Front matter (continued 2)

Ah yes, and Claude! With Claude at her side she doubted whether she should mind even a raid. Indeed, wouldn't it be rather fun to be caught in one? And so, while Claude was preoccupied with piloting his charges to safety, Janet half hoped that she might not be cheated of a practical answer to her question.

VI

Meanwhile the quiet stranger had contrived to get into one of the twisting, struggling whirlpools of men in the fracas, and to insinuate his immaculate person next to Hutchins Burley.

"Have a care," he said, in Burley's ear. "In another minute this rough-house will be cleaned up by plain-clothes men.

"Who in hell are you?" yelled Burley, none too pleased with the features of the man who had warned him before.

"Why, nobody in particular," answered the stranger coolly, and beginning to edge rapidly away. Burley tramped after him, his befuddled wits somewhat cleared by the recent pummelling.

"Then how the devil did you spot the cops?" he said, ploughing his way ruthlessly through human obstructions. "Do they whisper the secrets in your beautiful ears?"

"Oh, secrets are always coming my way," was the nonchalant answer.

The mysterious one halted as soon as he had put several yards between himself and the mob. Cool and self-contained, he was a striking contrast to Hutchins Burley as the latter, dishevelled, muttering and out of breath, bore down upon him.

"Mr. Burley, you'd better go, while the going's good! Here's an emergency exit. Good night. I'll look you up in the morning."

While the stranger's unobtrusive figure merged into the environment, Burley took the hint with loud Falstaffian clatter. He had barely passed through the door, when the lights went out and the raid actually began.

CHAPTER FIVE

I

During the Outlaws' Ball, Cornelia sat alone in the Lorillard apartment. Had she dressed for the masquerade she had declined to attend? One might have been pardoned for thinking so. To a piece of black satin, draped around her in sensuous lines, a girdle of tangerine velvet added the sole touch of color. It also served to draw her dress in high above the waist and to bring out the burnished gold of her hair. The fabric was ingeniously held together by pins, Cornelia being an advocate of a mode of dressing or draping that dispensed with sewing as much as possible.

One handsome shoulder was bare; and this arrangement detracted nothing from the garment's look of insecurity. Cornelia's men friends were apt to be on tenterhooks lest her pinned dresses should suddenly come to pieces. It was an emotion she was not altogether unconscious of, or wholly displeased with.

To the very last she had persisted in her refusal to take part in the festivity, and had held out firmly against the friendly blandishments with which Janet, Robert, Mazie, and Hutchins Burley had successively tried to shake her determination. She defended her position by declaring that dancing bored her to distraction, not to mention that the current dance forms, the fox trot, the jazz steps and the glide, seemed to her to be unspeakable profanations of a fine art.

With this explanation her friends had to be content, while they guessed at the true reason for her refusal. Claude hazarded the view that her real motive was a dread of emerging in public while her affair with Percival Houghton, the artist, was still fresh in everybody's memory. Mazie repeated her laconic opinion that Cornelia could spite more people and attract more attention by being missed than by being present.

About eleven o'clock some one rang. When Cornelia opened the door, she was confronted by an athletic young man whom she recognized as the occupant of apartment number thirteen, the one next to her own. Mistaking her dress for negligee, he apologized profusely and then explained that the gas in his room having suddenly given out he needed a twenty-five-cent piece to set the meter in action again. Cornelia observed that whereas his form was the form of the roaring lion, his voice was the voice of the cooing dove.

"I always keep an extra quarter on the mantelpiece," he said, coloring with embarrassment, "but the light went down all of a sudden, and in the dark I couldn't locate the pesky coin."

Cornelia hastened to get the necessary money. Returning, she sympathized with him upon the fickleness of quarter meters.

"Horrid, mercenary things! I'd give them 'no quarter,' if I dared, wouldn't you?"

"Yes—the light always goes out in the dark," he said, quaintly.

He was obviously anxious to make a good impression, and ill at ease because of this anxiety.

"Just wait a second, will you, Miss," he said, as she handed him the money. "I'll give it back right away."

As his door was only a few feet away from hers, she waited in the hall and looked curiously into his room after he had lighted up. She noticed that the place was filled with gymnastic paraphernalia—clubs, dumb-bells, weights, and a boxing bag apparatus. Meanwhile, he rummaged through the articles on the mantelpiece until he discovered the missing money tucked snugly away in an empty match-box.

"I don't know how it got there," he said, ruefully. "I guess I meant to put it underneath, but slipped it into the box absent-mindedly."

She smiled. "You have a complete pocket gymnasium," she commented.

"Yes, I'm pretty well rigged out," he replied, delighted at her show of interest.

He was very much impressed with her appearance, which mirrored a world socially more elevated and more beautiful than his own. He racked his wits for an excuse to detain her.

"Is this how you keep in trim?" asked Cornelia, indicating the apparatus.

"I—I'm a professional wrestler and a physical culture expert," he went on, fumbling in his pocket for a visiting card.

"Ah, I see. It's business, not pleasure." She did not look at the card, but flashed eloquent glances at his figure.

"That's it," he replied, emboldened by her mute flattery. "Will you come in and let me show you around? Young ladies aren't always interested in these things."

"Another time. It's too late now."

Her phrases emerged so curtly and her relapse into frigid conventionality was so abrupt that the young man stammered a hurt good night, and rather hastily closed his door.

Cornelia gained her sexual gratification in diluted but frequent doses. Without being a deliberate flirt like Mazie, she instinctively tried out the subtler weapons of sex on every man she liked and, since her appearance was both striking and agreeable and her likings fairly far flung, men often responded to her charm with a crudeness that gave her great offence. She seemed unconscious of the incitement in her manner; when, on one occasion, Robert pointed it out, she denied the charge with mingled passion and surprise.

And it was quite true that she took no pleasure in arousing a man's desire. All her pleasure was derived from baffling it. Curiously enough, an enamored man was an object which aroused in her only a feeling of distaste. And the presence of this feeling satisfied her that she was the innocent victim of his condition rather than the responsible author.

Perhaps it was this attitude of Cornelia's that Robert had in mind when he said that there was an indefinable suggestion of latent wickedness about her, of wickedness she had neither the vitality nor the courage to live up to. How much her luckless amour had to do with her inverted sex emotions, it would be hard to say. Robert's private view was that it had thrown her into the society of people like the Kips Bay tenementers who, by all current moral standards, were not "respectable." He also held that it had inspired her with a passion for respectability, as secret and as strong as the drunkard's longing to be considered a sober man.

After her neighbor's retirement, Cornelia looked at his card. In the middle was inscribed the name "Harry Kelly" and underneath appeared: "The Harlem Gorilla, Champion of the Mat."

II

It was an hour or more before the doorbell of suite number fifteen rang again. This time the visitor was Robert Lloyd. His entrance drove Cornelia's languor away. But she concealed her immense delight and received him neutrally enough.

"I couldn't endure the monotony of the ball another minute," he declared. "You've no idea what a relief it is to be able to come here."

"What was so monotonous, Cato?"

"What wasn't!" said Robert, taking off his overcoat and revealing the black friar's hood and gown that had served him during the evening. "The music, the dancing, the ogling, the drinking, the sickening coquetry, the silly speeches to and from brainless companions—in short, everything!"

"My dear!" exclaimed Cornelia. "At a ball, what can you expect?"

"Oh, I know I'm a fool for my pains," said Robert, laughing off the vexation he felt at having frittered away a whole evening.

He began to undo the girdle of his gown.

"Stop!" she cried. "I haven't had a really good look at your costume."

"Nor I at yours," he said, noticing how her dress lapped and caressed her form. He praised the effect freely.

Pleased, she went to his side, pulled his hood over his head, set his girdle and gown aright, and then stepped back to inspect the result, clapping her hands in approval as she did so.

"When the devil is sick of the world, the devil a monk would be!"

"The devil a monk am I!" said Robert, "unless an unholy rage at the world is a first-class qualification for monastic honors."

"Robert, the part fits you to perfection. It's astonishing how neatly you manage to blend the temper of a devil with the austerity of a monk."

"Not astonishing at all," said Robert, divesting himself of the costume. "Like most young men I have a craving for pleasure, excitement and female society. That's what you call the devil in me. But my observation is keen enough to show me that, under present social conditions, I can't give this craving either a temperate or an honorable satisfaction. So I repress it as much as common sense allows, and you call that repression austerity."

"Cato, you ought to be writing tracts for the Ethical Culture Society instead of newspaper articles for Hutchins' wicked Evening Chronicle. What are you doing among the Outlaws instead of in a goody-goody Sunday School?"

He took her raillery in good part.

"Every journalist is a patcher-up of unconsidered trifles," he said. "He makes a crazy quilt of them as orderly and coherent as he can. Well, where can I get the raw material I need in greater supply than in this little community of criminality and sentimentality, of Radicalism and bad debts? Kips Bay is an inexhaustible mine of police news and town talk."

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

"No?" he replied, amused at the shot. "I suppose I do grow more squeamish every day. Nothing like a steady diet of police episodes for purifying purposes. It acts the way some nauseous drugs do."

