Front matter (continued 3)

"Good Lord, what will happen next?" exclaimed the unhappy man, appalled at the collapse of his plan of conciliation. "The house has been like a funeral all day. Would to Heaven I were the corpse."

But his daughter did not hear this pathetic wish, for she was already on her way upstairs.

II

In Emily's bedroom above the parlor, Mrs. Barr was reclining in an invalid's chair. Illness had not softened the rigidity of that too, too solid flesh. She was pale, but her pallor merely accentuated the iron lines of her face.

Emily, more matronly than ever, hovered about her mother in unctuous solicitude, while Laura, the maid, busied herself setting chairs and knick-knacks wrong, in order to set them right again. Mrs. Barr disliked to have anyone about her unoccupied.

When Janet entered, her mother greeted her coldly, and then dismissed Laura with studied sweetness. She was actually much kinder to her domestics than to members of the family. Servants were hard to get and harder to keep.

"I'm sorry you have been ill," said the impenitent, politely.

"Sit down, my child. I'm getting better now, thanks in part to Doctor Hervey."

"What did the doctor say?"

"That it was to be expected under the circumstances," interposed Emily. "He thought it better for mother not to go to the missionary society tonight."

This was ominous news. Janet recollected that her mother had not missed a missionary meeting in two years.

The pause was filled with a battery of silent criticism. Usually Janet dispersed these terrible silences with a torrent of impromptu apologies. Today, however, she held her peace. Though every muscle in her body was taut, she felt care-free.

Yes, at this supreme inquisitorial moment, she felt surprisingly care-free. Except that, in response to Emily's allusion to missionaries, an old jingle ricochetted weirdly through her mind. It ran:

Oh, to be a cassowary,

On the plains of Timbuctoo,

Chewing up a missionary—

Skin and bone, and hymn book, too.

Outwardly, she was as impassive as a Chinese joss.

"Well, Janet?" said Mrs. Barr, outfought with one of her own weapons.

"Yes, mother?" replied Janet, demurely interrogative. She folded her hands innocently in her lap, and looked with a show of impersonal interest at Emily's new pumps.

"Have you nothing to tell me?"

"Not unless you wish to learn about the ball I went to yesterday. Are you interested in that?"

Emily gave a scornful laugh.

"I'm not interested in the ball," said Mrs. Barr, "and no one knows it better than you. What I am interested in is your attending the ball against my express wishes."

"Mother, in the twentieth century—"

"Are the ways of God less valid in the twentieth century than in the tenth?"

In disputes with her children, Mrs. Barr always invoked God first. This failing, she took stronger measures.

"Why do you always make poor God responsible for your severity, mother," said Janet. "It is not His way you want me to follow, but your own. Indeed, whenever you accuse me of disobeying the will of God, it is because I have really disobeyed your will, which you identify with God's. I wonder whether He likes it?"

"I don't propose to discuss the Deity with you. You have studied your Bible so little that you are apparently unable to give any opinion on the subject which is not blasphemous."

"As far as I know, the Bible does not prohibit dancing," said Janet, shifting the defensive attack so as to bring matters to a head.

"The Bible does say, however, that a child must obey its parents. I don't wish to be harsh, Janet. I believe that you have no just ground for accusing me of severity. I say now, as I have said before, that if you must dance, you may go to the affairs that are given at the church."

"Thank you!" cried Janet, ironically. "But I don't like a Sunday School atmosphere or a Sunday School man."

"I thought as much!" said Mrs. Barr, her eyes like points of steel. "You prefer to associate with unprincipled men who, having no religion, lead lives of pleasure and dance the lascivious dances of the time.

"Mother, I don't dance anything but thoroughly ancient and respectable dances. I've never had a chance to learn the modern steps. I dance very rarely, anyhow."

"Emily never dances," said her mother, cuttingly.

"No, she is rather heavy and men are so lazy nowadays, and so tender about their toes."

Some demon had made Janet spring up and stop reflectively in front of Emily. The latter's podgy bulk became a size larger by contrast with Janet's mobile slenderness.

"Oblige me by not arguing," said Mrs. Barr, coming to her elder daughter's rescue. "I tell you I won't tolerate anyone in my house that openly flouts her mother, spends whole nights with a woman of evil reputation, and deliberately wastes the Lord's time."

In her agitation she rose halfway from her chair. But rage and lack of food had so weakened her that she sank back limply. Emily, looking unutterable things at Janet, implored her mother to be calm in tones that invited her to be just the contrary.

Mrs. Barr hardly needed this spur. She sincerely believed that she was fighting the evil one for the possession of Janet's soul. Revived by this conviction she bravely returned to her task.

"See the condition to which you've brought me," she said, the angry tears welling up in her eyes. "What with watching and waiting and praying for you all night, and fretting about your safety—"

She instinctively followed a religious appeal with a sentimental one. But her speech had so much anger mixed with the pathos, that it left Janet cold.

"I hope you won't get upset about me again, mother," she said, unemotionally. "I'm quite old enough to take care of myself—"

"You'd better go to your room, Janet!" exclaimed Emily, "before you kill mother with your cruel selfishness."

"I'm not aware that I'm under orders to you, Emily, or that you've the right to play the Pharisee because you're content to lead a stagnant, hole-in-the-corner life. If you wanted anything you'd disobey mother fast enough. Only you happen to have no wants. And you make a virtue of your necessity. I have plenty of wants. And you persuade mother that my necessity is a vice."

"Be as theatrical as possible, Janet!" said Emily. "Why don't you add that I poisoned mother's mind against you?"

"You didn't have to carry coals to Newcastle, Emily. You merely had to fan the flame in your own sweet, sisterly way."

Mrs. Barr checked them both with an autocratic wave of her hand.

"You need not abuse Emily, or me either," she decreed, black-browed. "There is absolutely nothing more to be said. Either you respect my wishes about your comings and goings, or you leave my house."

"Mother, do you really propose to put me out for refusing to submit to an arbitrary wish?"

"I should think I had fallen far short of my duty, if I did not guard my children against sensual folly—"

"By showing them the door?"

"If you leave your home, it will be by your own choice and not by your mother's command," said Mrs. Barr, emphatically. "This is your home. It will remain yours so long as you keep Christian precepts. But a mother must hold the family hearth inviolate against evil doing. I cannot condone a wicked waste of the Lord's time simply because you describe the practice as a wish to be free. If you don't value a good home, you are certainly quite free to choose another."

"Why must I adopt the habits that suit your tastes and Emily's, but that are hateful to mine?"

"My child, you are flesh of my flesh—"

"All the laws and all the prophets can't justify the narrow, friendless, joyless, medieval life that you wish me to lead," cried Janet, in a passion of insurgency. "When you were young you led no such life yourself. Aunt Mary, your own sister, told me that you were the flightiest girl in the family. Your girlhood was a perpetual round of balls, theatres, parties and flirtations. Do I ask for a life of pleasure like that? No. I simply want to choose my own friends, trust to my own instincts, and follow my own bent."

This reference to her mother's youth was not a happy one. Mrs. Barr looked back on her younger days as a period of godless frivolity for which she had largely atoned by enduring with a contrite heart the double affliction of a weak husband and a wilful daughter. Her duty, as she saw it, was to keep Emily and Janet out of the primrose paths which she herself had trodden with such levity and with such disastrous results. Accordingly, Janet's presumptuous allusion merely stirred her fanaticism to its iciest depths.

"You either obey me or go," she said, with pitiless brevity.

"Oh, very well," said Janet, affecting a blitheness she was far from feeling, "I'll go."

Without another word, Mrs. Barr, weak as she was, rose and walked with a firm step to her own room. Emily, not altogether pleased with this climax, followed her immediately, giving a flabby imitation of her mother's really magnificent exit.

Janet stood nonplussed for a few seconds. Then she went upstairs to the inward refrain of:

"Chewing up a missionary

Skin and bones and hymn book, too."

Her inveterate evenness of spirit amounted almost to a failing; but now, for the first time, she became conscious of latent impulses of a vindictive and murderous kind.

Back in her own room, she hastily packed a suit-case with her most necessary belongings.

CHAPTER TEN

I

About a week later, a tall, thin, immaculate gentleman, in a suit of neutral taupe, entered the offices of the Evening Chronicle. A stand-up collar slightly tip-tilted his chin. But his expression was a friendly, not a haughty one. His small roving gray eyes looked around with a humorous inquisitiveness, as if they wondered what their immaculate owner could possibly hope to find in such a sloppy, disorderly place.

In due time, a slovenly office boy stopped pounding on a typewriter and showed the stranger to an inner office. Here Hutchins Burley penned those inimitable effusions on "the ethereal feminine" which gave the Saturday special half a million female and male readers. It was an army that ran the Saturday Evening Post brigade a close second, and rendered Burley's professional position unassailable.

The roving gray eyes saw the swollen bulk of Mr. Hutchins Burley, squatting like a giant toad behind a roll-top desk and pawing over a visiting card.

"Well, Mr. Pryor?" said the pillar of the Evening Chronicle, with no waste of civility. "What d'you want?"

"Frankly, I want Mr. Robert Lloyd's job."

"How do you know it's vacant? Are you a friend of his?"

"Hardly that. The information just drifted my way."

"You handed me that stuff at the Outlaws' Ball. Who the devil are you, anyway?"

Whenever Burley spoke vehemently, he shoveled the words from the left side of his mouth, a process that contorted his face into the exact likeness of a cartoon by Briggs.

"You might be a spy," he added, putting a cigar in his mouth and scowling horribly at his visitor.

The latter replied in a quiet and dignified but judiciously injured tone.

"Mr. Burley, you have my card. Go into my personal history all you like. But first, let me refer to the service I did you at the ball. It was a small matter—"

"Don't get puffed up about it then," growled Burley, with much less hostility, however.

