed this statement to be

the truth. Janet knew very well that her sister was, consciously or

unconsciously, the family ambassador. The Barrs always throve best when

their right hand did not know what their left hand was doing.

Emily, all a-tingle with the exhilaration which an angel inevitably

feels when descending upon a glittering abode of vice, had tried hard

not to betray her excitement. In a tone essenced with pious sorrow and

celestial distress! She had assured the erring one (though not in these

words), that all would be forgiven if only she returned to her home

before the world (of the Barrs) should discover that a Barr had

abandoned Brooklyn for Kips Bay, and her family for the society of

atheists, Bolshevists, and Bohemians!

"But I haven't the faintest notion of abandoning you," Janet had

replied. "I believe I can lead a fuller, freer, more active life away

from mother's apron strings, that's all. Of course I want to see the

family from time to time. I could come on short visits--"

Emily had assured her, not without a trace of exultation, that Mrs. Barr

would never hear of such a cool arrangement. Either the prodigal

daughter returned once and for all, or the family would treat her as

dead.

"Really! But how you'll miss the funeral!" Janet had wickedly

exclaimed.

At which Emily had put on her gloves.

All later messages sent by Janet to her mother in an effort to put their

mutual relations on a more reasonable footing had been severely ignored.

The only communications she had received were growingly infrequent notes

from her father, and these contained nothing but the same old

appeals--sentimental, pathetic, fatuous.

*III*

The doorbell startled her out of her long, melancholy reverie. She flew

to the threshold, and in came Claude! She had proposed to treat him

coolly at their next meeting. But his return was as sudden as it was

unexpected. And he was Claude, the same Claude with the same striking

appearance, the same telling voice, the same handsome face. Instantly,

the magnetic spark that had darted from one to the other at the Outlaws'

Ball made its swift, poignant, thrilling leap between them again.

Though words were superfluous, Claude, as he clasped her in a passionate

embrace, murmured:

"Janet, darling, forgive me. I was a beast to write a letter like

that."

"Confession is good for the soul," said Janet, laughing and trying to

release her head.

"Are you angry? Well, you ought to be. And I ought to grovel in the

dust at your feet. You are a saint to forgive me, and I should be

ashamed to accept forgiveness if I hadn't suffered. Yes, Janet, I've

suffered cruelly. I never had so keen a grief and I never so thoroughly

deserved one. But I'm nearly ill with worry."

He _did_ look pale, nor did it hurt his cause that pallor became him.

Besides, his apologies were as overwhelming as his fits of temper. How

could the poor girl help forgiving him?

And so Janet, who but a few minutes before had been considering

(mock-heroically to be sure) sundry historic forms of self-slaughter,

now forgot all about jumping off Brooklyn Bridge, etc., and poured a

heavenly compassion on Claude.

"Something happened in Huntington," she said. "Something serious. Does

it involve me? I want you to tell me straight."

"That scoundrel Burley tipped my father off about us, and as a result,

the old man is half out of his wits. He is determined that my marriage

with Marjorie shall not fall through, for the one terror of his life is

that of disobliging Mr. Armstrong. In what form the word was passed

along the line, I don't know. But they were at me, one and all, day and

night, giving me a hundred and one sly intimations of the general

satisfaction that would follow the much desired event. The pressure got

to be unbearable."

He said that the older people had left no stone unturned to bring the

Armstrong-Fontaine alliance to pass. Pacing the floor restlessly, he

spoke of the delicate hints, the veiled references, the consummate skill

with which he and Marjorie were engineered into tete-a-tetes. Could

Janet picture him alone with Marjorie, and the resultant sessions of

sweet, silent thought? Had she any idea of what the imperious will of

Armstrong's daughter could do in the way of maneuvering a man into the

most difficult situations? Janet had little difficulty in calling up an

image of the stately brunette with lustrous dark hair, patrician nose,

and sulky, discontented mouth. This imposing young lady had impressed

herself indelibly upon Janet's mind at the Mineola Aerodrome, and, such

are the unfathomable processes of sex, Janet profoundly pitied Claude.

She did this without a suspicion that he might be drawing generously

upon his imagination for the sake of that very pity of hers, which she

gave him so divinely. Nor did it occur to her that there were few young

men in all New York who would have been in unrelieved misery if Marjorie

Armstrong had set her cap at them.

As a matter of fact, Claude quite omitted to mention that he had gone to

Huntington with more than a vague notion of finding out whether he and

Marjorie couldn't hit it off together, after all; also that, if

Marjorie, with all her eagerness to capture him, had not so plainly

exposed her design of "bossing" the marriage after it had taken

place--well, then--

What he did say, was:

"Of course, I was left quite free to do as I pleased. Oh, quite free.