"You're perfectly detestable," she cried. She didn't like anybody but herself to disparage Kips Bay. "You've put your mind in a prison, Rob. Your symptoms require a drastic remedy. If I were a physician of the soul, I should prescribe marriage."

"Don't be a Job's comforter, Cornelia. I said I wanted female society, not female satiety. And, by the way, since when did you begin to advocate marriage as the door to freedom? You have always denounced it as the trapdoor to slavery."

"I don't advocate it for women, and even for men I recommend it only in the most desperate cases."

"Well, mine isn't desperate. But Hutchins Burley's is, judging from his conduct at the ball tonight. You might prescribe for him."

"Oh, he's past all treatment. What do you think he told me in strict confidence yesterday? That he's weighed down by a great sorrow; too many women find him irresistible, and persecute him to death with their lovesick attentions."

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

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

"Well, he seemed to be a remarkably willing martyr tonight. He buzzed like a huge wasp from one pair of lips to another. When he got to Mazie, who unfolds her petals so alluringly, he became quite intoxicated."

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

"Whose mind is a prison now?"

"I don't know what you mean," said Cornelia acridly. "Please don't assume that, because I no longer believe in marriage, I've turned my back on decency and good manners."

"This is breaking a butterfly on a wheel, Cornelia. The fact is, Mazie doesn't have to act to produce the peculiar behavior in men which I described. You know that quite well. She is what Joseph Conrad calls 'one of the women of all time.' I'd call her a throw-back with the emotions and appetites of a cave woman and the thoughts and looks of a Ziegfield chorus girl. It's not by acting shamelessly, or by acting at all, but by just passively being herself that she sets a man's blood boiling."

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

"Be fair, Cornelia. Some men's blood does, yes. Men on Mazie's own level. Burley's one of them."

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

"I'd better not go into details. He played several questionable pranks. Once, it looked as though he were on the point of seizing Mazie by her locks and dragging her, stone-man fashion, to his lair. Even Mazie had to act then, really to act, for she was after bigger game."

"You mean, Claude?"

"Yes. But Claude had no eyes for the woman of all time. His gaze was absolutely absorbed by a new star of the first magnitude, a star not charted in the heavens before."

"And this starry wonder?"

"Was Janet Barr."

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

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

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

The shaft missed.

"Yes, Burley got the worst end of it," he went on innocently. "I dare say Mazie consoled herself easily enough. But Burley's aspirations have met more than one jolt to-night. When he made a dead set at Janet—that was another rebuff."

Robert described the riotous scene outside the gypsy tent.

"Then, as I've already told you, Mazie gave him the slip; with the result that I've never seen Burley more completely divested of his first-prize bumptiousness. However, he soon pulled himself together."

"Goodness knows there must have been plenty of Outlaw girls ready to lay balm on the big scamp's wounds."

"Yes. And I needn't remind you that many of these young ladies believe in free speech, free men and free love. Well, Hutchins made the rounds of those he knew and publicly challenged them to live up to their pretensions. His proposals were brutally frank."

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

"They received them with scornful resentment—just like ordinary conventional creatures. That was what was so surprising. For Hutchins was simply a man who took their professed opinions at face value. 'Darling,' he would say bluntly, to one of his pets, 'Darling, I like you and your ruby lips. If you like me and are not otherwise engaged, suppose we go off to Paradise.' It was raw, of course. But you can't say it wasn't what is called 'free love'."

"Really, Rob!"

"Exactly. They were every bit as scandalized as you are. After gasping for breath, they called for their escorts. Whereupon I concluded that instinct is mightier than opinion and that the beliefs we inherit are vastly stronger than the beliefs we acquire."

Cornelia ignored this piece of satire. And Robert then told how Burley had resumed his pursuit of Janet.

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

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

"She's been much in demand. There was the gypsy tent, remember. When it comes to innocent credulity, a radical's capacity is just as great as any honest man's. So what with examining scores of palms and eluding Hutchins Burley, Janet might have died from exhaustion but for Claude's gallant interference."

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

"And the novelties have usually returned the passion!"

Cornelia felt a twinge of jealousy. But as Janet had evidently not been very attentive to Robert, and had even hurt his feelings, she was hardly conscious of the emotion.

"Janet is young, impressionable and fresh from a Puritan home," she said, with a languid air of detachment. "Small wonder if Lothario's dash and distinction have captivated her."

They fell to talking of Janet's history, and Robert spoke of the surprising change in her sphere of interests.

"A month ago she was demure enough to have stood model for the heroine of Miles Standish. She could hardly be induced to drink at a soda-water fountain on a Sunday. Now she is full of 'equal pay for equal work.' And she appears to have a voice as well as a vote. I'm told that she reads the Liberator and that she broke the last Sabbath by attending a meeting of the new Labor Party in Madison Square Garden."

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

III

Cornelia's assumption that she was entirely responsible for the change in Janet's outlook on life was without warrant. Yet she was so self-satisfied as scarcely to suspect that Robert had anything to do with the matter; and it was interest in the man rather than curiosity about the girl that caused her to question him about his previous acquaintance with Janet.

She learnt that Robert's mother was not a very distant cousin of Mrs. Barr, and that both ladies had spent their girlhood in the same Connecticut town, where they had been friends until Mrs. Lloyd married and went out West. When Robert left Los Angeles, he bore this relationship in mind and, on the strength of it, paid his respects to the Barrs soon after settling in New York.

Cornelia inferred that the young man's acquaintance with the Barrs had continued on a very superficial footing. Robert knew better than to undeceive her. As a matter of fact, he had repeated his visits to the Barr household for the simple reason that there had sprung up between himself and Janet a mental fellowship which the hostility of her mother, the timid aloofness of her father and the envy of her sister had been able to obstruct but not to destroy.

Janet had more than repaid him for the inhospitality of her relatives. She in turn amused, puzzled, inspired and electrified him. So much unsophistication in the midst of a guileful city, so much candor surrounded by pious make-believe, above all, so much eagerness for experience held in leash by a vegetating family routine, had filled Robert with the hope that he might play Pygmalion to her Galatea.

Galatea, however, did not exactly go into raptures over Pygmalion. Though her insurgent nature was full of silent sympathy with Robert, her instincts were so much under the bondage of the Barr atmosphere as to prevent her from fully estimating his worth. Still, she conscientiously followed up the leads he gave her. She made her first bewildered acquaintance with the new paintings, the new music and the new social sciences. She began to look forward to copies of the Republic, the Nation, the London Statesman; and she joined him in reading the great contemporary writers: Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Anatole France, Romain Rolland. In short, she ranged with silent delight through the new world of modernity that he opened up to her, though it had to be explored in an obstinate little way of her own.

As her unofficial pilot Robert was very happy and might long have held the post but for a fatal blunder. Mrs. Barr learned one day that he had tempted Janet to attend a performance of Shaw's "Blanco Posnet," given on a Sunday by the Stage Reform Players. According to Emily, her informant, this play was immoral, not to say blasphemous, as was proved by the refusal of the British censor to license its performance.

Such a flagrant breach of holy writ, family propriety and the Sabbath, raised a domestic tempest to which Janet deemed it wise to bend. Robert was forced to discontinue his visits. What he did not tell Cornelia was that, during the last two months, he had regularly met Janet at Brentano's, where she had formed the habit of browsing through the new books and magazines every Friday afternoon.

CHAPTER SIX

I

These facts Robert had his own reasons for hiding from Cornelia. To cut the cross-examination short, he walked up to a miniature portrait that hung on the wall over Cornelia's desk.

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

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

"It is the only picture in the room," replied Robert, evasively. "The face is that of an esthete under the influence of paranoia. It positively stares one out of countenance. Whenever I enter the room, I feel as if I mustn't take a seat until I've bowed before it thrice."

"I'm not responsible for other people's erratic feelings." Cornelia would have spoken with less acerbity if jealousy had prompted Robert's remark. But his cool sardonic tone eliminated the theory of a jealous motive.

"Pardon the explosion, Cornelia. But why must this man of all men be the presiding genius of your room?"

"You know the reason very well, Robert."

"Unfortunately, yes. You won't let your friends forget it. By keeping this portrait in evidence, you actually force the reason on people's attention. Do take him down, Cornelia, swathe him in incense, and lay him away amongst your most cherished souvenirs. Replace him, if you must replace him, with a picture of Saint Francis or Savonarola."

She bristled up under his ironic words. Her craving for admiration vanished in her resentment of disapproval.

"I am proud to have known Percival Houghton, and to have been his friend. Thanks for your recommendation, though I'm not aware of having asked for it."

"Don't be angry. You must own that you constantly remind your visitors of this Houghton affair, though what advantage it is to your position and influence, Heaven only knows. Let sleeping dogs lie. Believe me, Cornelia, half the tragedies in life result from forgetting what we ought to remember; the other half from remembering what we ought to forget."

"I'm not ashamed of the Houghton affair, as you call it," said Cornelia coldly. "Why should I be? It was one of those rare friendships that are quite beyond the perception of vulgar-minded, low-thoughted souls. What other people think of it concerns me very little."

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

"I know," she went on melodramatically, "of the spiteful gossip behind my back. I know of the scarlet colors in which my relations with Percival Houghton are painted by my enemies. Let them declaim against me! To a few real friends I have told the truth. They believe me, and that is all I ask."