"No fear," continued Mark Pryor, as terse as his host and much more urbane. "I mention it only because an ounce of action is worth a ton of talk. Or a cartload of stuffy introductions. The point is this. Having learned that you had discharged Mr. Lloyd—"

"Who says I discharged him?" Burley noisily cut in. "He discharged himself."

"Oh, did he?"

"Yes, damn him. I wasn't good enough for him, I suppose. You know his kind, brains, fatted brains. But no guts! Sticks his nose up at everything and hangs out with a lot of super-highbrows—New Republic gas-bags."

"The sort that cut a pie from the periphery to the center?"

"Yah! That's their lingo. Still, Lloyd's got a head on his shoulders. I'll say that for him. And I don't fire a man that's worth his salary. Why should I?"

"You believe in keeping your grudges out of your business?"

"That's me. I could have given him his walking papers for a hundred good reasons. But I didn't. And what thanks did I get? He left me in the lurch. That's what he did. Left me on his own hook at a damn critical time."

"A case of bad conscience, perhaps."

"You said it! He'd done me all the harm he could. He and Claude Fontaine who put him up to it."

Burley enlarged on his two-fold grievance. First, Robert and Claude had circulated a malicious story about Harry Kelly (a professional bruiser) making a punching bag of him; this story had ruined his prestige among the Outlaws of Kips Bay. Then, they had freely slandered him in Cornelia Covert's inner circle, with the result that Cornelia's friend, Janet Barr, had conceived an insane and utterly baseless dislike of him.

His story was full of evasions and suppressions. Thus he forgot to tell Mark Pryor that he had twice waylaid Janet on the street and had been coldly repulsed each time. It was clear that these repulses had added fuel to his hatred of Claude and Robert, the two men who found favor in her eyes. Against them, rather than against her, he vented his spleen. When he spoke of her, his diatribe degenerated into a whine.

"I know," said Pryor, laconically, cheering him up. "You have that 'nobody loves me,' feeling. Nastiest feeling in the world. We all get it once in a while. I find there's only one remedy for it, and that's to stop bullying people."

"Bullying people!" shouted Burley, jumping up and glaring at his visitor. "Say that again, if you dare."

Mr. Pryor smiled faintly and sat unmoved, save that his neck seemed to rise a very little out of his stand-up collar, as the eye-piece of a microscope rises out of the tube.

"I'm a plain man, Mr. Burley," he said, imperturbably. "And I speak plainly. If you don't like plain speaking, I'd better withdraw my application."

"The hell you'd better!"

Mr. Pryor got up, everything quiet about him except his eyes.

Burley looked as if he were about to launch a thunderbolt. But the roving eyes of his visitor were now fixed upon him like points of steel.

"Sit down," said Burley, suddenly limp.

Mr. Pryor sat down very quietly, without taking his eyes off Hutchins Burley, who sat down, too, almost as if mesmerized.

"Tell you what," he said, after a while. "I need a sort of confidential assistant. A man who can keep his eyes and ears on the jump, and his pen and tongue under lock and key. Get me?"

He went on to tell Mr. Pryor that he was willing to try him out and that faithful service would meet with very big rewards and with increasingly confidential commissions. For the present, his newspaper duties were to be subordinated to the one task of keeping track of the Lorillard tenements.

"Trust me," said Mark Pryor.

He did not think it necessary to explain that keeping track of the Lorillard tenements was precisely what he had been doing for purposes of his own.

"And glue an eye on that fellow Fontaine," added Burley.

"To get a line on the diamond smuggling?" asked Pryor, with the most casual air imaginable.

Burley straightened up with a yell of suspicion.

"What in blazes are you talking about?" he said.

"Merely what you yourself talked about, my dear sir," said Pryor soothingly. "At the ball you called Mr. Fontaine a diamond smuggler. More than one person will remember that remark."

Burley's suspicions were disarmed.

"Forget it, my friend, forget it," he said. "A man says a good many things under the influence of liquor that he has no call to say. I don't suppose the Fontaines are less on the square about their importations than the other big jewelers are. That's no business of mine or yours, however, is it?"

He declared emphatically that his interest in Claude Fontaine's doings had a totally different basis. On three occasions Fontaine had come between him and a woman. He did not hesitate to name the ladies. One was Lydia Dyson, another was Cornelia Covert, the third was Janet Barr. He had said nothing about the first two. He was not a greedy man. Anyhow, according to the ethics of Kips Bay, Lorillard females were nobody's property. That was no blasted secret, was it?

"But this Janet Barr's no Lorillard female," he said, bringing his fist down heavily on the desk. "Any fool can see that. And I'm man enough, to refuse to stand by while Fontaine dirties her good name."

"You don't mean to say that he has—"

"He'll do it, all right. Or why did he pick the girl up, when he's just got engaged to Armstrong's daughter?"

"Armstrong, the financier?"

"Yes. And Dupont Armstrong won't stand for a man who isn't on the level with his girl. Just put that in your pipe and smoke it."

"I know a safer place," said Mr. Pryor, gently tapping his head. "Where it won't go up in smoke."

He rose and, after coming to a few necessary understandings with Burley, took his leave.

As he walked rapidly along Broadway towards the subway, he felt that he had done a very good morning's work. He was satisfied that Hutchins Burley knew more about the diamond smuggling than he cared to admit. The puzzle was that, although Burley obviously connected Claude Fontaine with the smuggling operations, he was unwilling to give the connection away. What was the motive that restrained him from exposing a man he bitterly hated? Clearly, either a lack of proof, or some consideration of a more personal kind.

Reminding himself of his maxim that two and two never make four except in vulgar mathematics, Mark Pryor left the subway at Thirty-fourth Street, the Kips Bay station nearest the Lorillard tenements. Then he went directly to his flat.

II

Incoming or outgoing denizens made barely a ripple on the surface of Kips Bay. The district was used to a shifting population. Even the colonization of Sutton and Beekman Places by Pierian millionaires "cut no ice." Honest men and thieves, artists, criminals and Bohemians, idle paupers and rich idlers, all these floated in and floated out, but the net hodge podge was much the same. Bomb makers might come and gunmen might go, but Kips Bay went on forever.

The Lorillard tenements, the hub of the district, had experienced their fair share of changes during the week of Mark Pryor's advent. Robert and Janet were among the newcomers. Robert, thrown on his own scant resources, had secured a nook in Kelly's flat, Number Thirteen, his berth there being the fruit of Cornelia's good offices. And Janet had come to live with Cornelia in flat Number Fifteen.

This last event was at once followed by a break in Cornelia's partnership with Mazie Ross. The three small rooms and kitchenette were not large enough for more than two people. And pretty, slovenly Mazie, her early enthusiasm for Cornelia cooled, had lately spent more and more time on her own appearance and less and less on her companion's wants.

Cornelia always got rid of a companion the moment a better one turned up. A "better one" usually meant one who could do more of Cornelia's housework, or could look after her creature comforts more diligently, or could give her more of that flattering attention of which she never had her fill. Whenever the time came to change partners, Cornelia would send the old one flying without the smallest compunction. Nor was she ever at a loss for a good excuse.

Janet's first day in Number Fifteen was Mazie's last. When Mazie came home that night, "instead of poppies, willows waved o'er her couch."

The crash came after supper, while Janet was out shopping with Harry Kelly, who had quickly become a steady visitor at his next-door neighbor's flat. As a pretext, Cornelia chose the matter of Mazie's easy friendship with Hutchins Burley, a friendship reported to have gone as far as was possible, since the recent ball.

There was nothing new in the charge that Mazie practiced principles of varietism about which Cornelia simply theorized. The only novelty was that Cornelia now declared the charge to be a good excuse for parting company. Mazie thought it a poor excuse. On this difference of opinion there sprang up a tempestuous scene. Words flew high, and the checks that polite society imposes on candid criticism of one's friends went completely by the board.

The climax was reached when Cornelia offered the opinion that if Mazie wanted to become a vulgar little copy of Camille, that was her affair; but flat Number Fifteen was not the place in which to practice the part. In vain did Mazie reply with an unexpurgated review of Cornelia's history. Cornelia was unmoved. And her languid, cadenced retorts floated serenely above Mazie's torrent of invective like a violin obligato above the crashing brasses.

It did not take Mazie long to pack her most necessary articles into a bag and go. On her way out, she said, with a good imitation of Cornelia's sweetest tone:

"Good bye, Cornelia. I'd like to stay long enough to tell your next dupe what a fraud you are. But what's the use? She won't thank me for it, as I suppose she has a crush on you, like I had once. Well, it'll do her good to learn by experience. Finding you out, my dear, is such a complete education."

By the time Janet and Harry Kelly returned, all was quiet along the Potomac.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I

For the next few weeks, Janet lived excitedly in the glamor of the Lorillard tenements. She could not well have imagined a bigger difference than that between the complete orthodoxy of the Barrs of Brooklyn and the complete heterodoxy of the model tenementers of Kips Bay.

Her impression of the new life was put into words for her by Lydia Dyson, the author of "Brothers and Sisters," (then in its twenty-fifth big printing). Lydia, whose tall, thin form and pale olive skin lost none of their spectacular qualities by the snake-like movements she affected, the huge jet earrings she wore, or the gold-tipped cigarettes she smoked, assured Janet, in a rich Kentucky drawl:

"We obey only one custom here, and that is to disobey all customs; we hold only one belief, and that is to hold no beliefs."

Janet was fully persuaded that the first part of this statement was true and that the second part was a vast improvement upon the Barr regime.

In truth, she found the Lorillardian absence of formality, constraint and regulated behavior a decided relief after her long course of Calvinistic repression at home. And, active though she was by nature, she did not at first notice how the days slipped by with great ado, but with very little done.