They wouldn't lead the horse to water--not they, that would be brutal

coercion--they would simply make it drink."

This irony expressed the full truth. Claude had virtually given his

father a promise not to marry Janet. But Mr. Fontaine senior put no

faith in vows that were subject to the stresses and strains of love.

Mistrustful of his son's infatuation and also of the unknown quantity of

Janet's ambition, he did not scruple to adopt any tactical measure by

which the union of the Armstrong-Fontaine forces might be achieved.

"What do you mean to do?" asked Janet, greatly troubled.

"What _can_ I do? What can _any_ prisoner do? Run away, I suppose."

"What--without me?"

"Well, you see, I'm planning to go to Europe, darling. Separated by the

Atlantic I shall be able to make my position much clearer to my father.

An ocean is an astonishing convenience when it stands between the giver

and the receiver of an explanation."

"Yes, but why can't I go, too?"

"You dear innocent," he said, taking her hand tenderly, "we can't go

cavorting over two continents as if we were merely joy-riding from here

to Quakertown."

"Why not?" she persisted, with her customary refusal to be sidetracked.

*IV*

The question embarrassed him. Even had he been clear about the train of

thought at the back of his mind, he could not, in all brutal directness,

have said: "A man in my station does not flaunt his mistresses in the

face of the public. That is all very well for the vulgar rich. But not

for my sort. High-class polygamy is strictly _sub rosa_."

Claude did not explicitly think this, much less say it. His chief

difficulty in the way of reaching a straightforward understanding with

Janet was that his mind did not work straightforwardly upon the problem

of sex relations. His adopted radical professions were entirely

subordinate to powerful, instinctive reactions along traditional lines.

Thus, at heart, he had little use for Janet's views about free love. To

Janet, the term meant a public abandonment of an obsolete institution.

To Claude, it was little more than a polite synonym for illicit

intercourse.

Claude, in fact, had no deep quarrel with existing institutions. He

prided himself on being tolerant, and his tolerance extended to the

institutions of Bohemianism (which had no recognition in law), as well

as to the institutions of the established order (which enjoyed this

recognition). His support of "advanced" art, his membership in the

Outlaws' Club, his philandering among the Lorillard tenementers--these

were all ways of escape from the particularity of normal civilized life.

Bohemianism, by systematically discarding troublesome forms, costly

conventions and restrictive social obligations, really organized these

ways of escape for him and provided a maximum of pleasure with a minimum

of effort.

He was, therefore, by no means prepared to go as far as Janet wished to

go, openly; yet he was fully prepared to go to the limit, clandestinely.

So much so, that a severe critic like Robert would have said that Claude

was deliberately taking advantage of Janet's inexperienced outlook on

life. And it was quite true that Claude was willing to profit by her

belief in free love, although he was far from willing to champion this

belief, much less to become a martyr in its promotion.

But if he was exploiting Janet's infatuation for him, he was not doing

so consciously. And the fact remained that, had she been so minded, she

could just as easily have exploited his infatuation for her. Indeed,

the latter would have been easier. Claude was not aware of this. He

was aware only of his own power, and he believed he was exercising

almost superhuman self-control in an effort to avoid compromising her

future.

He believed he was doing this now, whilst fishing for an answer to

Janet's candid "_why not?_" A few hours earlier, in Huntington, under

the concerted pressure of the Armstrong family, he had realized that he

would have to give up either Marjorie or Janet; and it had occurred to

him that if he took Janet now, Marjorie was not lost to him later;

whereas if he took Marjorie now, Janet was lost to him forever.

Naturally, it was not in terms of pitiless realism that he sought to

explain his choice.

A more heroic explanation was that he had given up Marjorie for Janet's

sake, and that, on a peremptory summons of the heart, he had run away

from Huntington determined to risk everything--from his father's wrath

to the loss of Mr. Armstrong's protection in the matter of smuggled

diamonds. The heroic explanation was the one he meant to give to Janet.

Looking, at the moment, into Janet's gray eyes in their superb setting

of long, dark lashes, he was ready to give his thoughts any form that

might be acceptable to her. Surely, such a mixture of radical daring and

native good sense, of enticement and candor, of self-reliance that

ennobled her and soft yielding that flattered _him_--such a mixture had

never before been found in one woman. It made her exquisite, enigmatic,

thrilling and quite indispensable to him.

So reasoned his heart. And all his commanding nonchalance returned.

*V*

The result was that when Janet, failing to get an answer to her

question, repeated anew her wish to accompany him abroad, he enfolded

her in his arms and said:

"After all, why not?"