She had in fact taken more than one friend into her confidence. It was a common saying in the Lorillard tenements that the token of admission to Cornelia's inner circle was the almost sacramental rite of receiving her account of the Houghton episode.

The corner stone of this account—the supreme article of faith!—was the point that she and Percival Houghton had rigorously abstained from sexual intimacy throughout their voyage together in the same stateroom. Not from moral scruples, be it noted, but from a desire to prove to the world that free love and the severest tax on self-restraint were perfectly compatible.

Cornelia held passionately to the delusion that her account was accepted in every jot and tittle. Robert knew that behind her back, most of her friends greeted it with a cynical smile and pronounced it a pardonable but much too elaborate invention. When some one referred to Cornelia's assertion that the voyage to England had involved no infraction of the seventh commandment, the women would say contemptuously: "If you're going to be killed for a lamb, you might as well be killed for a sheep." The men, more vulgarly, would exclaim: "What a shame if they wasted a chance like that!"

Hutchins Burley, in one of his most egregious moments, wagered any amount that Cornelia wasn't half as big a fool as her story made her out to be.

It was owing to these and other coarse pleasantries circulating at her expense that Robert wished he could make Cornelia look the facts in the face.

What he regretted most of all, however, was that she seemed entirely to misconstrue the visits of the many men who sauntered in and out of her rooms. They came with the expectation voiced by Oscar Wilde, that "she who had sinned once and with loathing, would sin again many times, and with joy." Clearly, they hoped to profit by the repetition. But this was a truth to which Cornelia was obstinately blind.

"You, Robert," she said, aggrieved at his silence, "used to be counted among those who believed."

"And I am still. Good Heavens, Cornelia, why should I, of all people, doubt your words? Think of my situation. Here am I, alone after midnight in an apartment with a young and interesting martyr in the cause of free marriage. And what do we do? We discuss the subject of sex affinities, with a complete suspension of conventional reserve. Yet I couldn't so much as kiss you."

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

This tremendous talk, all about herself, had completely revitalized her spirits. She sat forward intent on Robert's every word, the movement causing her dress to fall low in front and show all her languid beauty at its best.

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

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

"I know," asserted Robert firmly, returning to an almost inhuman perfection. "If I began to make love to you, I'd be turned out in a twinkling. But who would believe this? Not a soul. If you were to tell the facts to our fellow tenementers, they would laugh you to scorn, and if I were to tell them, they would send me to the Bloomingdale Asylum. Yet my virtue is quite safe with you, Cornelia."

"You hardly do yourself justice, Cato," she said, biting her lips, and adjusting the neck of her dress.

"Oh, men are more or less passive agents in these matters. I'm safe with you because your radicalism, with all its offshoots into free love, free thought and free religion is only skin deep. You are a fascinating instance in the flesh of the great modern feminist dilemma: the demand for independence and respectability coupled with the fatal longing to be a Cleopatra, 'one of the women of all time.'"

Piqued at his innuendoes, Cornelia was getting ready to launch an acrid retort, when the door bell rang. It was one of those vicious jangles with which only a policeman or a pedlar ventures to announce himself.

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

II

It was difficult to think of this corpulent, bullying brawler as one of the leading newspaper men of the metropolis; he looked so very much more like a shoddy loafer from the underworld. His legs were still fairly steady, although his head was quite the reverse. His alcoholic exertions had been so ardent, however, that he sank on the couch with a loud snort of satisfaction.

"Where's Janet Barr?" he demanded, after getting his breath. "I followed her to Charlotte's flat, but she wasn't there. That's where Lydia Dyson said she was going to, the little liar."

Cornelia shook her finger at him in mock remonstrance.

"You have seen quite enough of Janet for one night, Hutch, judging from reports that have reached me. I'd be doing no more than was good for you if I put Mrs. Burley on your trail."

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

He gave himself up to a burst of horrible guffaws. As Robert looked at the man's gross, overheated, pitted face and at the Falstaffian neck and trunk, he was overcome with intense disgust.

This disgust was only in part shared by Cornelia. True, she did not relish Burley in his present drunken condition, but ordinarily she confessed to a curious weakness for him. "There's something about the brute that I like," she once frankly said.

She found his grossness and animal passion a relief from the refinement and fastidiousness of men like Robert. There was a certain quantitative satisfaction in the spectacle of his enormous bulk at her feet. Anyhow, all male slaves looked alike to her, the fact being that her appetite for attention or devotion was at once undiscriminating and insatiable.

Meanwhile Burley had turned to Robert.

"Listen, my boy," he said, clamorously, "when you marry, get a good stupid dray horse like my dame. One that'll believe in you even if God Almighty's against you. A good plodding dray horse. That's the best recipe I know for marital felicity."

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

"You know as much about women as about this tunic I'm cutting out," said Cornelia, rebuking him mildly with her voice, but not at all with her eye.

"Well, Corny," said Hutchins, in high excitement, "I'll tell you what I do know about them." He rose from the lounge and dumped himself amorously on one of the arms of her easy chair. "There are only three things a man need do to make a hit with women: give 'em food, give 'em clothes, give 'em hugs. It's a sure-fire rule for managing them, too."

He roared louder than ever. Robert wished Cornelia wouldn't encourage him under a pretense of doing the reverse.

"Now, Hutch, go home, please," she said, prompted by his silent disapproval. "You'll wake up all the neighbors with your loud laughter. Remember, the walls here are as thin as cardboard."

By way of answer, the irrepressible roisterer put his arm familiarly around her waist and tried to draw her back into the chair.

"Be human, Corny, old girl," he said. "Don't be a psychic adventuress. I've got to stay somewhere tonight, and I might as well stay here."

Cornelia wrenched herself from his grasp and, opening the outer door with a tempestuous gesture, told him to leave at once.

"You'd better go, Hutchins," said Robert, quietly. "Cornelia will be more than a match for you."

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

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

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

Burley's latent bestiality was now thoroughly aroused. Breathing threatenings and slaughter, he advanced towards Robert, working himself into a greater passion and shaking his fist more savagely every step of the way. Cornelia screamed and threw herself in the huge man's path. After a tussle of a few seconds, during which her cries rang through the open door, he shoved her forcibly aside. Robert's slim stature was already poised for the uneven combat, when a tall, agile, coatless figure dashed in from the adjoining apartment and deftly arrested the fist that Burley was sending with considerable momentum towards Robert's pale face.

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

But there was nothing gentle about his strength. The thwarted man sputtered abusive, incoherent indecencies. In vain. His expletives were cut short by two hands of steel that whirled his lumbering hulk forward, steered him past Cornelia with professional adroitness, and escorted him irresistibly into the corridor. A moment later an inchoate mass of humanity was torpedoed, with projectile swiftness, down the first flight of stairs. To make doubly sure, the direct actionist followed his missile.

Rumblings, sputterings and groans ascended discordantly up the stairway. Presently the noise grew fitful and then more and more subdued, as if some one had damped Vesuvius or banked its fires for the night. At length came silence.

Cornelia had sunk into a chair over which Robert was solicitously bending when Burley's subjugator returned. In reply to Cornelia's thanks he blushed like a boy and hid his embarrassment by edging towards the door.

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

"Just practice work," he said, in the same mild voice and Manhattan accent. "A little trick of concentration. A man brings all his muscular power to bear on a few weak points. And joints. The Japs can teach you. So can I."

He drew a card from his waistcoat pocket. Meanwhile, Cornelia, who had followed Robert to the door, chanted:

"You are wonderful, Mr. Gorilla, wonderful! How do you accomplish it?"

"Ah, Miss, a child could do it. The main thing is to be a powerful breather; you can't do much if you're only a powerful eater or drinker. You've got to fill your lungs and your bel—your abdomen, with good fresh wind; then you travel on velvet."

He gave Robert his card.

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

His eyes meeting Cornelia's again, the vanquished victor withdrew in evident confusion to his retreat in number thirteen.

Robert looked at the card and turned it over to Cornelia. She recognized with a smile the legend about Harry Kelly, the Harlem Gorilla and Champion of the Mat.

PART II

LOVE AMONG THE OUTLAWS

CHAPTER SEVEN

I

When Janet awoke at eleven, it took her several moments to recollect that she was in Cornelia's apartment in Kips Bay, where Claude had left her before dawn. She could hear Cornelia bustling about in the living room, but she stayed in bed a little longer to luxuriate in memories of the preceding night.

She got lightly out of bed and stood before the mirror over the chiffonier. But she was less preoccupied with the image in the looking glass than with mental pictures of the night before.

In the bright light of day, the glamour of some of these pictures took on the effect of tinsel. But Janet could still thrill to the excitement of the raid on the Lyceum, the pell-mell escape, the violent dispersal of the mobs in Murray Hill and the hurried collection of a troop of Outlaw refugees and their nocturnal march through Kips Bay streets under the leadership of Claude Fontaine. It had been a very festive troop, swelled by stragglers all the way to the Lorillard tenements, where the party camped in Charlotte Beecher's double flat.

Of the long merrymaking that followed, Janet cared to remember only the occasions when Claude Fontaine was at her side and at her service. How vividly she could picture him in the dashing part of Charles Surface, his handsome face tinted with rich, young blood, and his eyes of such brightness and depth that surely no infamy could ever dull them!