The Lorillard tenementers were not exactly lazy. They were merely idle. Like the idle rich and the idle poor they were ceaselessly occupied—in killing time.

Cornelia was in the habit of getting up somewhere between nine and eleven. After breakfast, the two friends would set out to look for a job. The spirit in which they proceeded was the spirit in which young people go skylarking. Hunting for a job was an old pastime of Cornelia's. If she ever came up to a job's requirements, the job never came up to hers. Or if by chance it did, she discovered a bewildering array of reasons for not taking it, or for speedily leaving it, when taken.

At noon, the day's duty was considered fully done. After lunch, there was another jaunt; this time to an art gallery, concert hall, theatre or movie. Free tickets from Cornelia's theatrical friends were reasonably plentiful, and when these failed, there were return calls to pay.

Thus, Charlotte Beecher's studio was a favorite stopping place, as Janet soon discovered. Charlotte possessed a million dollars or more in her own right, and she had three or four studios in totally different parts of the city. She did her hardest work in her double Lorillard flat every morning; her evenings were spent warding off fortune-hunting suitors like Denman Page, who besieged her Fifth Avenue apartment; on certain afternoons she served an "intellectual tea" in a studio sumptuously fitted up in Washington Mews.

Janet was always taken to the studio de luxe in the Mews. Cornelia, invariably busy, would be sketching some new design of a hat, or pinning together a one-piece dress, whilst she luxuriated happily amidst the rich Chinese rugs and the soft silken cushions of Charlotte's show room. The serpent in this garden of Eden was the "little group of serious thinkers" (an element alien to Kips Bay) that met in the Mews by virtue of Charlotte's encouragement.

"These intellectuals!" Cornelia would say scornfully to Janet on the way home. "Did you ever hear such bumptious talk?"

"I find them rather amusing," Janet would perhaps reply.

"Araminta, what nonsense! They positively put the furniture on edge. But that's Charlotte all over. There's a nigger in every woodpile, and there's a jarring note in every one of Charlotte's rooms. My dear, it bores me cruelly."

Still, Cornelia went on visiting the Mews, intellectuals, cruel boredom, and all. It puzzled Janet for a time. She had still to learn that a perfect Kipsite is prepared to suffer no end of martyrdom in the sacred cause of luxury.

Every evening was like a new party to Janet, flat Number Fifteen being one of the chief rendezvous in the tenements. After supper, visitors of both sexes dropped in unannounced and uninvited, until by midnight, a dozen people, more or less, were sure to be occupying the whole flat.

Generally, the guests split up into small groups and spent the time in play. Some played at dancing or at music, others at clever repartee or giddy flirting. To this play, the counterpoint was enthusiasm. A magnificent enthusiasm for self. In a rapturous torrent of words, each Kipsite painted a roseate future that led by startling steps to a supreme moment in which the world lay prostrate at the enthusiast's feet.

It was a cosmopolitan gathering. All the arts and sciences and occupations, all the moral and immoral standards, and all the races and nationalities of New York were represented. A dancer from the Hindoo Kush, several would-be Fokines or Stravinskys, two or three imitation Oscar Wildes, Theodore Dreisers or Frank Harrises—these were sure to be there. Even the solid banker (or aspiring Pierpont Morgan), who kept a quiet flat and a lady in it, was an occasional visitor. No one was excluded who was piquant or picturesque.

Cornelia's specially privileged guests were a scanty handful. Among the men were Claude Fontaine, Robert Lloyd, Denman Page, and Harry Kelly, the "Harlem Gorilla." Soon after Janet's coming, Mark Pryor, immaculate and unobtrusive, joined the ultimate circle and began mysteriously to appear and to disappear.

Still fewer were the women admitted to the inner ring. Of these the chief were Lydia Dyson, the spectacular, and Charlotte Beecher, the industrious. The novelist came in silks, the heiress in calicos. Charlotte's cheap but natty working costume was looked upon among the Outlaws as an affectation. Her blouses and skirts gave Cornelia the horrors.

So did her marked preference for Robert Lloyd.

Janet had an idea that these evening visitors came chiefly to admire Cornelia or to be admired by her. She assumed that Cornelia was "the whole show." It was a pardonable assumption. Cornelia sat in a rocking chair in the central room and was feline, and languid, and observant, while the excitement eddied and swirled around her. To all appearances she held the reins of her party with the masterly skill of the Borax man who drives the celebrated twenty mule team.

Robert would have it that Cornelia was neither the star nor the manager of the nightly performance in Number Fifteen. According to him, the only management she displayed was in the skill with which she focused attention upon herself. The cadenced laugh, the sugary stab, the artful question—these were not the subtle devices of a clever hostess; they were merely the centripetal pulls of an egomaniac against the centrifugal interests of her guests.

Janet dismissed this explanation lightly and begged Robert not to analyze every joy until its very essence had been probed—and destroyed. She laughed at his attempt to convince her that these gay evenings of Cornelia's were a kind of renaissance. His theory was that the light of Cornelia's splendor had been getting dim of late, as it had got dim on several previous occasions. But the impact of a new partner against her, like the impact of an astral visitor against a dying sun, now as always gave her a new lease of brilliance.

In short, Robert asserted that it was the replacement of Mazie by Janet which had caused a tremendous revival of interest in Cornelia's flat. Everybody in the inner ring of the Outlaws or in the outer ring of the tenements, everybody indeed, that had any shadow of a claim to an entree, had come trooping in to sun themselves in the restored glory of Number Fifteen.

To most of Robert's remarks, Janet paid little attention. But she carefully treasured up one of them.

This was that never before had Claude Fontaine been such a constant visitor.

II

Yet for a few days after the Outlaws' Ball, Claude had behaved as if his confession of love had never been made, or had merely been the expression of an impulse, for which he disclaimed responsibility. There had been no return to the intimacy that instantly abolishes all the formulas of mere politeness and all the prescriptions of mere etiquette; there had been no recurrence of that world-without-end moment at the ball or of that other moment in the limousine next day.

At the ball he had treated her as he would have treated any respectable middle-class girl who might take his fancy. That is, he had stretched the conventions as far as an impressionable young woman will usually allow a dashing young man to stretch them, but not further.

After she joined Cornelia, however, his attitude changed. He treated her with a certain wariness of manner by which he appeared to convey the following:

"I took you to be a girl who strictly observed the moral customs established and honored in Brooklyn, but long fallen into disuse in certain parts of Manhattan, and nowhere less respected than in Kips Bay. It amused me to tempt you to violate these customs, especially as I had little hope of meeting with success. But now that you have become a Lorillard girl, what spice is there in tempting you? Either you never were the girl I took you for; or, at any rate, you soon won't be.

"At all events I shall be on my guard. You are the first girl to work upon me so mightily with a single glance. But you are not the first girl who has looked as innocent as a dove and acted as subtly as a serpent. Be warned! Neither your innocent subtlety nor subtle innocence can make me forget that a Claude Fontaine is in the habit of forming but one sort of friendship with a girl in the Lorillard tenements."

Janet, always very sensitive to atmosphere, got the effect of this train of thought, and in consequence kept Claude at as great a distance as her naturally cordial nature would let her.

In one of the evening gatherings at Cornelia's the talk turned on marriage, and it came out that Janet had adopted Cornelia's views on the wickedness of marriage in its modern form. Claude, with the common failing of lovers, promptly referred her action to himself.

Was this Janet's way of announcing that she meant to make no greater demands on a rich man than any other girl in the Lorillard environment? At first, it seemed so to Claude, and he felt relieved. But, on second thoughts, another question occurred to him. Might not Janet's conversion to Cornelia's beliefs in free love be a mere blind? A pretended dislike of wedlock was a recognized bait for landing a man at the altar. Was her conversion of this type or was it of the franker type of Mazie Ross, who asked all that was due to a Lorillard tenement girl but asked no more?

On the whole, it seemed fairly safe to treat Janet on the Mazie Ross plane, and this he proceeded to do.

Mazie, by the way, had returned as a visitor to Number Fifteen within a week of her spectacular exit. Her doll-like face had recovered its pretty smile and her baby blue eyes gave no clue to whether she was seeking vengeance or merely currying favor again. No one asked or cared, hatred, like love, being a very fluctuating stock in the model tenements.

Janet had not failed to notice that Claude made little difference between his manner to her and his manner to Mazie. She did not like it, but she had to wait some time for the chance of showing how much she scorned his judgment.

III

The opportunity came at one of Cornelia's gayest parties given at the end of Janet's second week in Kips Bay. It was really a sort of "coming out" party for Janet. All the Outlaws, both of the inner and the outer ring turned out to hail the new favorite. Even Mark Pryor put in an appearance and actually remained on deck until the end, perhaps because the trio of Cornelia's friends who provided the music played Lehar, Straus, and more recent dance tunes without the customary sentimental whine.

Contemptuous of the fitness of things, Claude did his best to monopolize Janet. When the gayety was at its highest and the music at its most intoxicating, he danced her into a room which, for the moment, proved to be nearly but not quite empty.

Pushed out of the way against a corner stood a screen. Behind this he whirled her, and then swiftly took her in his arms and kissed her passionately. As swiftly, she pushed him away with an expression of extreme distaste.

"I don't like my friends to imitate Hutchins Burley," she said, her voice quiet and cool, her gray eyes full of life and scorn.

The others in the room laughed in mockery or applause. For an instant, Claude's all-conquering look was replaced by a crestfallen one. But he quickly regained his poise and spirits.

"Just a kiss to try," he said jauntily, as he attempted to recapture her arm.

"It's much too trying for gentle Janet," blithely chirped Mazie, who had danced into the room and taken in the situation, as Janet again turned away from Claude.

