Front matter (continued 5)

"I hope Mr. Grey will be satisfied," Janet could not help saying, once the bundle of papers was safely tucked under her arm.

"I hope so," said Mrs. Grey meditatively. "But who can fathom the ways of the creative temperament—?"

She left an eloquent hiatus.

From which Janet inferred that the shortest way with that particular temperament was to let the explanation follow the act.

V

This bout with the green-eyed monster had taken place shortly before Claude's petulant flight to the Armstrong estate in Huntington. To Janet the whole affair was very ludicrous, and none the less so in that she had given Mrs. Grey little cause for anxiety.

Not for a moment had the newspaper acclaim of Howard Madison Grey imposed upon her. Having measured her own wits with the playwright's, she had formed an estimate of his talents which caused her to reject with contempt the fantastic eulogies of him in the press. She continued to see in Mr. Grey what she had always seen, namely, a decidedly middle-aged man with a bald head and a graceless figure, a man whose amorous pleasantries and elderly sentimentalism inspired her with the same distaste as the odor of stale tobacco smoke with which his person seemed to reek.

She knew quite well that she had captured his emotions and his illusions, but as she had found no difficulty in keeping his advances within bounds she had seen no reason for giving the matter serious thought.

On the day of Mrs. Grey's interference, Janet returned to Kips Bay in high feather. This had mystified Cornelia, who could not see in her friend's recital of events any great cause for congratulation. She gloomily predicted that Janet would soon lose her position altogether. Janet said she didn't care. A change was the only stimulant she ever took or needed. And any change, even a change for the worse, would serve the purpose admirably.

Cornelia wondered what was back of all this optimism until Janet pointed out that, with her new program of work, she could repay Robert for his many services to her. The firm of Barr & Lloyd could now carry on business in the mornings as well as in the afternoons, Robert sharing with her the work that came in from the Greys and perhaps from other authors, just as she had shared with him the work that came in from the League of Guildsmen. This statement was received in silence by Cornelia, who drew her own conclusions and communicated them only to Harry Kelly.

Janet's offer to pool her secretarial jobs from all sources with her typewriting for the League had been very welcome to Robert. His funds were running uncomfortably low just then. The reason was that the League was not a paying concern. The economic changes advocated by the Guildsmen were so drastic in character and called for so much discipline and far-sighted cooperation on the part of the working classes that the very people whom they were intended to benefit fought shy of them. Leaders of labor received the Guild proposals coldly, and the rank and file gave them little sympathy and less support.

For several mornings Robert and Janet pitched in with a will on the typewriting of Mr. Grey's manuscripts. In the afternoons they had continued the League work. Their comradeship was a happy and an intimate one, how happy and how intimate Janet did not fully realize until long after it was over. Perhaps the most delightful periods were those in which they proofread the manuscripts they had finished. They took turns reading aloud, and endless was the fun they extracted from the lines of Mr. Grey's new play. More delightful still were excursions into the fields of literature and economics, the play or some Guild pamphlet furnishing the starting point.

Thus the partnership of Barr & Lloyd had gone on swimmingly for two weeks, until the afternoon on the recreation pier, the memorable afternoon that had begun with the long talk about free love, and had ended in the model tenement with Robert's kiss and Claude's sulky fit of jealousy.

VI

On the morning after this fateful day, Janet had to go to the Howard Madison Greys' to return some finished manuscripts.

She had gone there for this purpose some two or three times a week, since the last arrangement with Mr. Grey. On these occasions, the playwright himself met her. And usually he spun out the interview as long as possible, due regard being had to the prudent Mrs. Grey who, hovering watchfully in the background, reminded Janet of a quiet but overcautious museum attendant.

Mrs. Grey would frequently contrive to come into the room for the undisguised purpose of glancing at or even criticizing Janet's typewriting. The expectation of such a visit made Janet, on this particular day, decidedly nervous. For, what with her distraction by Claude's anger, and a sudden crotchiness that had overtaken the typewriter, her papers bore the glaring evidence of innumerable corrections and erasures.