A knock cut this day dreaming short.

"How do you do, Araminta?" said Cornelia, entering melodramatically. "And what does the Sleeping Beauty want for breakfast?"

"I'm hungry enough to eat sticks and stones and puppy-dog's bones," replied Janet. "But I won't murmur if you have gentler fare."

As Cornelia insisted that dressing should be deferred until after the meal, Janet tripped to the breakfast table in her nightgown, her curly hair hanging down to her shoulders. Cornelia, her figure lapped precariously in a simple dress, which she had made and pinned together at a cost of fifty cents all told, sat down opposite her young guest.

"This is a picnic!" exclaimed Janet. She was filled with glee at the wrapping paper neatly spread out in place of a table cloth, at the cups, saucers and dishes all made of agateware, and at the compressed paper plates for the slices of bread.

"Well, it isn't a Barmecide's feast, by any means," said Cornelia, who was amused at Janet's artless joy. "The plates may be made of paper, but they are fresh and so are the eggs and bacon."

She set these articles on the table.

"All the principal dishes are of agateware," she said, in answer to a question of Janet's. "I've got four of everything necessary—four cups, four saucers, four glasses, four knives, four spoons, and so on. But don't imagine that we have wrapping paper for a table cloth every day. Dear, no! That's only for guests of honor and on Sundays. On week days we use newspapers."

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

"Oh, it's old news. I always use the newspaper of a week ago. And it's curious how often I run across some interesting bit of politics or scandal that escaped me a week before. Sometimes, while devouring a roll, I catch myself in the midst of a slobbery article by Hutchins Burley in the Evening Chronicle. The wretch is running a series of articles called: 'The Soul of Woman under Freedom.'"

She gave Janet a circumstantial report of the encounter with Burley during the night. Janet followed this narrative with sympathetic interest, and wished that she and Claude had arrived in time to prevent the occurrence.

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

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

"In ambush at the door?"

"No, in the hallway downstairs. I had gone out for some cream. On my way back I ran right into his arms."

"With what result?"

"Very little. He exhausted his eloquence in stammers and deaf mute lingo. And when I thanked him again for last night's service, he promptly took to his heels. It was cruel."

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

Cornelia, pleased at the implied assumption that she had inspired a romance, dwelt with gusto on the hero's exploit. For the fiftieth time she described the skill and celerity with which "the physical culture expert" had propelled Burley from the apartment.

"At the Outlaws' Ball, Mr. Burley called Claude a diamond smuggler," said Janet, by way of changing the subject. "What did he mean? Do people accuse the Fontaines of smuggling?"

"I never heard of such a thing," replied Cornelia. "Merchant princes like the Fontaines would hardly stoop to that. Besides, it wouldn't pay them. Did Claude notice?"

"Yes, and he seemed to mind it very much. His whole appearance changed as if he had been stung into sudden fury. But he controlled himself bravely."

"What else could he do with the belle of the ball at his side? He's always a man of the world—when in the world."

"But not in private?" asked Janet, anxious to get to the bottom of this veiled aspersion. Cornelia's reply was evasive.

"A fine summer's day will often end in a burst of terrifying thunder and lightning," she said. "Lothario has plenty of good looks and plenty of temper. A man who is accustomed to find people submitting to his will, easily gets indignant when he meets with opposition."

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

"Well, I don't blame him for getting enraged at the abuse of that horrible man," said Janet, sturdily defending him.

"Nor do I. Once in a while a thunderbolt will strike the wicked as well as the good, won't it? Claude was quite justified this time, no doubt."

"How does he happen to come among the Outlaws, Cornelia? He doesn't seem to belong to them exactly."

"He doesn't pretend to. He walks among us humble tenementers like a god among his creatures. Distinctly Like a god, Araminta. That's the footing on which he associates with mere human beings."

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

"Ah, yes, but don't let that deceive you. Jupiter was hail fellow well met with many a mortal, especially with many a mortal maiden. You remember that he visited one earthly princess in a shower of gold. That is what Claude does. He visits the model tenements in—or perhaps I should say with—a shower of gold. I mean," she added, "he doesn't think of marriage with a girl on Mazie's level. Nor with a girl on yours or mine."

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

"I thought that made no difference to you," she said, for she had already been favored with some of Cornelia's destructive criticism of the institution of marriage.

"It makes no difference to me," said Cornelia. "But in this stifling room I can't explain myself as I'd like to. The spacious blue skies and the free pure air of the Hudson will be a more fitting background for the story I'd like to tell you. Put on your things, Araminta, and we'll go for a charming ride."

Janet dressed with promptness and pleasure. She appeared to have forgotten that Robert Lloyd had particularly said that he was coming about noon in order to take her home. Her friend did not remind her. The knowledge that Robert would go away in bitter disappointment robbed the outing of none of its zest, so far as Cornelia was concerned.

Claude, too, had promised to drop in at Number Fifteen. This promise Janet bore well in mind. But as his visit was not to take place until late in the afternoon and there was thus no danger of missing him, she joined Cornelia with enthusiasm.

II

At the corner of Thirty-fourth Street and Second Avenue, where Kips Bay edges its dingy little proletarian stores into bourgeois respectability, the two young women entered a car bound for the West Twenty-third Street ferry. It proceeded at a jog trot along Second Avenue to Twenty-third Street where it struck the cross-town line west.

Janet felt no annoyance at the snail's pace from which the car never departed. Manhattan was still a novelty to her, and this section of the East Side was wholly new.

But Cornelia made unflattering comparison between the surface conveyances in Manhattan and the bus transportation which Londoners and Parisians enjoyed. She was annoyed by the complacency that New Yorkers displayed toward their street-car service and the petty provincialism that actually led them to believe this service to be the fastest in the world, when in fact it was the slowest. At the climax of her irritation she gave Janet the benefit of one of Robert Lloyd's epigrams. Robert had once said that New York "rapid transit," as it was optimistically called, was the organized effort of the local traction magnates to annihilate the specific advantages of modern electrical machinery. Cornelia did not doubt that in this effort they had triumphed.

The jolts with which the car came to a standstill at each successive street crossing, and the jerks with which it resumed its languid pace again, would ordinarily have frazzled her nerves for the day. This time, however, she bore the ordeal much more composedly. For one thing, Janet's calm spirit had a soothing influence upon her. For another, it amused her mightily to have so unsophisticated a companion to point out the sights to. She caused Janet to observe the Italian district with its macaroni dens along the cross streets, the Armenian district with the Eastern restaurants parading strange Greek-lettered names, and Kips Bay's fashionable western fringe with its Madison Avenue hotels, stores and residential palaces.

Janet drank it all in thirstily. Not for a moment did she regret the defiance she had flung at her mother's wishes by going to the Outlaws' Ball. On the contrary, this act of insurgency appeared to have heightened her perception as much as it had strengthened her self-esteem. She saw things with different eyes, or believed she did. The people and the shops fairly brandished a life and reality totally new to her experience. She longed to be more than a mere spectator in the tumultuous scene unfolded before her. She would have given anything to be even a cog—an active cog—in this giant metropolis whose roar and grime possessed an immense attraction.

At the North River they left the car. Three big ferry houses confronted them and Cornelia was undecided which to take. It was a grave question in her mind, for she staged the big scenes of her life with as much care as a play producer. The artist in her at once eliminated the Erie ferry.

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

"Let's take the one that gives the longest ride," said Janet, for whom the smell of the river quickly cut such minor esthetic knots.

Cornelia's first and invariable impulse towards any proposal made by another person was to turn it down. The reasons she gave for doing so were usually quite plausible, though sometimes cast in a rather theatrical style.

"The Jersey's trip is a little longer," she said, "but the difference is slight. The Lackawanna appeals to me more. Lackawanna! Don't you love the music in that name? Besides, Araminta, the Jersey boats are painted a sickly gray, while the Lackawanna boats are maroon. A wonderful maroon! And they have a glorious seat on the upper deck, directly facing the bow."

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

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

But if Janet had any hopes of hearing a great deal more about Claude Fontaine, she was soon disillusioned. She did not yet understand her friend, to whom the world was an audience at a stage play in which Cornelia Covert had the star part. She speedily learned that Cornelia had not gone to all this trouble to analyze the love affairs of other people. No. The moment had been chosen and the stage had been set to make Janet the recipient of the sacred narrative of Cornelia's experience with Percival Houghton.

The tale did not begin until the boat was well under way, so that Janet had an opportunity to revel in the swell of the mighty Hudson and to contrast the differing aspects of the two banks. The Palisaded Jersey side was almost hidden by huge ocean steamers, except at the spot where the Castle Point Terrace of Stevens Institute rose serenely above a forest of quivering masts.

Janet thought the heights of Hoboken quite dwarfed by the towering office structures of lower Manhattan. Cornelia interrupted her ineffable story long enough to repeat another opinion of Robert's without acknowledgment. It was to the effect that the commercial skyscrapers on the Hudson were as grimly symbolic of ownership as the castles that overlooked the Rhine. Did Janet realize that the lords of these skyscraping fortresses were the masters of the river and thus of the country on which the river's port had a strangle hold? In each of the big business edifices, thousands of mercantile retainers served their liege lords with pen or typewriter as industriously as ever men-at-arms flourished crossbow or arquebus in the brave days of old. Only, the economic factor in the comparison was all in favor of the industrial barons of today. Their armies, opulence and power were of a magnitude that would have caused the robber barons of the Rhine to expire with envy.