AS a matter of fact, it was Janet's sense of propriety in public that was offended more than anything else. As for Claude, he was only less mortified by the affront to his vanity than by the haunting fear that Janet's rebuff came from genuine dislike.

No girl had ever given the brilliant, impetuous Claude Fontaine a glance of undisguised repugnance.

Janet spent the rest of the evening chiefly in conversation with Robert Lloyd and Mark Pryor. Meanwhile, Claude affected a complete indifference to her actions. He threw himself into the party with a mad abandon, and whipped up the conviviality with a riotous, headstrong wildness until everybody voted it the merriest evening in years. Amongst the other sex, he exploited to the utmost his patrician graces and masculine daring, and was so much the center of the occasion that the party might have been his rather than Janet's.

The women thought him magnificent, graceful, cruel—in a word, irresistible; the men laughed at his impudence, and envied or admired his readiness, effrontery and ease.

And yet, as he showed his fine points triumphantly now to this adoring girl and now to that, his voice vibrated towards Janet.

Janet took it all in, and continued talking to Robert with undisturbed satisfaction. She saw Claude pass recklessly from one favorite to another, and guessed easily that none of these was his real aim.

When the party broke up, Claude induced Janet to listen to him alone for a moment. He was suddenly all contrition. To his whispered plea for forgiveness, she said, in a not unkindly tone:

"Forgiveness for what? For advertising your emotions?"

"For the kiss," he said, his voice full of sensuous charm. And he added, on a more audacious note: "I wish I could take it back."

"Oh, do you? You'd better begin with the publicity."

"Please forgive the kiss and the publicity, Janet."

"I'll forgive the second when I forget the first," she replied, much more gaily than she intended, thus proving that Claude was not the only one in the grip of a resistless passion.

Claude went home, satisfied that his daring had once again enabled him to snatch victory out of the arms of defeat.

CHAPTER TWELVE

I

And so it had. None the less, the experience had taught Claude a lesson which, for once, he took to heart. He never again supposed that Janet's friendship was to be had on the same terms as Mazie's or even Cornelia's.

True, he remained in the dark as to what precisely her idea of self-respect was. Conflicting and irreconcilable inferences were the only ones he could draw from the conduct of a girl who lived in the Lorillard tenements, moved in the Outlaws' circle, professed to be hostile to marriage, yet stood on her dignity withal, in quite a traditional womanly way.

But Claude was not the man to waste time on psychological conundrums. Besides, he was too happy to be critical. He was back in the good graces of Janet, or rather, as he soon paraphrased the case, she was back in his. He flattered himself that he was the dominant influence over a girl who was a piquant, if puzzling, amalgam of Brooklyn and Bohemia.

In the next two weeks, his position as Janet's particular friend was established beyond dispute. Few afternoons passed in which his motor car did not drive up to the Lorillard and whirl her away to a place of gayety or recreation. The chief rival claimant upon her time was Robert Lloyd. But as Claude, in point of social advantages and personal graces, far outdistanced him, this rivalry was not taken seriously by any of the three persons concerned, least of all by Claude.

One day, to Cornelia's astonishment, Janet announced that she had planned to spend the afternoon, not with Claude, but with Robert. She made the announcement from a tuffet on which she sat soberly, while reading a book by Mrs. Beatrice Webb.

"Is this your pensive day?" asked Cornelia, ironically.

"Yes," replied Janet. "Robert complains that I'm neglecting him, and consequently my education. I think I ought to give him a chance to prove both assertions. So I've asked him to come here this afternoon. I can't spend all my days in sky-larking, can I?"

"My dear, 'youth's a stuff will not endure.' If you choose Mrs. Sidney Webb and Robert Lloyd rather than Claude Fontaine, the choice is your own. Of course, Robert is very entertaining. He pledges you with facts and figures. But when I was a rosebud like you, Araminta, I preferred a man who drank to me only with his eyes."

"Cornelia, I adore being made love to; yet I get horribly tired of it—even of Claude's love making—when it's kept up too long. And I hate facts and figures; yet Robert's never bore me."

"What a morbid symptom, my dear!"

"Oh, don't say that. I feel sure it's quite a natural condition, in my case. But perhaps there's a quality left out of me, a quality that other women possess."

Janet was clearly eager to carry on her self-analysis, but Cornelia gave no sign of sharing this eagerness.

Cornelia, in fact, was far from pleased. Her unconscious game was to keep Robert revolving in an orbit around herself. He was such an excellent drawing card! For had he not the rare power of raising the value of any object or person he admired? Not that people ever credited him with unusual discernment or insight. Yet the fact remained that Robert had only to praise a human being or a work of art hitherto undervalued or overlooked, and presto, the article or the person instantly became subject to an urgent popular demand. This was one of the reasons why Cornelia (who felt that she had been handsome enough in surrendering Claude without a murmur) did not wish Robert as well to gravitate from her stellar system to Janet's.

But, seeing no way of cancelling Robert's visit, she determined not to be a spectator of it.

"I must run in next door, Janet," she said, "and ask the Gorilla to do an errand for me."

She left, omitting her customary lyrical phrases of affection. Janet did not suspect the jealousy behind this omission. But she was undeniably disappointed because Cornelia had not encouraged her to discuss her friendships with Claude and Robert about whom her heart and her thoughts were brimful.

Thus quickly did Cornelia damp down the fire of intimacy by treating the exchange of self-revelation as a strictly one-sided transaction. She had (so it struck Janet) a very low opinion of all confidences—other than her own.

II

When the bell rang, Janet opened the door wondering why Robert had come an hour before the appointed time.

But it was Claude who entered! He came in, like the god of the glorious spring without, in his gayest, most engaging mood.

"What luck, to find you in!" he cried. "Janet, I've come in an open car on the chance of taking you for a spin to Mineola to see the start of the great Cross-Continental airplane race."

"Oh, Claude, how nice of you. But—I'm afraid I can't go."

"Why not?"

"Well—you see—I've promised to go out with Robert this afternoon."

His face clouded.

"And you never told me!" escaped from him.

"You are not my diarist," she said, faintly ironical.

"Please forgive me, Janet," he said, dropping his possessive tone, as he reminded himself how touchy she was about her independence. "But I'm disappointed, bitterly disappointed. I planned the excursion as a surprise for you. And how I've counted on it!"

"Not more than I long to go, Claude. But what can I do?"

He took her hands in his, and said eagerly:

"Must you keep the engagement? Can't you think of some excuse? Where on earth was he going to take you to?"

"To the Japanese Industrial Exhibition at the Grand Central Palace."

He made a contemptuous grimace.

"A stuffy exhibition!" he exclaimed. "Good Heavens, Janet, why hesitate to change your plans? It isn't as if Robert wanted you for himself, as I do. He'll understand."

Janet wondered whether Claude would understand if she confessed that she was actually more interested in the Japanese Exhibition than in the cross-continent air race. But though she kept silent on this point, because she really wanted greatly to go with Claude, she was rather troubled. It was not easy for her to gratify a private desire at the expense of a social obligation.

"I don't like to hurt Robert's feelings," she said, turning away in her indecision.

"Oh, very well, if you don't wish to come with me!"

He flung himself sulkily into a chair.

Janet was astonished at his complete change of mood. She might have felt hurt, had she not had a woman's instinctive weakness for spoiling the man she was fond of.

She sat down irresolutely, and reflected that this would be the second time she had broken an engagement with Robert.

"It's idiotic," he said, rising, with a sense of deep injury. "Here is the most sensational race in a century, on a perfectly glorious day. And I'm mad to be with you."

"Perhaps Robert is, too," she said, a merry light dancing in her eyes.

"Of course, he's no fool. He'd rather be with a wonderful girl than an ordinary one. But what he wants more even than a wonderful girl is a chopping-block, any chopping-block, for his sociological theories. Why on earth did you leave your home, if all you crave is more instruction, and if the only freedom you want is the freedom to stand on more ceremony than before?"

"That has nothing to do with the matter, Claude," said Janet, refusing to ignore the truth simply because it was disagreeable. "Robert may not be offended at finding me away, but he is sure to be offended at finding me rude."

"It seems to me that you are far more concerned with Robert's feelings than with mine," said Claude, changing to a tone of melancholy reproach.

"But I really haven't a good excuse, Claude," she said, troubled, but still indecisive.

"I know girls who wouldn't take two minutes to find an excellent one," he said, with a return of his superior authoritative air.

Janet's temptation was great; greater yet when Claude, in his most handsome and daring manner, drew her out of the chair and put an arm around her waist.

"It's an occasion in a million, Janet. I've set my heart on this ride with you. What does it matter what Robert may think, or what anyone may think, as long as we two want so much to be together? You must come. I shall believe you don't care a straw for me, if you don't."

His flawless form and vibrant voice annihilated argument. With a happy heart but a guilty conscience, Janet dismissed her scruples.

On the way out, she stopped in at Number Thirteen to beg Cornelia to smooth matters over with Robert.

Cornelia, serene and all smiles again, promised to do her best.

III

Robert came home soon after and, getting no response from Number Fifteen, went to his own room in Kelly's suite next door.

He got all the news from Cornelia, who politely tried not to gloat over his disappointment. She professed to see no reason for finding fault with Janet's easy submission to the force of an irresistible attraction.

As it was fairly plain that Robert would have preferred to be alone, Cornelia perversely lost no time in proposing that he carry out his original intention of visiting the Japanese Industrial Exhibition, she, of course, to take Janet's place as his companion.

She had another reason for inviting herself out with Robert. This reason was the Harlem Gorilla. He, though almost superstitiously devoted to her, sometimes had to be "managed," in accordance with Cornelia's view that love makes the most constant of men uncertain, coy, and hard to please. Luckily, the treatment that Harry Kelly's case required was not a subtle one, and so it was Cornelia's practice to alternate a little encouraging discouragement, with a little discouraging encouragement. On this occasion, by accompanying Robert who didn't want her, and deserting Kelly who wanted her very much, she neatly killed two birds with the same stone.