However, Mrs. Grey seemed for once to be off duty. So at least Janet concluded from the fact that the author himself received her with much less than his customary constraint and far more than his ordinary enthusiasm. And not only was he in the best of spirits; he was groomed to perfection. He had put on a suit cut in a fashionable English mode, with quaint cuffs on the sleeves of the coat as well as on the bottoms of the trousers.

These and other details of sartorial artistry were probably lost on Janet, but she was sensible enough of the general effect to surmise that her employer had dressed himself to conquer. This surmise would have forced itself upon her in any event, for Mr. Grey soon launched into repeated hints looking to an assignation with her outside his home, hints that presently crystallized into a direct invitation to a dinner at Sherry's.

According to the principles of Kips Bay—and Janet at this time subscribed to these principles—there was absolutely no reason why Mr. Grey should not invite her and absolutely no reason why she should not accept. But the heart has a reason to which reason must bow. Janet's heart was in submission to but one law, and that was the law of her integrity. She could no more strike up a friendship with a man to whom she was not naturally, spontaneously drawn than she could fly. And she could hardly pretend to be drawn to Mr. Grey. No, not even for the pleasure of giving the suspicious Mrs. Grey something to be suspicious about.

Besides, the man was too cocksure. He appeared to share Mrs. Grey's conviction that the slightest nod on his part would incline Janet (or any other woman) to follow him to the ends of the earth. This was amusing. But it was also irritating to one's pride of sex.

The trouble with Mr. Grey was that, having realized the first of the two ambitions which governed his desires, he felt satisfied he was about to realize the second. As an author, he had conquered the public; as a man, he now meant to conquer women.

To Janet, Mr. Grey's illusions about himself were as transparent as his illusions about her. It was plain that he took with the utmost seriousness the greatness that had recently been thrust upon him. His reasoning was quite simple. If success in pleasing the crowd and its leaders did not imply the possession of superior gifts and of a masterly technique in exploiting those gifts, what did it imply?

This reasoning struck Janet as puerile. Yet Mr. Grey could hardly be expected to share her view that talent and superb execution had never by themselves attracted the plaudits of the crowd, or that the only man who could please the million was the man born with the taste of the million. Mr. Grey had been lucky enough to inherit this taste. Why demand that he look a gift horse in the mouth?

But the judgment of youth is direct and pitiless! It seemed nothing less than ridiculous to Janet that Mr. Grey should seriously pose as a fount of the divine fire, and calmly invite her to become a ministering angel to the sacred fount. What was still more ridiculous was that he disguised his offer in weird, roundabout phrases calculated to enable her to "save her face."

He was still confidently urging the project, when Mrs. Grey swept in and fell upon them like a moral landslide.

Mrs. Grey did not stop to account for her unexpected return, to disclose how long she had been eavesdropping, or to listen to Mr. Grey's stumbling and embarrassed explanations. Her belligerent manner left no doubt that she put the very worst construction on what she had heard. Ignoring Janet altogether, she opened her batteries full on her husband and discharged a broadside of questions, short, sharp and desolating.

Her questions were entirely rhetorical.

Was this the loyalty he had sworn to her, when she picked him out of the gutter of obscurity and married him? Had she not, all along, suspected that he was plotting an affair with this girl? No doubt the girl had been setting her cap at him, but was that a legitimate excuse for inconstancy? At his age, he ought to be beyond a desire to sow wild oats. Didn't he know that a mature man sowing his wild oats presented as idiotic a spectacle as if he were sucking his thumb? She didn't know or care what his family would think, but was he proposing to besmirch the unstained record of her family with a divorce scandal? And so on—

Janet listened in icy humiliation whilst the storm broke over and around her. She expected every moment to be caught up in it, whirled into its vortex, and destroyed.

What actually happened was that Mr. Grey played a ghastly imitation of his masterful hero in "The Klondike Mail," until his lady, infuriated by even this shadow of defiance, reached a degree of tension that would have burst a twelve-inch gun. Death and destruction were almost afoot when she spied the typewritten papers which Janet had just returned. She pounced upon these papers and violently projected them to a point within three inches of her spouse's nose, after which she regaled him with a description of the flaws in the typewriting and the deficiencies in the typist.