III

With these brief interruptions, Cornelia pursued the even tenor of the story whose narration was the seal and token of her friendship. What moved her to tell it to Janet was not the idea of self-defence, or the hope of softening the shock a friend might receive on learning the details from a hostile critic. Quite the contrary. She was inordinately proud of her intimate connection with a man as famous as Percival Houghton; and she was altogether anxious that her friends should know of this connection in the form in which she wished it to be known and hoped to make it remembered.

Two years had passed, she told Janet, since Percival Houghton came to the United States. He was a young Englishman, well connected, who had gained an immense vogue as an illustrator. He was said to have "isolated" several rare types of French and English female beauty, and fabulous sums had been paid for his portrait studies in pastel. His press agent having in advance widely advertised the artist's announced purpose of adding the American girl to his pictorial conquests, his arrival was extremely good copy for the newspapers.

Hutchins Burley, with an eye to the Evening Chronicle's large feminine clientele, did not let the opportunity slip by. He assigned Cornelia, then attached to his paper, to interview the ambitious Englishman. In her own words, "she went, she saw, she conquered."

After the flattering notice in the Chronicle, Percival Houghton sought her out and attended her devotedly. Cornelia dwelt on the warm friendship that sprang up between them and on her own quick subjection to his great personal charm.

"He was a wonderful man, Araminta. He had a great leonine head with wild flowing locks; there was fire in his eye and music in his voice; and he had that imperious way with him that opens a path straight to a woman's heart."

The week before his departure, he made an avowal of his passion. And she was in a paradise of ecstasy until the next day, when he sent her by mail a piece of information he had not had the courage to give her in person. He confessed to a wife and two children living in England. In a moment of impetuous boyish idealism—like Shelley's, he said—he had married a girl who was intellectually (though not financially) his inferior. Worst of all, she shared none of his tastes or aspirations. He assured Cornelia that every day of his married existence had been a lifetime of exquisite torture.

This confession, Janet heard, was the prelude to many hours of bitter torment. Cornelia said that the one good outcome of this evil period was that she began to think of the realities of life for the first time. She was led to question the moral conventions which she had always taken for granted and which, she now saw, encrusted the conduct of most of the people around her. Under the tutelage of Percival Houghton, who proclaimed himself a free thinker, as well as a free lover, she became alive to the absurdity of regarding the conventions of an age as immutable laws for all time.

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

Percival read out many passages from the great writers of today—continued Cornelia—from Galsworthy, H. G. Wells, Havelock Ellis and Gilbert Cannan; and these passages exposed the unalterable belief of the writers that marriage, in its existing form, was wrong, conclusively and crushingly wrong.

Wrong, she hastened to explain, in so far as it was a contract that was held to be binding even after the death of the love on which the contract was based.

She developed the logic of the situation at some length in arguments with which Janet was greatly impressed.

"You own mother and father hate each other, Janet," she pointed out. "The result is the cat-and-dog, bite-one-another's-head-off relationship that passes for family life in your home. Do you see?";

Janet saw, or thought she saw. Anything that could plausibly be shown to be responsible for family life among the Barrs was sure to receive her cordial detestation. Cornelia, certain of her auditor's sympathy, continued her story. Percival Houghton's solution of the difficulty caused by his rash attachment was a highly quixotic one. He proposed that Cornelia accompany him to England, so that they might together lay the facts before his wife and beg her to sue for a divorce after he had furnished her with funds and with technical grounds for the suit. They were to be open and aboveboard in urging the right of true lovers to be free from all the shackles of law and tradition. His wife was not ungenerous, he declared. Moreover, she had never really loved him; and he persuaded himself and Cornelia that, face to face with an overwhelming passion, she would readily consent to an act that was to liberate three lives.

This, he insisted was the only honorable course to pursue. It had the precedent of such great names as Ruskin and Millais. Besides it was the only course that would not seriously affect his career or completely cut him off from his children.

What could Cornelia do but yield? He engaged passage to England for two, and—she emphasized this detail again and again—though they occupied the same stateroom, their union was a union of two souls and nothing more.

Without giving Janet time to grasp the logic of this behavior or of its explanation, she continued:

"Percival said it behooved us to show that free love could rise above the lustful impulses of the flesh. We were to come to each other clean, so as not to do the cause of free love an injury."

England had been the Paradise of her hopes, but it proved their sepulchre. Scarcely had they docked in the Mersey when reporters representing news associations accosted them for information about their "elopement." The news had been cabled from New York, where they were featured as "elective affinities." In London, too, they found themselves headliners in the yellow journals. Needless to say, the most extreme construction was put on their journey together. And the escapade of "affinity Houghton" became an international sensation.

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

"Not a soul. But my connection with a newspaper was fatal. A woman journalist is subject to more gossip than an actress. Every time she's seen with a new man, she's reported to have ensnared a new lover."

As a result of this glaring notoriety, Cornelia went on, Houghton's manner toward her underwent a radical change. He remained kind and courteous, but his manner grew cool. He urged one pretext after another for postponing what was to have been a historic interview with his wife. In London he took her to a hotel and left her there alone.

Two days later she received a letter from him, in which he said that his wife was unalterably resolved to contest a divorce on any ground, and that the newspaper gossip had almost irretrievably injured his prospects. He added that he was as devoted to her as ever. He was, in fact, broken-hearted, but his clear duty to his family, his children and his career demanded that they should never meet again.

In spite of this note she made several attempts to see him once more. She confessed to Janet that she had been ready to accept any terms he might make, if only he agreed not to part from her forever. It was for love and not for marriage that she had sacrificed herself. It was not marriage but love that she demanded. But he sustained his pitilessly inflexible attitude. Almost prostrated by the notoriety which the experience had thrust upon her, she made a heart-broken return to the United States.

"I landed in New York without hope, without health, and without a home," said Cornelia, dramatically. "But I had vindicated my belief that love should be free."

To forestall a social boycott, she had proudly decided to shun all her former friends. To this end she rented a flat in the Lorillard tenements. And here she had remained in eclipse, and in receipt of a small allowance from a brother who was a leading politician in a Western State.

Latterly, old friends of hers, members of the fellowship of Outlaws, had drifted into her rooms in Kips Bay; and so she had been dragged—unwillingly, she alleged—from her retirement.

She asserted that she had no ill-will for Percival Houghton, who would always be the one man in the world for her. After all, he had sold his birthright for a marriage of convenience, and he might well feel that he ought to stick to his bargain, cost what it might. She was persuaded that his coldness to her in London was merely an iron vizor clamped upon his real feelings by the ruthless institution of matrimony. She also appeared to derive some comfort from the thought that though he was "a soul pirate," though he had "stolen her soul," his own had been damned in the process.

"Yet I shall always love him," she said, with tragic resignation. "I shall never love anyone else. And I shall never marry. I've suffered enough from marriage as it is."

The ferryboat docked at the Lackawanna Station. Janet, who had been lost in a reverie, mechanically followed her companion's suggestion that they take the same boat back. Cornelia's story—the vivid story of one of the principals—had a very different coloring from the account of the "affinity Houghton" scandal which had filled the front pages of the evening newspapers two years ago. Janet could still recollect the headlines, the pictures, and the expansive gossip; also the strange mixture of curiosity and pious disgust with which she had followed the reports.

Could the horrified Janet Barr of that dimly remembered time be the same girl who was now sitting in the closest intimacy beside the leading female in the case?

On the return across the river, Janet had several questions on the tip of her tongue, but Cornelia's manner seemed to discourage inquiries of a too personal kind. However, Janet did get in:

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

"He said we could meet only in secret; but that any continuation of the secrecy was more than he could endure."

"Do you think that excuse rings true?"

"Why not? I suppose I should say it rings falsely true, as faith unfaithful always does."

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

"Perhaps. But, Araminta, all men are cowards, moral cowards, I mean. They face bullets sublimely, but they shiver and shake before an argument. They gayly lose their lives for a hunting trophy or a football triumph, but they can't bear to lose their dinners for a belief."

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

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

"My dear, it isn't the women who keep up the marriage system. It's the men! Women just fall into a system that's ready made for them. Most women are all body and no soul. Give them the choice between marriage, which provides for the body while starving the soul, and some other condition which provides for the soul while starving the body, and of course they'll choose marriage. They prefer to hold a man by his lusts rather than by his spiritual impulses. But the men keep the system up, my dear. Because of the children they want."

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

"So we do. We want them because life demands them through us; for are we not the mothers of the race? But that is not the men's reason. It isn't the race that is calling through them for immortality. Heavens no! It's their boundless male egotism. And since they know that they can't live forever in their own selfish little bodies, they hope to get a new lease of life in the bodies of their sons. That is why they have built up an institution in which they can keep their women wedlocked and can make sure that their children are their own."

"But perhaps marriage is necessary for the children, Cornelia. They are the better off for it, at least when they are very young."