On the way to the exhibition, Robert gave Cornelia an account of his latest occupation. He had been made organizing secretary of a body called the League of Guildsmen. Was this a fanciful name for another set of Outlaws? No, the Guildsmen were servers of the community, the Outlaws were spongers on it.

"You have golden opinions of us," said Cornelia, theatrically. "I marvel that you soil your garments by staying in our midst."

"It's nothing to marvel at, Cornelia. I had to learn what Kips Bay and its slum population were at first hand before I could desire in earnest to destroy them, root and branch. Familiarity, which sometimes breeds contempt, often breeds homicidal mania. Do you recollect how Caesar spent a short vacation among a band of desperate pirates and how the experience filled him with a conviction that it was his duty to exterminate them? Well, I am filled with the same conviction about Kips Bay."

"What a passion you have for reforming everybody and everything, Cato! I am sure it is a very noble passion, though it does include poor me in its program of extermination. Still, I wonder whether reform, like charity, oughtn't to begin at home?"

"I used to think so," replied Robert, unmoved by her sarcasm. "In my schooldays, my elders obliged me to hack my way through obsolete French tragedies or the differential calculus instead of allowing me to gain a working knowledge of current English plays or of modern political economy. And when I made a fearful hash of their instruction, they voted me a miserable failure. Whereupon, I determined to reform myself in order that I might reform the world. I am wiser now. I know that I must reform the world before I can hope to reform myself."

"Cato, you are a perfectly gorgeous mixture of building air castles and of seeing things upside down! One can never tell whether your head is in the clouds or on the ground."

Robert indulgently proceeded to say that the Guildsmen were young people of like sentiments with his own. In a general way, their aim was to advance the idea that the producers and servers of society, being the rightful possessors of the earth, must eliminate the profiteers and the parasites who have usurped possession.

"If that is your aim, Robert, I predict that your league and your secretaryship will have a short life and a merry one."

Robert laughed and admitted that he did not expect a long tenure of office. The Guild plan was a European idea for which America was by no means ripe.

"I fancy we are as progressive in industrial matters as the Europeans are," said Cornelia, on her mettle.

"Oh, more so," replied Robert, drily. "Our giant industries lead the world in maximizing the production of things of a mediocre quality and the creation of human life of a contemptible quality. Yes, in crude capacity, we are ahead of our European competitors. But in political capacity, we still lag far behind. Hence the difficulty of transplanting to our soil a high-class social policy like that of the Guildsmen."

"But when this Guild plan dies a natural death, what forlorn hope will you champion next?"

"I fear there'll be nothing left but to throw myself on the mercy of a rich uncle."

"What, an uncle in a fairy tale?"

"No, an uncle in California, a real live one."

Cornelia evinced little more than a languid interest in Robert's information. Fabulously rich relatives—who were cast for the parts of Deus ex machina, but who never materialized in flesh or cash—made a golden splash in the 'scutcheon of too many veteran Lorillard inhabitants. She preferred a conversation dealing with more tangible personages. Truth to tell, she rather hoped that Robert would try to undo the painful impression he had made on her by his recent criticism of her affair with Percival Houghton.

All the greater was her chagrin when he brought the talk around to the subject of Janet.

IV

He began adroitly enough by complimenting her on the success with which she had made Janet alive to the galvanic interests of contemporary life. It was a miracle of education, he assured her, and he begged her not to spoil the achievement by converting Janet to her favorite theory of free love. He hoped she would rather warn her friend of the folly of contracting a free union under existing social sanctions.

"Like the majority of men, you believe love and sex emotion to be one and the same thing," she retorted, cuttingly. "That's why you have no understanding of what freedom in love means."

"Now, Cornelia, I won't be drawn into a controversy on the merits of free love."

"Then don't sneer at it."

"I don't. In fact, like every healthy young human being, I am by nature something of a varietist myself. But, as a civilized member of society, I'm bound to take the institutions of my country and generation as I find them. I believe Janet will be better off, if she does so too. Let her set out to alter or revolutionize our institutions, but not to defy them."

"My poor Cato! Don't you know that numbers of the young women of today are quietly doing what numbers of the young men have always done?"

"Living in illicit relations, you mean?"

"That is what a ridiculous man-made custom calls it."

"But, Cornelia, although many of the Lorillard girls have admittedly flung a glove in the face of social conventions—"

"I'm not talking of Lorillard girls, Robert. I'm talking of teachers, lawyers, stenographers—the 'respectable' girls who remain in their schools and offices without any loss of self-respect or public esteem, and who merely do what the 'respectable' men do, that is, pay a mock tribute to outward appearances, and go scot free."

"Exactly, Cornelia," said Robert, triumphantly. "They pay a tribute to appearances. They quietly disobey existing conventions. But they don't defy them, much less try to alter them. They are frequently their staunchest supporters."

"Just like the men."

"Just like the men. But you are wrong when you say they go scot free. You are wrong again when you say that the tribute they pay is a mock tribute. It is anything but that. It is an endless payment by installments, a payment in degrading stealth and harassing secrecy."

"What are you driving at?"

"Janet is not the girl to pay a tribute of this kind," he said, with emphasis. "If she champions the cause of free love, she won't do so merely to experience the ups and downs of an underground existence. She will do so, believing it to be a wise or progressive departure. And she will defend her championship in the teeth of the whole world, regardless of its effect on her future."

Cornelia received this speech unmoved.

"Well, why shouldn't she?" she said. "Others have endured much more for their beliefs. To be candid, I really don't see how Janet's behavior concerns you, any way."

"You forget, Cornelia, that I, too, talked modernism in a blue streak to her before she broke with her people. And so I feel that I share with you the responsibility for her present course."

"Oh, do you?"

"Yes. There's a lot of moonshine in Kips Bay that passes for modernity. I think the least we can do is to show Janet that modernity is not simply a new watchword for moonshine. We ought to prevent her from being taken in by the illusion which the Outlaws produce of easy, satisfying intimacies between the sexes."

A stream of silvery laughter escaped Cornelia. Then, in a studied tone of superiority, she replied:

"My dear boy, the love relation between two individuals is strictly their own private affair. It is nobody else's business whatever. I have no right to interfere in Janet's intimacies, and neither have you. Anyhow, I believe she is quite competent to stand on her own feet."

"I'm not so sure, Cornelia. Janet is utterly different from the Lorillard Outlaw girl, or the Greenwich Village Bohemian girl. The effect of Greenwich Villageism is to make irregularity (what regularity so often is) a bore. The purpose of Lorillardism is to make irregularity pay. But Janet is not likely to adopt a radical creed merely as a pose or with an eye to its profit. She will adopt it in a spirit of sheer blind self-sacrifice. And every advantage will be taken of her, precisely because she's not a sex profiteer."

"Cato, the beginning of wisdom is self-knowledge. Have you ever heard of any gain in self-knowledge without some loss of happiness? No. It is a law of life which neither you, nor I, nor Janet can escape."

"But," he urged, "you must admit that Janet's case is a special one. She has just left a home where purely private gratifications dictate which conventions shall be kept; and she has entered this model tenement life where, again, purely private gratifications dictate which conventions shall be broken. She may not grasp this difference all at once. Are we to let her inexperience cause her unnecessary suffering?"

"I, too, have suffered for my convictions, Robert!" she said, with a conclusive gesture of impatience.

Robert felt like telling her that, at this moment, she reminded him forcibly of the fox that had its tail cut off. But he didn't quite dare.

Naturally, under the circumstances, the visit to the Grand Central Palace was a complete failure. Cornelia, loathing the exhibition, seized the first available excuse for asking to be taken home.

The resentment she harbored was too strong to be hidden beneath the ordinary civilities of polite intercourse. Her affection for Robert, which had long been hanging by a slender thread, was now sharply snapped through the complete revulsion of feeling she experienced towards him.

From her point of view, the fault was entirely his. She had always hated what she termed his moralistic nature. But never before had he shown such a callous want of sympathy with her past misfortunes or such a frank hostility to her present outlook on life. What she did not acknowledge to herself was that his concern for Janet had given her amour propre a mortal wound for which she could never forgive him.

On their return to the Lorillard tenements, she promptly called Harry Kelly into Number Fifteen. The Harlem Gorilla (renicknamed Hercules as a mark of favor) was highly flattered and only too willing to be a listener and a comforter.

"Robert is getting to be quite impossible!" she exclaimed, with a lurid Belasco intonation. "I can't imagine what has come over him, or why he continues to honor the Outlaws with his presence, seeing that he is now an enemy of freedom and not a friend of it. Hercules, will you believe it, he cannot hear the word Lorillard so much as mentioned without showing the cloven hoof."

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I

While Robert and Cornelia were going to and from the Grand Central Palace, Claude's car was carrying its occupants through pleasant stretches of Long Island country to the Mineola aerodrome. The day, the air, the landscape, and the man conspired to make the occasion an intoxicating one for Janet.

Claude's gayety and personal charm were fully matched by his perfect ease. This was the quality that magnetized her, it was so new in her experience of American men. The men she had known in Brooklyn, struggling professional and business men, wore their manners as they did their Sunday clothes, with a painful effect of unfamiliarity. Their behavior was as different from Claude's as a sputtering torch is from an arc light.

In the company of women, these men were nearly always ill at ease. Sometimes they acted obtrusively protective or aggressively possessive, more frequently they were apprehensive, timid or even pitiably afraid. Whatever they did, they did with constraint. And they never seemed able to forget the towering fact that their manhood had an economic value. They were as painfully conscious of this asset as an elderly maiden is of her chastity—and they guarded it with the same zeal.