And after a fervent embrace, he added:

"Janet, I think you ought to face what's in store for us."

"Don't let's cross bridges, Claude," she pleaded.

"We'll get married, of course," he went on, unheeding her. "Frankly, my

father won't like it. He'll probably make Rome howl. However, he'll

get used to it in the end--especially when he meets you. But, though

there's a storm ahead, you are brave and we'll weather it, I'm sure."

"Your father won't raise a storm," said Janet, with a strange smile,

"for a small but important reason. Remember, I'm not going to be

married."

"Janet!"

"You know I don't believe in it."

They argued the matter pro and con, she spiritedly, he lamely. Janet

pointed out, among other things, that when Mr. Fontaine senior learnt of

their free union he was little likely to attempt any serious

interference, but would count on time to separate them.

"'Love's not Time's fool!'" said Claude, quoting dithyrambically. "We'll

never be separated, darling, will we?"

"Well--not for the present," said Janet, with dancing eyes. "I won't

vouch for our dim and distant feelings."

"No teasing, you darling imp!"

"Claude, I mean it. If--if it should turn out that your father was

right, that will merely prove that we were wrong."

He was at a complete loss how to treat her incredible self-surrender.

As a man of the world, he was part scandalized, part uneasy, according

as he swerved from the conviction that Janet was candid, to the

suspicion that she was designing. Again, as a gay Bohemian trifler, he

saw in her attitude an easy way out of possible complications. Whether

he should or should not carry out his offer of marriage was now a

question he would not have to face. She did not mean to put his vows to

the test! This was breath-bereaving, staggering; it was even slightly

annoying. But, her eccentric choice being a fact, surely the

consequences did not rest on his soul?

"Janet, you don't know what you are doing!" he cried out involuntarily,

being torn many ways at once.

She, too, was greatly agitated; but, under the pressure of her theory,

she kept her head. While he stood there as if distraught, she poured

out a flood of reasons to which he scarcely listened. For instance, she

said it was criminal for two people to form a permanent union or bring

children into a family until they were sure of being well-suited to each

other and of establishing a family that children would wish to enter.

All marriages ought to be trial marriages of the kind that George

Meredith had suggested long ago.

Moreover, until she became independent in the matter of money, she

couldn't dream of subscribing to any permanent arrangement.

He replied that this was all nonsense and derided Meredith as a bookworm

and a dreamer. For his own part, hadn't he money enough to provide for

them both? If she wouldn't take half his money, she didn't love him.

That was flat!

"I do love you!" cried Janet, with more visible emotion than before.

"That's why I mustn't marry you."

He rose with a wild movement.

"I must save myself--and you, too!" he murmured. "I'm going abroad by

the first steamer."

But these words were dashed with insurgent passion. Handsome, hypnotic,

intense, his whole being vibrated towards her. She surrendered

incontinently.

"Not without me!" she said, enchaining him in her arms.

He kissed her tempestuously.

"It's a daring step, and a perilous one," he said, more in weak protest

than in forceful remonstrance.

"No, no, no!" she cried, as with a gesture of ecstasy she hid her face

on his shoulder.

*PART IV*

*NEMESIS*

*CHAPTER TWENTY*

*I*

One morning in the middle of August, Harry Kelly cut short his

gymnastics and went downstairs to get fruit, cream and rolls for

Cornelia, as he had done daily since Janet left. The letter box held

one letter, a fat one, postmarked Paris. Cornelia was inclined to be

lackadaisical before breakfast, but a letter enlivened her at once,

especially if it came from a long-lost friend or bore a foreign

postmark. Kelly sent his powerful form bounding up the staircase, the

victuals being safeguarded by a miracle of balancing.

"A letter from Paris," he called out joyfully, as he entered Apartment

Fifteen.

"From Janet!" exclaimed Cornelia with conviction. One glance at the

handwriting verified her guess.

"Janet's hand," she said, and tore the envelope open feverishly.

"Wouldn't you enjoy reading it more after breakfast?" he said wistfully

as he watched Cornelia unfolding a great many pages of writing.

"What an idea! Make the coffee, Hercules, there's a good boy. The

water is boiling; all you need to do is to pour the water on the coffee

and let it stand."

As Kelly had fallen sole heir to the daily duty of preparing her

breakfast, he uncomplainingly went to work. Meanwhile, Cornelia, in a

very becoming green-and-gold Mimosa jacket, sat down on a lounge and

buried herself in Janet's letter.