"Are you so sure? Remember, loveless marriages seldom result in healthy offspring. Look at Percival Houghton's two children. One is a girl with hip disease, the other is a feeble-minded, flabby anæmic boy. Yet the parents are both physically sound. Do you think I would have had such children?"

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

"I'm not sure I can judge from one case, Cornelia," said Janet, her firm voice and clear distinct utterance betraying a will of her own. "But I'm sure that people who marry and find that they are mistaken in each other, ought to be able to rectify the mistake. It's horrible to think that they can't."

"Ah! Now you've come to it. If people find that they are mistaken in their butchers or grocers, they experiment until they find the right one. They won't go on eating bad steaks forever because luck or inexperience landed them in a poor shop at the first try. But do they take as much trouble to get the right husband or wife as they do to get the right mutton chop? They don't. Whatever partner luck or inexperience hands them at the altar, they put up with for the rest of their lives."

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

"My dear, it's been proposed often enough. By men, of course. You are too young to remember the furor that followed when George Meredith proposed trial marriages. It's an easy thing for the men to propose, since it's the women who must risk the beginning. The question is, who is to begin? The plain women daren't, because the risk is too great; and the fascinating women needn't, because they get what they want anyway, within the law or beyond it. Now if ever girls like you, Araminta, on whom the eye rests with delight, began to experiment—"

"What then?"

"Oh, I've no right to urge my views on individuals. Besides, you are far too young and inexperienced, my dear, to be one of the first. Though I'm sure nothing would suit men like Claude Fontaine better."

"There, Cornelia, you're making innuendos about Mr. Fontaine again," said Janet. "It isn't fair. If you mean to take me into your confidence at all, you might do it all the way through."

"Not another word will you get out of me now, Araminta," replied Cornelia, with one of the queer laughs she gave whenever she blocked people's wishes.

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

"I'm too famished to talk. Here we are, landing at last. Come, we'll get a nice lunch. I know you're dying to talk about the irresistible Claude. I promise to tell you Lothario's whole history over our cups of tea."

Janet begged to be taken to the Y.W.C.A. Cafeteria, whose good food, self-service and picturesque quarters she had heard Cornelia extol. When they reached the restaurant, they saw a very long line of waiting customers.

"This will never do," said Cornelia, disgustedly. And, quite unwilling to sacrifice comfort in the cause of self-service, she dragged the reluctant Janet to a French pastry restaurant on Fifth Avenue.

"I do like a waiter and a table cloth," said Cornelia, as she contentedly resigned herself to these dubious luxuries. "And I don't like to scramble for my napkin and my glass of ice water."

"What a strange thing for you to say," said Janet, puzzled. "It sounds as though, in spite of your advanced views, you might at heart be thoroughly in love with conventional ways."

"Don't put such ideas into your head, silly!" said Cornelia, giving a high-pitched, self-conscious, stagy laugh, with which she shut off further personal questions.

During lunch, Cornelia contrived to say curiously little about Claude Fontaine, Janet learning hardly anything she did not already know. Claude was heir to the great Fontaine jewelry establishment. He was a social swell. He was very handsome. And he was trying equally hard to dabble in modern paintings and not to dabble in modern amours.

His success in both attempts was dubious, according to Cornelia. Particularly in the matter of the amours. He was, of course, the greatest catch of his day. In his own circle, every mother had marked him for her daughter. And it was to escape the conspiracies of matchmakers that he had taken up with the Outlaws in the model tenements. In their unconventional atmosphere, he had hoped to move and breathe more freely. But if every girl in his own set was willing to become his wife, every girl in the Lorillard tenements seemed willing to become his mistress.

It appeared that Mazie Ross had been particularly shameless in setting herself to catch Claude. Somehow or other, the conversation pivoted chiefly on Mazie, her selfishness, her neglect of her fair share of the work in flat number fifteen, and her willingness to sell herself. This last was the fault which Cornelia proposed to take most exception to.

"I wish I could get rid of her," she said. "Then you could come and live with me, Araminta. It would be like exchanging a room that smelled of last night's stale flowers for a garden perfumed by fresh roses."

CHAPTER EIGHT

I

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

"Well, Cato, where did you drop from?" said Cornelia, who was lazily tidying up the rooms while Janet was doing the breakfast dishes.

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

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

"Not much. He isn't a talker like me. He's a doer. He tried to explain a few tricks in gymnastics to me. But every second sentence or so the word 'Cornelia' crept into the explanation. It was decidedly confusing."

"Pray what has the word 'Cornelia' to do with the subject of gymnastics?" asked the owner of the name.

"Ah, what! I asked the Gorilla that question myself. But he simply repeated the name adoringly and looked all sorts of unutterable things. Beware, Cornelia. He thinks the sun rises in one of your eyes and sets in the other. I believe he is planning to carry you off by main force to his cave, his gymnasium cave."

"A lot he is! He couldn't carry off a buttercup against its wishes. Really, Araminta, he's the gentlest and shyest 'wild man' you ever laid eyes on. How he ever came to take Gorilla for a nickname, I can't imagine."

"Nor I," said Robert. "But don't forget that he has learnt the art of concentrating his enormous strength on one or two crucial points. Certainly he treated Hutchins Burley to a good exhibition of his mastery, didn't he? For all that, he's a very singularly gentle sort of Hercules. If I had to provide one for you, Cornelia, I'd get a much more ferocious specimen, if only to pay you out for kiting away with Janet, after promising me you'd both stay in. I've been waiting for you since noon."

"Poor Cato, I'm terribly sorry. In the excitement of having Janet here, I clean forgot you were coming. Waiting since noon, were you, poor boy! There's devotion for you, Araminta. Never mind, Rob. Here she is, now. And all's well that ends well, I hope."

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

"Thanks very much," said Janet, not wishing to lose Robert and yet not caring to say that Claude had promised to call for her, if he could possibly get away from business. Before she could say more, Cornelia interposed. She had not expected Robert to wait and had not quite swallowed her chagrin over this surprise.

"How do you happen to be off duty, Rob?" she asked. "Does the Evening Chronicle stop work for you on Saturdays?"

"No. I've stopped work for the Evening Chronicle on Saturdays and all other days."

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

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

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

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

"Exactly. In his sober moments, Cornelia, you are apparently the only mortal soul he stands in some fear of. It was only because of a sneaking affection he has for you that he hesitated to fire me."

"Well, why throw a good bargain away?"

"A nice position it would have left me in. That of an understrapper for Burley to play cat and mouse with. Not if I know it! Burley likes to torture the people in his power as much as you do, the only difference being that his weapon is coarse brutality while yours is insidious charm."

"Your comparisons, Cato, have the merit of being as unambiguous as they are rude. I trust you gave Hutchins Burley the benefit of a few of them."

"Oh, no, I always forgive my enemies. Nothing enrages them more. I left Hutchins stunned. But I've no doubt he recovered in time to appoint the successor that I sent him."

"That you sent him?"

"Yes. You don't know him, but Janet does. Janet, do you remember the tall, thin, aristocratic chap who was always mysteriously turning up and who stopped Burley at the tent?"

"Of course I do. He wore a quaint stand-up collar with two points sticking into his neck. It was he who warned Claude about the raid."

"Oh, did he? Well, when I was on my way up the stairs here at noon, he suddenly appeared, like a ghost stepping out of the stone wall. It gave me quite a start. I asked him where he was bound for. 'Nowhere in particular,' was his answer."

Robert had got to talking with the mysterious one, who confessed that he had just rented a flat in the model tenements. On Robert's alluding to the severance of his connection with the Evening Chronicle, his new acquaintance had asked permission to apply for the vacant place. He claimed to have an ear for news and remarked casually that information was always drifting his way.

"As if I had any permission to give!" continued Robert. "I warned him what he'd be up against in the person of Hutchins Burley, and bade him Godspeed."

"He's either a detective or the Prince of Zenda in disguise," said Janet. "Which do you think, Robert?"

"From the speed and completeness with which he obliterates himself, I should favor the detective theory. On the other hand, there's his get-up! That melancholy, drooping mustache, that semi-clerical collar, and that comical tip-tilted chin! The fellow's simply unforgettable. He must be a prince incognito."

"Yes, we'll have him a prince!" exclaimed Janet, who, at twenty-four, had a normal craving for romantic illusion. "But I should like him in any part."

"A prince! Nonsense, children!" interjected Cornelia, in her most languid cadences. "He's probably a burglar."

"A burglar!"

"Certainly not a detective. Detectives don't obliterate themselves. They don't know how to. And they never look like princes in disguise. They're not clever enough. All the detectives I ever saw looked like butchers on a strike. The only man, rich, skillful and bold enough to take his fellow man at a right royal disadvantage is a first-class burglar. A Raffles, for instance, might be a prince 'incognito.'"

Cornelia's wits could work brilliantly under the stimulus of a new friend like Janet.

The door had opened while she was speaking.

"Here's a prince, Araminta!" she continued, in the same musical vein. "Not incognito, either, to judge by his handsome motor coat."

Claude Fontaine came in, and the sheer sweep of his personal attractiveness made Cornelia's slightly ironic phrasing sound quite empty. Janet thought that many a titular prince might be glad to exchange his coat of arms for Claude's conquering air.