Janet was inexpressibly thankful that Claude had never treated her as if she belonged to an unknown or unclassified species, and that he was not constantly filled with a nervous dread that she might at any moment begin picking his soul, if not his pocket.

They talked of everything under the sun; she of her childhood, her school days, her aspirations; he of social or artistic doings in and about New York, with the more notable and distinctive of which he had a first-hand familiarity. But no matter how sober or philosophic the topic chosen, it was sure, in some mysterious way, to be sidetracked into the catechism of love.

Janet had all she could do to keep matters from taking too amorous a turn. It was delicious to be made love to as audaciously as only Claude could. It was great fun to tremble on the quicksilvery margin between how much he dared and how little she permitted. And it was her native mother wit rather than her instinct that set a limit to his impetuous wooing.

As soon as they reached the aerodrome, Claude became a more conventionally courteous cavalier again. And Janet got a glimpse of a section of his life to which she had hardly given any thought.

II

The Trans-Continental Air Race had been widely advertised, and the gigantic aerodrome was jammed with excited crowds. Claude at once plunged his companion into the thick of things. Anybody and everybody appeared to know him, and he knew everybody who was anybody. In swift succession Janet was introduced to the superintendent of the grounds, the president of the Aero Club, the chief contestants of the day, several foreign aviators of renown, the naval officer who commanded the first "blimp" across the Atlantic, and to so many other notabilities that her head began to whirl.

Once or twice Claude left her to pay special homage to some lady, frequently an elderly one and a personage of uncommon account. In these intervals, while standing a little away from the throbbing, bewildering spectacle around her, she attempted to give some perspective to her impressions.

It was gradually clear to her that the spectators resolved themselves into two classes: first, the hoi polloi whose teeming throngs pushed along the common passageways and packed the benches in the stands to the point of suffocation; and then a small, compact group of men and women whose breeding, dress and carriage would have differentiated them from the other spectators even if the weather-beaten air of superiority with which they promenaded within the fenced-off and sacrosanct places, had not sufficiently done so.

Superficially, the attitude of these chosen ones towards the gallery was the attitude of actors towards an audience: they affected to be oblivious of its existence, and yet it was patent that they were greedily conscious of the snobbish admiration and flattering envy which the crowd radiated collectively and in its component parts.

Janet watched these bankers and railroad directors and senators with their wives and daughters urbanely encircling the placid airplanes, the restive airmen and the little extra demonstrations for the elect. And it seemed to her that they appropriated the special privileges inseparable from the governors of a democracy with an affably paternal air which was as much as to say: "What a very democratic ruling-class it is that runs this very democratic nation."

Of course she knew that they were not really thinking this. Seeing that they were the ruling class, they ought to have weighty, superior problems of finance, transportation or statesmanship at the back of their minds. Had they? Or were they merely thinking that unless they were on the qui vive they might be caught in an awkward pose by one of the brigade of camera men who were photographing celebrities for the Sunday pictorial supplements and the cinema current topics.

Janet perceived also that the faces of the ladies and gentlemen of the plutocracy, though set in hard lines and wreathed in hard smiles, were, on the whole, much less hard than the faces of the poorer middle-class people among whom she lived and moved and had her being. Their complexions were far better, too. And they were healthier and robuster and decidedly cleaner and politer.

Politer, but not better mannered. Temporarily, Janet might have been deceived by the surface courtesy with which the men approached one another and the ceaseless vehemence with which the women talked and smiled, or rather, exhibited the whole of a fine set of front teeth from the top of the upper row to the tip of the nether gum. But when she had mingled with them at Claude's side, these same ladies that paraded their toothful smiles so amiably for the photographer's benefit, had politely but uncannily looked her through and through in the most literal sense of the words. To put it bluntly, they had instantly sized her up as an intruder from a sphere they had no personal contact with. True, they murmured the necessary courteous phrases, but they did so to a creature whose common humanity with themselves their glances insolently and emphatically denied.

Had Claude sensed this, and left her alone to spare her (and perhaps himself) embarrassment? The question made her feel uneasy and disconcerted. It also made her wish him back, in the hope that his presence would restore her confidence. What was keeping him so long this time? By way of finding an answer, her eyes searched him out among the machines.

She saw him, not very far away, in the midst of a group of three other people: a couple in the prime of life, who were obviously the parents of a young lady of about Janet's own age. The attention of the daughter was fixed detainingly on Claude; that of the parents was fastened proudly on their daughter.

Thanks to a fine eyesight, Janet was enabled to get an excellent view of the young lady's appearance.

She was a tall, light brunette, and her frock, her sulky discontented mouth and her affectation of stateliness were all highly fashionable. So was her face, which had a tolerably clear skin and otherwise neither a noticeable blemish nor a spark of fire. It was the kind of standard feminine face just common enough in America to fit the popular conception of beauty and just enough above the common to be in constant request by illustrators as a model for the covers of monthly magazines.

It struck Janet that she was making some demand upon Claude which was taxing his charm and diplomacy to the utmost. Eventually, as he took leave of the group, she abruptly turned away from him, the back of her shoulders expressing the most intense vexation.

III

Soon thereafter he was at Janet's side again, looking somewhat harassed.

"Those were the Armstrongs and their daughter, Marjorie," he said, in answer to her look of curiosity.

"Who are the Armstrongs?"

Claude was taken aback by this question. In his world, where everybody knew everybody else, the bare name of Armstrong had a very definite and compact meaning.

"Dear little ignoramus! The Dupont Armstrongs, of course."

This addition meant very little more to Janet, although it rekindled a vague memory that she had seen the name somewhere in the newspapers. Politely concealing his wonderment, Claude explained more at length.

He said that Colonel Dupont Armstrong came of an old Southern family, and was the active head of the great firm of Harmon, Armstrong & Co., the international bankers whose financial power had built golden bridges between continents. His wife had a passion for collecting exquisite jewels; he had a mania for hoarding Chinese vases. But the operation of his esthetic taste being unreliable, he had struck up an intimacy with Claude's father soon after he discovered this gentleman to be a thoroughly dependable guide. In time, he became a regular patron of the Fontaine galleries and his purchases of diamonds, necklaces and porcelains had contributed appreciably to Mr. Fontaine's fortune.

Janet's curiosity in respect of worldly matters was much more quickly satisfied than her curiosity in respect of people.

"Is Mr. Armstrong's daughter as charming as she looks?" she asked Claude at the end of his explanation.

"Well, most men think so," said Claude, smiling. "Marjorie is undoubtedly very beautiful and fully conscious of the fact. You may have seen her portrait by Ben Ali Haggin in the last Academy exhibition? It was a tone poem in russet brown, quite the stir of the season."

"Oh, I'm sorry I missed it. I've never been to an Academy exhibition, Claude."

"How amazing! Not even to one?"

"Not even to one. Imagine how hopelessly ignorant I am of art!"

"Art! People don't go to the Academy in quest of art, you dear innocent. It would be a waste of effort. They go as a compliment to their friends whose portraits have been painted, not as a tribute to the men who painted them."

But Janet was not to be deflected from her purpose.

"I played the spy whilst your back was turned," she said, "and watched your pretty friend closely. She was evidently displeased with you. What had you done?"

"Absolutely nothing. That's just Marjorie's way when she can't have all she wants—which seldom happens."

"Then she wanted you?"

"Yes, for some party or other. But I'm not going to leave you merely to gratify a passing whim of hers. Anyhow, it isn't so much a case of wanting me to be with her, as of wanting me not to be with anybody else."

"Rather dog-in-the-mangerish, isn't it?"

"Oh, all the tyrants of the earth are like that, especially the fascinating feminine tyrants," replied Claude, in an attempt to recapture his good spirits.

But it was plain that his mood had radically changed. For the remainder of their stay he was preoccupied and his gayety was forced.

The cloud that this cast over their outing was not fully lifted that day. Outwardly Claude recovered his equipoise and, on the way home, tried to make up for his earlier abstraction by a deepened tenderness towards his companion. But something was manifestly weighing on his mind. Janet herself was in a pensive mood. She had been quick to discern that in Claude's manner towards Marjorie Armstrong and the other young women of his own set there was an inexpressible something which was absent from his manner towards her.

This troubled and dissatisfied her. True, Claude no longer ventured to treat her as flippantly as he treated Mazie Ross. But neither did he treat her as finely as he treated Marjorie Armstrong. Why was this? Did Claude still misinterpret her considered expression of disbelief in marriage? She had a passionate longing to give love and to receive love on a plane worlds above material considerations. Could no masculine mind grasp the reality of this simple passion in a modern girl's heart? Was it possible that her freedom from the vulgar commercial associations of love was precisely what cheapened her to such as Claude?

The thought was ironic, it was maddening, it burrowed into one's soul. But it did not rob Janet of her self-approval. She set a high value on her integrity, and she was secretly resolved that by no mere man should this value lightly be set aside.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I

The Fontaine galleries occupied a conspicuous building on Fifth Avenue above the Forties. It was one of the show places in New York's principal show street, and it received a daily stream of visitors as much for the sumptuousness of its interior appointments as for the worth of its stock and its exhibitions.

Mr. Rene Fontaine had inherited the business from his father, who had left France in his boyhood and had begun in a small way as a jeweler on lower Sixth Avenue. The founder of the house had built up a fashionable trade in pearls and precious stones and, having a strong private fancy for certain kinds of ceramic ware, had been led into adding a department of rare porcelains.