*II*

Dear Cornelia:

Here I am in the Luxembourg Gardens, alone with my fountain pen and my

pad of paper, Claude having gone to the races as the guest of a Russian

Grand Duke. I feel ages removed from the days of Kips Bay, though by

the calendar only four weeks have gone by.

Why haven't you heard from me in all this time? That, I imagine, is the

first question you would ask me if we met face to face. No, you

wouldn't. You would divine the answer. You would know that the

blinding, paralyzing, notoriety into which we were suddenly plunged,

left me with but one desire, the supreme desire for solitude. A desert

without a single oasis would not have been too lonely for me to live in.

For a few days even Claude--

Those cruel headlines, those stabbing capital letters! Like points of

fire in a demon dance they riot in and out of my memory yet. "Affinity

or Elopement!" "Fontaine Heir Meets Enchantress on Baronia!" "Diamond

King's Son in Joy-Ride to Europe!" How did the inquisition happen to

overlook such exquisite weapons of torture as huge red capitals on a

smooth white space?

Writing the letters down affords a mild relief. To my physical sight,

not to my mind's eye. Oh yes, I actually saw the headlines that

Hutchins Burley fabricated in his newspaper story. Some thoughtful

enemy of Claude's took pains to have a copy of the _Evening Chronicle_

forwarded to his Paris address.

Didn't you guess at once that Hutchins was the beast responsible for the

publicity we got? That vicious man has a mortal grudge to pay off

against me or against Claude or perhaps against us both. But what for?

How he got on our track, heaven alone knows. Heaven and Mark Pryor.

Yes, Cornelia, our own Mark Pryor (the human embodiment of the theory of

protective coloration, as Robert called him)--he it was who brought me

the fateful news. In this wise.

On the second morning out, I was taking a turn around the deck by

myself, while Claude was chatting with the captain. (The "Baronia's"

captain is an old friend of Claude's family, the Fontaines being heavy

shareholders in the steamship company. This was the connection that

enabled us to get accommodations at such short notice, the purser's room

having been given up to me and the second engineer's quarters to

Claude.)

As I said, I was roving about the upper deck, when one of the

ventilators or posts or something, suddenly became alive. Or so it

seemed to my startled eyes. Walking remorselessly towards me, this no

longer stationary object magically assumed the form and voice of Mark

Pryor! You could have knocked me down with a feather. (By the way, I'm

more certain than ever that he's a detective or a spy or a Soviet

propagandist--or can he be merely an American novelist studying life for

the _Saturday Evening Post_?)

Whatever the key to his inmost mystery, I've always been greatly taken

with him. He's like a flash of lightning on a pitch-dark night: his

comings and goings are never more sinister or mysterious than when his

sudden vivid presence gives them a momentary relief.

Without letting me into the secret of his skill at sleight-of-hand (or

rather, sleight-of-feet), he drew me aside and told me in a most

sympathetic way of the story about Claude and me that was being

headlined in the _Evening Chronicle_ and that was soon to be the gossip

of two continents. The information had breezed his way--by wireless.

Out of pure regard for me, he had bribed the radio man to keep mum.

Wasn't it splendid of him? But he warned me to prepare for a leak.

"The only thing you can keep dark nowadays is the truth," he said, in

his quiet way, without a twinkle in his eye.

He also said that Hutchins Burley was certainly at the bottom of the

whole scandal. He was sure of this, because he had seen Burley on the

pier shortly before the "Baronia" left, and because of other reasons

which he declared he was not at liberty to divulge.

After predicting that we should meet again, Mr. Pryor "faded away" as

imperceptibly as usual, leaving me a prey to my thoughts. My heart was

mostly in my boots and I can tell you I was getting pretty limp when I

pulled myself up short with the reminder that I must pluck up a little

courage if only to show that I deserved a disinterested friend like Mr.

Pryor. (He's in France at present, on some dark business or other. I

don't care how dark, I'm glad he's here. The mere fact gives me the

sensation of being watched over. I'm confident that Mark Pryor's keen

sight is at least as far-reaching as the long arm of coincidence.)

It wasn't exactly a picnic to tell Claude the news. Like most of us,

Claude thrives wonderfully well on good luck but takes bad luck hard.

Naturally, to a man who has so many important friends, newspaper

notoriety is a bitter pill to swallow. Claude raged at his fate with a

violence that frightened me. He tortured himself by anticipating the

libels to which his character would be exposed, the pictures of himself

and me that the yellow newspapers would print, the slanders that the

busybodies would privately circulate. How his father and the Armstrongs

would take the affair was another source of torment. And then there was

the fear that the story might leak out on the "Baronia" and that we

should become the talk of the ship.