II

Her heart beat faster for more reasons than this. How was she to let Robert down gracefully and without hurting his feelings, after having more than half accepted his offer to accompany her home?

As if in total ignorance of her dilemma, Cornelia, who had begun sketching a design for a new dress, intoned:

"Admirers never come singly. Choose your escort, my dear. Which is it to be? Cato and the subway or Lothario and a limousine?"

They all dissembled very poorly.

Claude, who had not expected rivalry, looked displeased; Robert, though he had already made up his mind to withdraw, felt uneasy; and Janet stood up between the two young men, embarrassed and confused.

Cornelia alone seemed wholly unmoved. She went on sketching imperturbably. But Robert was quite certain that she was not unconscious of the tableau. Janet broke the painful silence.

"Let's all three go together," she said, with one of her quick graceful gestures, half conciliatory, half pleading in its effect.

"Certainly, if Robert would like to come," said Claude, politely, but without enthusiasm.

Robert declined promptly. He explained that he had really been free only for the morning, and that, as long as Claude was to see Janet home, he had better utilize the late afternoon to hunt up another position. There were newspaper offices at which he ought to call. Before supper, he had a speech to rehearse. Perhaps Cornelia would be good enough to let him say it over to her.

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

"Wait till you hear it."

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

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

"A sermon from Cato is as sweet as a billet-doux from any other man. Come, Araminta, let's show these men how quickly we can get ready."

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

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

Robert recounted his farewell interview with Hutchins Burley.

"You're well rid of him," said Claude. "What do you think the swine called me at the ball? A diamond smuggler. In front of everybody, mind you!"

He paced the room indignantly.

"I tell you, Rob, if these were the good old days of duelling, I'd have run his fat carcass through with a rapier half a dozen times before this. And done it with relish, too. Nowadays, worse luck, it isn't even good form to give him a thrashing, though Heaven knows he's the sort of brute that understands no argument but a blow."

"Blows would only sharpen his wits against you, Claude. Curs bite, as bees sting, by force of nature. The only thing to do is to get out of their way."

"I'm not in the habit of getting out of any man's way," said Claude, haughtily. "However, don't let's talk about the beast. I'm extremely sorry you're out of a job. Tell you what, Rob. Come up to my office on Monday, and we'll talk the situation over and see what can be done. You'll find me in the galleries on the top floor."

"Thanks, Claude, but Monday is impossible," said Robert, glad of the excuse, for he scented patronage in his friend's manner. "I'm giving a talk on 'Unemployment under the National Guild System' before the Guild Study Club. When I arranged to speak on Unemployment I had no idea I should do so as an experienced hand."

Possibly Claude was dimly conscious of his friend's sensitiveness. At all events, he said:

"Well, come on your first free day. I'm always there afternoons. You must come, if only to see my two new Cezannes. I've just induced father to buy them. By the way, old chap, what on earth are National Guilds?"

The return of the ladies cut off a reply. Janet's natural grace redeemed the hang of a not too well-tailored suit. Cornelia was all aglow over a mandarin coat she had put on. It was a wonderful dark green silk with dull gold embroidery. Her clothes had a remarkable effect of clinging to her contours. "Look at me," her body seemed to call out through its vestments, "did you ever see anything so ravishing?"

Janet walked over to Robert's side and sought forgiveness without asking for it. And he forgave her without saying so. Her soft, flexible, thrilling voice disturbed him sorely, and he wondered whether its sustained riches were as illusory as he judged the mysterious depths of her gray eyes to be.

Meanwhile, Claude was telling Cornelia in all sincerity that she had never looked more enchanting.

"Flatterer!" she said. "To how many girls have you said that today?"

"Facts don't flatter, Cornelia. They simply cry out the truth."

"Lothario, it's all a matter of the science of pinning and the art of dressing. Or rather, of not dressing."

For the hundredth time, she assured Claude and Robert that she never wore corsets or underwear, and didn't believe in these accoutrements.

"What, nothing?" exclaimed Claude, perhaps to see Janet blush.

"We are an art-hating people with ugly ideas," continued Cornelia, unheeding his interruption, "and so we grow ugly, unsightly bodies. That is why modern fashionable dressmaking has but one aim: to conceal deformities. But dresses that conceal women's bad points are sure to conceal their good points, too. A tragic loss! Janet is young and charming; she can stand this loss. I'm on the wrong side of thirty; I can't."

"Are you poking fun at my Brooklyn clothes again?" asked Janet. "If you go on like this, I shall have to ferret out all the secrets of your art, in pure self defence."

"We must all take a hand in educating you," said Cornelia, grandly. "My part will be to make you see life as a world of beautiful lines, rhythms, and colors."

"What will mine be?" asked Claude.

"Yours? To make her see life as a vale of Cashmere—all roses and wine."

"And Rob's?"

"Rob will make her see it as a vale of tears—all sermons and social problems. He'll be a necessary corrective to you."

"And to you, too," said Robert, quickly, amidst a general laugh.

Janet was now ready to go. As she and Claude left, Cornelia kissed her tenderly and said:

"Remember, if anything serious happens at home, I want you, Araminta."

III

Claude instructed his chauffeur to drive across Manhattan Bridge through Prospect Park and along the Coney Island Road until the signal should be given to turn back to Janet's home in the Park Slope section. Then he took his seat in the closed car beside his companion.

It was a warm spring day, and an agreeable wind from the bay blew upon them through the open windows as they crossed the East River. The breeze, the river, and the motion joined to chase from Janet's mind the shadow of the scene that awaited her at home.

Besides, there was the god at her side. Nearness did not rob him of his divinity, it did not make him grow commonplace. And although some of the glamor of his strangeness wore away, she liked him all the better for being a human god and for having human weaknesses that caused his diviner side to seem all the more real. Janet never gushed, and even her most fervent adorations were shot through with a cool streak of matter-of-fact perception.

Claude was very happy, too. Philandering had few new sweets to offer him. Yet Janet was a novelty in every way. What was unique in her was her disinterestedness, a quality he did not consciously credit her with, however, since he did not believe that any woman possessed it. All the young ladies he had ever known had either struck attitudes at his social position or groveled more or less openly before his wealth. According to his view of women, their one aim in life was to get money out of him; by marriage if possible, by fouler means if not.

But Janet was different.

She might have fawned upon him, or thrown herself unblushingly at his head, or used a frigid hauteur to emphasize the point that her station in life was better than appearances indicated. The girls he knew invariably pursued one of these courses. But Janet didn't. Her whole bearing permeated the atmosphere with a suggestion that Claude was a very wonderful being, dashing, handsome, divine. A most agreeable suggestion! But, since it takes a goddess to detect a god, it was clear that she was quite a wonderful being, too. And what is a matter of divinity among the gods on Olympus. It is like a title among peers of the realm.

It was her simple, natural, unaffected behavior, in short, that kept his fancy intrigued. Without knowing it, his suspicion of women was almost completely disarmed.

Cornelia's parting words to Janet had given him some concern.

"You're not thinking of going to live with Cornelia?" he said.

"I may soon be glad of the chance."

"Why?"

"Because my mother threatens to put me out of her house."

"But what for?" he said, looking at her in amazement.

"I don't look like an incorrigible, do I?" she said smiling. "But my mother thinks me one for associating with people like you."

"With people like me?"

"Well, like you and the other model tenementers."

"But I'm not like them," he said, half amused, half annoyed.

"No? Do you know what I've noticed? All the people in the model tenements say they are 'not like them.' Cornelia says so, Robert says so, and now you say so. Each one thinks he is different, unique."

"Well, I'm sure that you are," he said, rather seriously. He added, lightly. "That's why it would be fatal if you went to live there. Do try to patch it up with your mother, Janet, and give up this plan of Cornelia's."

"Patching it up with my mother means complete submission. Her motto is, 'bend or break.' And I've bent long enough."

She tried briefly to give him an idea of her mother's domestic tyranny and of her own rebellion against it.

"You don't know what it is to live in my mother's house," she said.

"I've heard what it is to live in Cornelia's house," he retorted. "She casts a spell over young girls before they know her well. But she is selfish and moody. Her friendships always end in violent quarrels. She is now on the verge of a break with Mazie Ross."

"She may have very good grounds for the break."

"Oh, she's never at a loss for grounds. That isn't the point."

"What is the point?"

"The atmosphere of the Lorillard tenements. It isn't made for you to breathe in. Have you any idea what the people there are like? Gangsters, anarchists and fake artists or writers, with a very small sprinkling of well-meaning idealists, most of whom are cracked on social questions. The men are all out of business, the women all out of marriage. On the loose, every one of them, either in their actions, or in their beliefs."

"You mean they don't believe in marriage? Well, after all I've seen of family life, I don't believe in marriage either."

This was a confession which, by way of bait, many another girl had made to him.

"That's the sort of thing for a girl like Mazie to say," he said coldly, "but not for a girl like you."

Concern for himself had rapidly taken the place of concern for her.

"Mazie's way doesn't impress me any more than the way of all wives," she said, with a delightful gesture of candor. "I think she is more of a slave to men than most married women are. I want to be mistress of myself."