After the death of the founder, the business was incorporated. Mr. Rene, as president of the firm, continued his father's twofold policy with such success that, when the uptown trend of high-class trade necessitated a change of quarters, Fontaine and Company transferred their establishment to one of the choicest corners of Fifth Avenue. Here the ceramic and other works of art were displayed in galleries on the second floor. And the patronage of these galleries was so profitable that Claude had persuaded his father to open a gallery for paintings on the third floor and let him conduct the new department.

Mr. Fontaine was a fastidious man and a stickler for appearances, particularly British appearances. The fashionable set in New York aped English manners, and consequently, the door attendant at Fontaine's was an English youth and the salesmen in the art departments were Englishmen with consciously superior airs fortified by British university educations, Oxford accents and modish London clothes.

A humble art lover on a visit to the galleries might easily have been frightened off by the sumptuous appointments, or overawed by seven or eight swagger young gentlemen who would eloquently ignore him as he crossed their several posts. They might have been so many heirs to dukedoms engaged in a feeble game of passing themselves off as prosaic American commoners. Yet they could pay a very flattering attention to multimillionaires, especially of the feminine gender; and these, as their astute employer knew, they attracted in considerable numbers.

Moving in and out among his father's young men, Claude might readily have passed for one of them. He was like them in the ingratiating, physical appearance that comes from a systematic cultivation of the body, and his accent, if not of an Oxford, was of a Harvard flavor. The only real difference was that he was several degrees less arrogant—not that humility was one of his specialties, by any means.

II

About ten days after the Mineola outing he was seated at his desk, opening the morning's mail. Two letters caught his eye. One, from Marjorie Armstrong, supplemented Mr. Armstrong's invitation to the two Fontaines to attend a week-end party in the Armstrong's Long Island home. The other was a note from Cornelia, reading:

"Lothario, remember your appointment with us this evening. We shall sup al fresco in the Japanese pagoda on the Lorillard roof—Araminta, Hercules and you will be the guests of honor. Only the chosen few are invited: Lydia, Charlotte, Robert and the invisible Pryor. A special attraction has been provided after supper—if indeed you need an attraction other than the piteous spectacle of Araminta pining away for you.

Cornelia.

This operatic reminder was much more welcome to Claude than Marjorie's frigid message. Cornelia's latest party—parties trod on one another's heels in the model tenements—was in celebration of Janet's admission to the society of the Outlaws. Everybody counted on Claude to be the bright particular meteor of the occasion. Yet how was he to follow his natural inclination without offending his father, to say nothing of Colonel Armstrong and Marjorie?

He turned over a volume of Muther's History of Painting and, while staring vacantly into its pages, raked his mind for a diplomatic escape from attendance at the Armstrongs' party. He was still far from successful, when his father approached to transact a little business. This settled, Claude referred to a Van Gogh he had lately bought for $5,000. Mr. Fontaine's face puckered quizzically.

"You are worse than the prodigal son," he said. "That young man squandered his patrimony on real extravagances, while you fritter yours away on unreal mockeries."

"Did you look at it, father?"

"Bless my soul, no. Its mere presence in the house is enough to upset me. As soon as I learned of its arrival, I looked at a copy of Ruisdael's "Mill" for ten minutes to steady my nerves. Whenever I hear of one of your modern pictures, I steal comfort from an ancient one."

"But you can't judge a picture without seeing it," remonstrated Claude.

"My boy, you once induced me to spend ten minutes at a Matisse exhibition in Stieglitz's Little Secession Gallery. What I saw there was one horrible libel on humanity after another. That will last me a lifetime, thank you."

Claude laughed. He and his father got along admirably by rarely pursuing an argument beyond its illogical conclusion.

"What have you done with my particular 'libel'?"

"I had it sent upstairs, to join your other atrocities in the Chamber of Indecencies."

This was a nickname Mr. Rene Fontaine applied to a little room on the top floor where Claude had hung various "finds" in the later Impressionist, Cubist and Futurist styles.

"Tomb, not chamber," said Claude. "Everything there is practically buried."

"Not at all. Your friends are forever trotting upstairs. I even send people there myself. Only yesterday I invited J. Tuyler Harmon to go up. He said he enjoyed himself hugely."

"What brought the old rogue in here again?"

"His mistress. She's one of the chief patronesses of the Religion and Forward movement. She had to attend a committee meeting downtown. He escorted her from her apartments in the Plaza and waited here for her until the committee adjourned. Out of that waiting I made several handsome sales—but not of your pictures."

"Thus religion and art," said Claude, "are reconciled by the Mammon of Unrighteousness."

III

This reflection was lost on Mr. Fontaine, whose thoughts had switched to another line. He reminded Claude of the party they were to attend on the Armstrong estate in Huntington, Long Island.

"Can't you lunch with me at one, Claude?" he asked in an excellent humor. "Then we'll take the train together."

"I'm sorry, father, but I have another engagement this afternoon."

He elaborated the urgency of the matter with an anxiety that Mr. Fontaine was quick to detect.

"An invitation from Armstrong Hall, Claude, is like an invitation from Windsor Castle," he said, smiling. "It cancels all previous matters except matters of life and death."

"I never felt less like breaking my word," countered the younger man obstinately.

Mr. Fontaine did not press the point. His easy life and lucrative business had enabled him to cultivate certain expensive reticences. It pained him to drive anyone into a corner. As regards the three stages of paternal activity—the interrogative, the declarative and the imperative—he held that a competent father need rarely go beyond the first two. Besides, he had found by experience that, if he took a determined stand, his son frequently yielded to the mere pressure of silent expectation.

Mr. Fontaine, who had been a widower for ten years, habitually gave great latitude to Claude, his only son, of whom he was genuinely fond. He frankly made "keeping up appearances" the basis of all conduct. Apart from that, he had a naive Rousselian theory of education, to the effect that, if you let a young man indulge all his whims and passions to the top of his bent, he will settle down at thirty or thereabouts to a sane and steady career.

As refined tastes and good physical habits came natural to Claude, the operation of this theory had done him no bodily harm; but it had trained him to an exaggerated concern for his own desires and an enormous ignorance of other people's. Opposition to his stronger wishes was so rare that, when it occurred, he was tempted to regard it as wicked, and hence to crush it with a close approach to a feeling of self-righteousness. To put it shortly, he had the makings of a first-class tyrant, and he would have become a vicious one if his will had been as pronounced as his desires.

"You haven't had a tiff with Marjorie?" asked the father, with a casual air.

"No," said Claude. "We haven't quarrelled in three months."

"But you haven't seen her more than once or twice in that time."

"That's why, father!"

"Well, I'm glad you're not on bad terms with her, anyhow," repeated Mr. Fontaine, a deep interest beneath his affected unconcern.

"Oh, no. On as good terms as she'll allow. I don't know whether you've observed it, father, but it isn't easy to break through Marjorie's reserve."

"You don't mean she's a cold nature!"

"Only when Lord Dunbar is around."

The trace of petulance in this reply was the scar of an old wound. Claude, always first among his rivals on the battlefield of love, had once been obliged to yield the supremacy. This had happened about a year before, when the young Earl of Dunbar came to Newport in Marjorie's train. With two fine strings to her bow, Marjorie actually made Claude her second string. This sensation had been the talk of the smart set from Bar Harbor to Palm Beach. And Claude had never quite forgiven the very serious blow to his pride.

Mr. Rene Fontaine had no fault to find with Marjorie's supercilious airs and snobbish predelictions. He liked and admired her unreservedly and thought it quite natural that, in choosing a husband, she should prefer a titled Englishman to a Yankee commoner. Why not? That London was the real capital of American fashionable society was, after all, a fact no socially ambitious American girl could be expected to ignore.

"I don't think she ever cared for Dunbar," ventured Mr. Fontaine. "At all events, he's gone."

"Gone!"

"He sailed for England yesterday. I've just heard it from Mr. Armstrong."

"Good Lord!" exclaimed Claude, walking up and down in marked agitation.

"My dear boy!" cried Mr. Fontaine, uncertain as to the cause of his son's emotions, "she didn't take him after all."

"No. Probably she couldn't. I dare say she means to take me, now."

"Why, Claude, everybody supposed you two were as good as engaged long before this Englishman came over."

"So we were—before he came."

"Well?"

"Well—he came."

"Really, Claude—"

"I mean, she preferred him to me. I don't blame her. He had more to offer."

"What had that to do with it?"

"Everything. He's a British nobleman. I'm only an ordinary American. He's got the entree of the best London circles. I've only the entree of the best New York."

"That's a very unkind thing to say of Marjorie. I've known her since she was a baby. She has her faults. But heartless calculation is not one of them."

Mr. Fontaine's indignation did not sound convincing. Like Claude, he knew that Marjorie would not hesitate to sacrifice her feelings to her social ambitions.

"I don't say it's a fault," protested Claude. "She had the right to change her mind. For women, the business side of marriage is the most important side, since marriage establishes them in life positions. I find it perfectly natural, therefore, that they should knock themselves down to the highest bidder."

This was a sentiment he had adopted, with his own modifications, from Robert Lloyd.

"Don't be cynical, my boy," said Mr. Fontaine. "Business is business, but family life is quite another thing."

"I agree with you, father," said Claude, pacifically. "As I said before, I don't blame Marjorie. And I'm not too proud to be her second choice."

"That's the way to talk. Second choice, like second thought, is often the sounder."

"Only, it happens that when she changed her sentiments, I changed mine, too."

"You mean there's some other girl?"

"In a way—yes," replied Claude, awkwardly.

Then, on the impulse of the moment, he plunged into an account of Janet Barr.

IV

Mr. Fontaine was distinctly uneasy. But he concealed his emotion as well as he could.

"You haven't any wild plan of marrying this young woman?" he said, adopting the air of a judicious outsider.

"I like her better than any girl I ever met."

"My boy, is that a good reason for marrying her? Take the word of an elderly man: It isn't worth while to marry solely for love, because you are bound to fall in love with somebody else as soon as the honeymoon is over."