This description was pithy, elaborate, exhaustive, but it was not exactly verified.

Followed an effective oratorical pause. And then Mrs. Grey begged to be informed whether the quality of the work was not ample evidence that the worker came for no good and sufficient business reasons. No one venturing to reply, she hurled the manuscripts at the head of Mr. Grey's rapidly retreating form and, as her aim was marred by a trifling miscalculation, she picked up another document and took a shy at Janet. While Janet was warding off this missile, the playwright made good his escape.

"Really, Mrs. Grey," said Janet, standing her ground boldly as her indignation got the better of her fright, "you are behaving worse than a fishwife."

Mrs. Grey sobered down with incredible suddenness.

"My poor girl," she said, solicitously, "did I hit you?"

"You came within an ace of knocking out one of my eyes!"

"Just so. Within an ace. That was my intention, precisely. I aimed for effect, not for damage. I assure you I'm a first-rate shot."

Mrs. Grey had now composed her feelings and her dress, both of which had been considerably ruffled.

"A husband is hard to get nowadays," she went on, smiling, "but he is even harder to keep. When a charming girl makes this comparative difficulty a superlative one, she does a wife grave wrong. Still, under the circumstances, I forgive you."

"You mustn't presume too much on my wickedness," said Janet, smiling at this strange turn of affairs. "I'm disgracefully inexperienced."

"Inexperienced! Ah, well, men have an amazing weakness for some kinds of inexperience—in a girl. In a wife they're not so keen on it. My dear, if unmarried girls would only put themselves in a wife's place, what a lot of trouble they'd save—for us now and for themselves later on. But of course, they can't do it. They think marriage is a picnic on a motorcycle with the bride in the carriage attachment. What a dream! Marriage is more like a tennis game with the two players facing each other across the dividing line of sex. You'll find that out the day after the wedding! You'll know then that the only way to manage a husband is to discover his weakest point and keep driving at that until the game and the set are in your hands. Mr. Grey's weakest point is his horror of facing facts. He dreads a fact the way a boy dreads soap. I discovered that at our honeymoon hotel when we debated how to stop the waiter from serving us with cold soup. Rather than compel the waiter to change it, Mr. Grey tried to prove that the soup was really quite hot. No, I'm not the tartar you think I am. I don't object to a man having his fling now and then, provided it's a short fling. But I can't let him get into the grip of a girl of your sort, the permanent sort. That might introduce fatal complications, and I don't mean to take any chances."

"Then why did you let me come here in the first place?"

"Because you took me in completely," replied this astonishing woman. "You had none of the obvious female ways. You were almost pathetically businesslike and you seemed to be—well—no beauty. Excuse me for being frank."

"The excuses are all on my side, I'm sure," said Janet, highly amused.

"Not at all, my dear. I'm convinced I was quite wrong. You grow on one, even on a woman. I soon found out that beneath your dovelike innocence there was a serpentine wisdom. It's a magic combination. No man can resist it."

"Thank you, Mrs. Grey. This flattery is more than I deserve, but—"

"It's no good protesting. There is a devilish fascination about you. If I'm beginning to feel it myself, what must poor Mr. Grey feel?"

And with a gesture which betokened that, in these matters, feelings transcended verbal arguments and oral contracts, she paid Janet what was owing to her and made it clear that she need not come again.

At the door, she wished Janet good luck.

"My dear," she said, "as a typist you cut rather a poor figure. But that combination I spoke of—it's worth a fortune—"

Janet went away not knowing whether to laugh or to cry. A good cry would not have come amiss; and yet, as she counted up the fortunes of the last two days, she could not help observing that her mishaps had trod on one another's heels in a procession that was well-nigh comic. Claude's letter and flight, Cornelia's bad temper, her own involuntary rudeness to Robert, the crop of errors in the playwright's manuscript, Mrs. Grey's impertinences, and the crowning loss of her position—here was a downpour of calamities amounting to a regular deluge!