His doubts were allayed again. The spring sunshine and Janet's subtle charm were too strong a team for suspicion to hold out against. As the car sped on through Prospect Park, a delicious breeze, laden with the perfume of flowers and the rising sap of trees, cooled their faces, and fanned their senses warm.

"You are a dear little theorizer," he said in a tender vibrating tone. "But theories have no interest for me now. I'm too happy to think about them. I want to think only about you."

"Impossible. You don't know enough about me. We've only just met."

"Absurd," he said, taking hold of her hands. "We met when the wood nymphs first danced to the pipes of Pan, when the starlight first threw its enchantment on youth, when lovers first threaded their way over wild hills and woodlands by the rays of the crescent moon. We have known each other for ages."

"As long as that? Dear me! What an experienced person I must be."

Had her acknowledged objection to marriage affected him, after all?

"All experiences are nothing to this experience," he said, putting his arms around her and trying to kiss her.

She resisted him with a quick, firm movement. All he could do was to seize her hands and give them the rapturous embraces intended for her lips.

"Claude!" she called out, more in shyness than reproach.

"But I love you!" he cried, retaining her hands by main force.

"Since yesterday?"

"Yesterday! A million years ago. The moment in which I felt I loved you, Janet, was a world-without-end moment. That is love's way."

"Don't profane the word love," she said, her voice rich and thrilling. "You can't love a girl you don't know."

"Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?" he said, quoting the line reproachfully, and releasing her hands as he did so.

"Do you believe that love always happens at first sight? What about the feeling that takes hold of us as we slowly learn to know another's splendid character? The feeling of tenderness and adoration. Isn't that love, too?"

"No, a thousand times, no! Call it friendship, comradeship, esteem, if you like. Call it glorified toleration. But don't call it love. Love doesn't come like that. It comes like the swift lightning that embraces a cloud."

"How I should love to love like that!" she exclaimed, with a mischievous imitation of rhapsody.

"Then you don't love me?" he demanded.

She refused to admit that she did. He pressed her for an answer.

"Don't, Claude," she said at last, disturbed. "I must keep my wits about me today, or I shall be as putty in my mother's hands."

He was bitterly disappointed. Her use of his name was some solace, however; for, as her soft, flexible tones prolonged it, the sound was music to his ears.

"Is that why you won't let me kiss you?" he pursued hopefully.

"No. I'm not used to it yet," she said, quite simply.

"Not used to it! You mean you haven't been kissed by men before?"

"Nothing so silly. I haven't been kissed by you before."

"Ah, I might have known the reason wasn't inexperience," he said, with incipient jealousy. "Then why balk at me?" he went on, seizing her hands again.

"As I said," she replied, calmly matter-of-fact. "I haven't had time to think of it. At least, not much nor for long," she added impishly. "I must first see whether I can get used to the idea."

"Indeed! But getting used to the idea won't get you used to the thing itself. Only practice makes perfect."

"A rehearsal in dumb show is not to be despised," was her response.

And so they bantered on and made pretty speeches, while Claude's car bucked the wind until they turned into President Street and stopped at the corner of her own block.

As Janet got out, she was hard put to it to conceal her sense of loss.

At parting, all her matter-of-factness deserted her; for a few seconds she felt like a prisoner half awakened from an idyllic dream.

The car drove away with Claude less triumphant yet more satisfied than he had ever felt towards a charming girl before. He was profoundly stirred by the magic of Janet's genuineness, and her rich, clarinet tones lingered disturbingly in his mind.

CHAPTER NINE

I

Thoughts of home had flitted intermittently through Janet's mind during the afternoon's ride. But her faculty for living securely in the present had been strong enough to send the omens flying as fast as they came. A domestic crisis now confronted her, however, and she knew it could not be evaded. As she crossed the threshold, there was a sudden bristling of her nerves, a parching and aching of her throat, and a sense of utter misery.

From Laura, the maid, she learned that her mother had been ill all day, and had kept to her bed. As this was Mrs. Barr's invariable practice when any member of the family displeased her, Janet was not surprised. She crept quietly upstairs to her room at the top of the house. On the second floor she passed her sister's room. Through the open door Janet could look into a mirror which reflected an image of Emily, dressing for the evening. She called to her sister with an assumed cheeriness. Emily answered stiffly and without stirring an inch.

Janet, catching the unfriendly glance from the mirror, continued on her way, hot indignation kindling her blood. She could invent excuses for her mother's hostility, unreasonable as she considered it, but Emily's censorious manner was altogether intolerable.

In her own room she changed her costume to a simple black skirt and a plain white blouse. Claude and Kips Bay receded to another world while she nerved herself for the coming ordeal.

In about half an hour, the maid came up with a message that Mr. Barr wished to see Janet in the back parlor. She promptly went downstairs and discovered her father pacing the floor in agitation. It was hard to believe that this tall, imposing man was a moral weakling or that his eagle's bearing concealed a pigeon's heart.

"Jenny," he said, on the thinnest fringe of reproach, "thank Heaven you're back!"

The mere sight of his favorite daughter cooled his phantom anger. All he wanted now was to see his wife placated at any price. For he, poor man, always became the scapegoat, no matter who the criminal was.

"How could you give us such a fright, Jenny?" he continued, referring to her absence.

"Really, father, I can't send you hourly bulletins of my whereabouts, can I? It's not my fault that I've outgrown childhood. It's a law of nature."

"You don't consider your mother," he said, plaintively. "You know how it upsets her to be disobeyed."

"I'm sorry, father. But mother will have to get reconciled to the facts of biology. When the young of animals grow up, instinct makes them follow their own bent, even at the cost of disobliging their parents."

Janet felt rather proud and a little surprised at hearing herself talk in this bold, scientific style. She wished she could repeat it to her mother, but secretly doubted her ability.

"That may be," said Mr. Barr, on whom her biological views were completely thrown away. "But remember that she has been sick all day, sick with worry over your escapade!"

"Nonsense," replied Janet, unmoved. "My escapade had nothing to do with it. Her bad temper has made her ill. It always does, and nobody knows better than she how useful the weapon is. When everything else fails, she gets sick with rage, and takes to her bed until she gets her own way to the last dot. We cringe and cower before her sham illnesses—"

"Janet! You mustn't speak of your mother like that. She is ill. She lay awake the whole night and didn't touch a morsel of food all day."

"No doubt she enjoyed tormenting herself and blaming the result on me. But I don't believe that my absence was really a source of worry to anyone."

"Janet, I stayed up until three o'clock for you. And that was after leaving the bank late and stopping at the Montague Library to get the books you wanted."

"Of course, you did, you foolish old dear," said Janet, in an access of remorse.

She put her arms affectionately round his neck. It was not easy to get over her childhood idolatry of him.

"Kindness is a bad habit of yours, papa," she said. "You take to good deeds as some men take to gambling or to drink."

He smiled and patted her cheek tenderly. Her remark was not far from the truth. His morbid (and never wholly gratified) passion for approval made him intemperately anxious to please, and caused his good nature to be freely exploited by unscrupulous people, who repaid him with nothing but their contempt.

"That's like my own little Jenny. Now go up to Emily's room and make your peace with mother."

"Is that in my power?" said Janet, flaring up again and disengaging her arms from him.

Mr. Barr was torn between fear of his wife and affection for his daughter.

"Simply keep quiet and don't answer her back when she speaks to you," he urged pacifically. "After all, she's your mother, she has a right to criticize you."

"I refuse to acknowledge the right."

"Now, don't be obstinate, girlie. She can't help lecturing people. It's a habit she acquired in her missionary society. Doesn't she lecture me? If I submit, surely you can."

"I'm neither a heathen nor a husband."

"There now," he said, pleading with her. "Don't spoil everything by standing on your pride. What will you gain by defying her? Nothing! Then why do so? I tell you, Jenny, your mother may be a little hasty, but she's a very clever, strong-minded woman. In the long run, she is always in the right."

"How can you cringe to her even when her back is turned," cried Janet, revolted. "You know the truth as well as I do. She has terrorized all of us as cruelly as ever her Puritan ancestors terrorized Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson."

"Now, that shows how unfair you are," said Mr. Barr, eagerly, in a vibrant voice, as rich as Janet's own. "Only two nights ago, your mother was reading to me from John Fiske's colonial history. She came across this very case you mention, the case of Anne Hutchinson. And I distinctly recall that she condemned the persecution severely."

Disdaining to reply, Janet walked away from his side. In that moment, she hated him. It was incredible that he could be such a willing, subservient dupe.

She looked hostilely at his magnificent exterior. He had also inherited a lively wit and considerable mental dexterity. Had he possessed any force of character he might have been a great financier or statesman instead of a petty manager of a small branch bank. And Mrs. Barr's temper might have been kept within bounds, and the Barrs might have enjoyed a happy home, instead of becoming a phantom replica of a bigoted Boston family in the high and palmy days of Cotton Mather.

He misinterpreted her silence.

"You need merely say that you are sorry," he urged, "and that you'll never stay out again without her approval. That will patch up everything."

"Father," she cried, exploding. "I can't say that. Because I simply don't mean it. From now on, I'm going to have my own way about some things, even if I have to leave the family. Mother may grind you to the very dust. Marriage seems to give her that right, and you seem to enjoy the process. But she shan't do so to me."