"If not for love, what is one to marry for?"

"Why, for compatability, position, money—these are the considerations that wise men weigh."

Both were silent for a while, Claude thinking sardonically of his father's charge that his view of family life was too materialistic. Then Mr. Fontaine resumed his objections.

"How do you intend to support the young lady?"

"Surely my interest in the firm is enough."

"You never made a bigger mistake, Claude. Perhaps the fault is mine, though. For I have never driven home to you the relative value of an income of twelve thousand a year. That is what you've been spending."

"Good Heavens, father! You exaggerate, surely."

"Not in the least. I am in the habit of keeping very careful accounts, a habit it would do you no harm to acquire. Let me remind you that your new car cost five thousand dollars. That puts your weekly outgo roughly at a hundred and fifty, of which your chauffeur alone gets fifty."

"I'll cut down my extravagances! Besides, two can live more economically than one."

"Can they? Well, just try it, my boy! I fear you've picked up that idea in some novel. But don't forget that all novels are written by middle-class people and reflect middle-class notions of economy. Possibly a middle-class couple can save if they double up in one sordid flat, sleep in one bed, limit their amusements to the few which please both, compromise on the one or two friends whom neither dislikes too much, and generally lead the spiritual life of the Siamese twins. But this can't be done in our class! With us, the diverse activities and needs of husband and wife make expenses for two run four times as high as expenses for one."

Mr. Fontaine returned significantly to the assertion that he was in no position to play the benevolent father. He would not deny that the firm was doing business on a magnificent scale. But magnificence was costly, on the debit side as well as on the credit side. There were ferocities of competition that were slicing off the safe margins of profits, besides pressing the management into transactions involving a peculiar risk.

"Risk!" exclaimed Claude, greatly surprised.

Ha begged his father to remember the huge dividends recently declared on Fontaine & Company's stock.

"I didn't say financial risk. There's a tremendous legal risk."

Mr. Fontaine felt that the time had come for Claude to learn more of the technique of a big business in jewelry and the fine arts. He pointed out that the war had caused a substantial reduction in the demand for luxuries accompanied by a substantial increase in the tax upon them. And he asked his son if he had never wondered why, in the face of this handicap, the firm's post-war profits had exceeded the records of pre-war years.

"Yes, it did puzzle me," admitted Claude. "But there's so much wizardry in your management of the business—"

"No wizardry at all. One or two of the biggest firms land their prizes without the Customs House being a penny the wiser."

Claude made a wild movement to rise, but fell back in his chair again.

"Then that blackguard was right," he cried, his face ashen.

"What on earth do you mean? What blackguard?"

"Hutchins Burley! He called me a diamond smuggler right out before everybody at the Outlaws' Ball."

In the greatest agitation Mr. Fontaine pressed Claude for particulars. When the whole story had been told, he breathed a sigh of relief.

"Nothing to worry over, thank goodness!" he said, reassuring his son. "Nobody will pay the slightest attention to what a tipsy man blurts out against the Fontaines."

"No?" Claude's tone was decidedly skeptical.

"No, they won't dare to."

"Anyhow, we're actually in this smuggling game—" Claude went on gloomily.

"Our competitors call it slight-of-hand organized."

The ghost of a smile flitted over Claude's face.

"And what do they call being at the mercy of a drunken cur's venom?"

"Don't rub it in, Claude. I blame myself severely for your embarrassment. I ought to have forewarned you earlier. But it won't happen again. Depend upon it, I shall lock that fellow's tongue, good and tight."

"Is it really necessary for us Fontaines to have truck with such degraded scoundrels?"

"Well, my boy, it isn't exactly easy to get certificated gentlemen for the work," said Mr. Fontaine, stung into irony. "But don't let's go into that now, Claude. You must have confidence in me. One of these days I shall give you the history of the whole matter from A to Z."

"But look here, father. Suppose we were caught!"

Mr. Fontaine sat down in an armchair opposite his son and lighted a cigar with leisurely grace.

"It's a possibility," he said, "a slim possibility. But we have excellent friends."

"Government officials?"

"H'm—yes. More especially—there's Colonel Armstrong."

"Mr. Armstrong! You don't mean to say he dickers with backstairs political grafters?"

"'Dickers' is hardly the word. Colonel Armstrong stands above, about and underneath the political machines—both of them."

"Mr. Armstrong in the boodle game! I can scarcely believe it."

"Boodle game! Don't talk like a grocer or a reporter, Claude. Mr. Armstrong is a lover of fine art who, like all sensible people, thinks it monstrous to tax foreign works of art destined to do an educational service here. By virtue of his influence at Washington, he has been able to use his good offices to our advantage. The result is that the Customs House officials are wise enough not to go behind our list of import declarations."

"Does he get much out of it?" inquired Claude.

"What a brutal question, Claude! Armstrong is so rich that he has nothing to live for except the luxury of being disinterested."

Mr. Fontaine added that there had never been any outright verbal understanding between himself and his protector. Mr. Armstrong might be said to have slid into the protectorate insidiously. He was chiefly interested in the exquisite vases and textiles handled by Fontaine, and he was probably ignorant of the fact that it was not these articles but the precious stones that comprised the larger and more profitable fraction of the smuggled goods.

"For the rest," said Mr. Fontaine, "he is, as you know, a steady purchaser here. He buys whatever suits his fancy at cost price. We needn't begrudge him the bargain."

"I wish our relations with the Armstrongs were not complicated in this way," said Claude, with an ominous feeling that he, too, might be knocked down at a bargain if the influential banker should fancy him as a bridegroom for Marjorie.

Claude had always taken special pride in the irreproachable origin of the Fontaine riches. He had looked up to his father as a convincing example of the possibility of making trade both clean and aristocratic. Mr. Fontaine's disclosures now robbed his son of this illusion, besides confronting him with the sordid hazards of reality.

One of these sordid hazards was barely a week old. A new customs inspector, in a fit of unsophisticated fervor, had stumbled upon an act of smuggling in which the complicity of the Fontaines appeared in the course of investigation. Only the lucky fact of Mr. Armstrong's nephew being the Collector of the Port of New York had saved Fontaine & Company from scandal, public exposure and humiliation.

"By Heaven!" said Claude. "We're indebted to Mr. Armstrong for being out of prison!"

"Quite so," replied the father. "An American business man who desires to keep out of prison must take one of two hygienic precautions. One is to form a friendship with a leading financier or a political boss; the other is to avoid being caught. I have done both."

Mr. Fontaine looked significantly at his son.

"Those plans of yours," he said, "about the William Morris art center and all that—there can't be anything in that line if you marry a poor girl, you know."

Claude was silent for a while. His father, watching him keenly and sympathetically, supposed him to be in the throes of a fierce emotional contest between his sense of duty and his love for Janet. Claude was under the same delusion. In reality, the willful force that swayed him was not so much inclining him to marry Janet as pushing him not to marry Marjorie. For the moment, the easiest course to pursue was to yield on the minor issue and gain time on the major one. He would give up the evening with Janet and go to Huntington, but he would refrain from committing himself definitely as regards Marjorie and marriage.

"I'll be in Huntington for dinner, father," he said briefly.

Mr. Fontaine, greatly relieved, patted his son's back affectionately and walked away with a satisfied smile.

V

That evening, just before the theatres opened, a tall, thin man in a taupe-colored flannel suit and a soft beaver hat came out of the Commodore Hotel walked westward along Forty-second Street, and took an uptown bus at Fifth Avenue.

Mark Pryor, in a very unprofessional mood, had the air of one who is determined to be seen rather than to see. Considering the constant use he made of his knack of fading out of his surroundings to the point of almost total invisibility, this was not as easy for him as it sounds. Easy or not, it was his mood. Mr. Pryor, whose gift for self-effacement amounted to a miracle, needed a change. And he sought it by trying to make himself manifest, as other people seek it by trying to hide.

He had not deserted Kips Bay. But the growing inquisitiveness of his neighbors, and particularly of the acquaintances he had struck up in flat Number Fifteen, had driven him to the expedient of running two domiciles and of dividing his time between them. The choice of a room in a first-class hotel had been dictated not by a craving for luxury but by a sense of domestic propriety. "There are two things I can't live without," he had once told Robert Lloyd. "One is an unfailing supply of hot water, the other is perfect freedom to come and go as I choose. A man can always get these treasures among the model poor or the unmodel rich, but never in a middle-class home."

Robert had heartily endorsed this sentiment without any suspicion that Mr. Pryor—whom some of the Outlaws suspected of being a fugitive counterfeiter and others of being a shrinking novelist in search of local color—perambulated from an army cot in his Lorillard flat to a Circassian walnut bedstead in the Commodore Hotel. On the evening in question, Mr. Pryor decided to explore a section of Manhattan which he had hitherto neglected. Accordingly he boarded a cross-town bus going east and alighted at the corner of Second Avenue and Seventy-second Street.

Between this point and East End Avenue, he took a zig-zag course along several side streets and main roads. Thus he sauntered past the Vanderbilt tenements—the aristocrats of their kind—and through the German and Czechoslovak colonies, which were remote enough from Times Square to have retained some of their European flavor.

Presently he found himself in a very prettily lighted shopping section of First Avenue, a section which reminded him faintly of the chief street in some of the Teuto-Bohemian towns he had once traveled through. Reaching the Eighties, he strolled westward again, not without a sigh of regret as he noticed that the few quaint German or Slovak spots left on the East Side were fast being submerged in the uniform drabness which inevitably descends on all the quarters of an American city.

The cross street into which he turned was dimly lighted and quite deserted except for one other pedestrian on the opposite footway. This was a man whose hippopotamine dimensions instantly chained Mr. Pryor's scrutiny.