It was a calamity. And the worst of it was that Claude appeared to

think I was in some way directly responsible for it. His anger worried

me far more than the notoriety did; the angrier he got, the more the

notoriety sank into relative insignificance. He accused me of being

callous! Wasn't that monstrously unjust? Merely because my advice was

that we should make the best of a very bad matter and face the world as

if nothing had happened of which we were ashamed. He took my calmness,

which was all on the surface, as a personal affront. It infuriated him

more (if that were possible) than the exposure, and caused him to accuse

me of disloyalty and lack of sympathy. Are men ever satisfied? They

pretend that they can't endure a weeping woman. Yet, give them a

stoical countenance, and they'll ask for tears.

No, Cornelia, this was not the first rift. That had come on the very

evening we sailed, when the passengers held a dance on deck in the

moonlight. I was not feeling very well and danced only once, but Claude

did full duty as a leader of the cotillion. During his absence from my

side, a young British captain in mufti (he had been an ace in the war)

sat down in a steamer chair next to mine and helped me, what with his

charming manner and his gorgeous British accent, to while away the time.

All went swimmingly until, in an interval between dances, Claude came

back to me. Can you call up an image of Claude, the magnificent,

approaching at a temperature of absolute zero? His manner, of the ice

icy, froze the poor captain dead away. This done, he turned on me and

asked me what I meant by "picking a man up!"

You can imagine that I replied pretty tartly, and one word led to

another till we reached a point where Claude threatened that he would

never marry me--no, not for all the king's horses and all the king's

men. At this, I burst out laughing. My laughter was immodest,

unladylike, spiteful. And I should have regretted it, had Claude

understood me. But Claude is in some respects a reincarnation of

Kipling's famous vampire lady. He had never understood, and now, he

never will understand.

But I'm running ahead of my story.

As we feared, rumor and gossip about us soon had free rein on board the

"Baronia." Poor Claude had to bear the brunt of this annoyance and of

the Captain's anger too. That Claude and a lady were together on the

voyage had certainly been a secret, but a secret to which the old

sea-dog was a party. The Captain's sense of propriety was not outraged

by the secret. It was outraged only when the secret became a matter of

common knowledge. And he did not permit a feeling of delicacy to

restrain his indignation against his fellow conspirators.

What happened on the "Baronia" was trifling compared to the furor of our

landing at Southampton. We were met by "all the latest London papers"

filled with the wildest details of our "elopement." That is the way

they featured our experiment over here. It was described as the

elopement of a young multimillionaire with a poor plebeian stenographer,

an elopement carried out in the teeth of a tyrant father with invincibly

aristocratic prejudices. Shades of the Barrs and their Mayflower

ancestry!

Worse remained behind. The English reporters promptly spotted Claude.

You can't be six feet two in your socks and have the airs and graces of

Prince Charming, without being conspicuous even amongst a crowd of

first-class passengers on a fifty-thousand-ton liner. When the

newspaper men plied poor Claude with questions, I began to weaken at the

knees. But Claude was a trump. He kept his most nonchalant air, gave

cleverly evasive answers, and even begged one of his tormentors for a

cigarette quite in the style of the imperturbable villain of a screen

play. Then a battery of motion picture men turned their cameras on us.

Mark Pryor and the British captain swooped down to the rescue at this

critical moment, which was very lucky for us, as we had just about

exhausted our nerve (to say nothing of our nerves).

We stayed in London barely forty-eight hours. In spite of our assumed

names we were bundled out of three hotels, thanks to the curiosity of

reporters who kept after Claude as though he were a ticket-of-leave man.

I had supposed that only American journalists hounded people, but

evidently the London tribesmen have taken a leaf out of the New York

book in the matter of pitiless persistence. Claude felt so harassed,

outraged and persecuted that he could not get out of London fast enough.

He saw a reporter in every strange face and lived in constant dread of

another forced interview until we were safely across the Channel.

And now I had better answer the question that I know is uppermost in

your mind.

We have been living as a married couple! Now it's out. Your Janet, the

bold and fearless advocate of free unions, has been masquerading as a

wife, a timorous and trustful, cowering and respectable wife, differing

from other wives only in being a fraud.

It's a terrible comedown, a sickening fall from grace, isn't it?

But what else could I have done, short of leaving Claude entirely?

You see, Cornelia, the stark fact was that we couldn't get

accommodations anywhere except by pretending that we were married. Had

we declined to make this pretense, we couldn't have remained together at

all unless we adopted all sorts of secret, underground, time consuming

devices. It was a choice between the pretense and the secrecy--a

Hobson's choice, so far as I could see.