And not a single ray of sunshine in sight, either.

On second thoughts, she had to admit that this statement was not strictly true. For Robert would probably be home, and what an immense relief it would be to tell him all that had happened to her! At the same time she would be able to obliterate the effect of yesterday's rudeness.

For she guessed that Robert's feelings had been deeply hurt by her gesture of withdrawal from him. But she felt no doubt of her power to conciliate him or to conquer his just resentment. In fact, she had so little doubt of this power that, the nearer home she got, the more she looked forward to the prospect of exercising it.

Ah, yes, it would be simple and sweet to make up with Robert, and they should spend a very jolly afternoon together, working over sundry papers and planning new activities for the firm of Barr & Lloyd.

And (such is the peremptory, indomitable influence of the heart!), her spirits rose again. In the full flush of agreeable anticipation, she began to turn the day's adventures over in her mind. As she did so, she gave them a humorous twist, for she meant to relate them to Robert entertainingly, in return for his expected concession to her.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

I

On reaching her own street, Janet had to plough her way to the Lorillard tenements through shoals of children that scampered about as derelict as herself. She felt the keenest pity for these little tots who came from the very immodel tenements not far away, where five or even eight people existed in a single room, defying the decencies of life by day and mocking them by night in order to live up to "the highest standard of living" in the world.

She did not expect Robert until two o'clock, when he regularly returned from the League of Guildsmen. In the interval she looked, as a matter of course, under Cornelia's alarm clock, where the four friends were in the habit of putting brief communications for one another. She found the following note addressed to her in Robert's painstaking hand:

Dear Janet:

Forgive me for not being on hand this afternoon. During the next few days, and perhaps longer, I shall be in Pittsburgh. For some time, therefore, the whole burden of the firm of Barr & Lloyd will have to rest on the shoulders of one partner. Lucky that this partner is so thoroughly staunch and dependable, isn't it?

What is taking me out of town is the strike in Pittsburgh. Thousands of steel workers have laid down their tools in protest against the conditions under which they are obliged to work. The contest between these men and their all-powerful employers is horribly uneven, and the apathy of the general public towards the issues at stake is appalling. Naturally, every agency that is pledged to the success of a healthy labor movement must pitch into this prickly business. For the strikers need all the help they can get, whether of a material or a moral kind.

It is on the moral side that our League of Guildsmen comes in. The recent war has filled the earth with indescribable bitternesses and resentments. It has also given sovereign strength to the idea that henceforth the control of the world's affairs must be taken away from the idlers and profiteers and given to the workers and producers. At every turn, omens of a vast incalculable change force themselves upon our senses.

Clearly, those who don't want a bloody revolution have got to work tooth and nail for a pacific one. Now the Guildsmen, being advocates of a change that shall be peaceful though drastic, have a vital interest in drumming it into people's heads that violence can never breed anything save violence and violence again.

You see, don't you, that I am needed there far more than here? Please believe that I'm sorry in the last degree to upset our joint business plans and to hold up "The Klondike Mail" on the typewriter at just the critical moment when Mr. Grey's double-dyed desperadoes are holding it up in the middle of the third act. It makes me feel like an accessory to the crime, all the more so in that it gives you, at the secretarial end, the task of foiling one more villain.

Arrangements have been made at the League office for the delivery to you of another batch of Mss. Could you call in there tomorrow afternoon?

More later, as soon as my plans are surer.

Ever yours,

Robert.

P.S. On second thoughts, it seems a shame that you should be saddled with a partner who is bound to be more or less on the jump. I recall the plan you confided to me last week, the plan of turning Barr & Lloyd into a real secretarial business on an extensive scale. With this on your mind, you may well fear that my haphazard movements will prove ruinous to any settled policy. If so, and whenever you can find a more stable associate, please have no compunction about making a change. We must not let sentiment stand in the way of good management.

"He can't even say good-bye without delivering a lecture," said Janet bitterly.

She felt aggrieved. Just when she needed Robert most, he left her in the lurch. True, his direct connection with the labor movement made his departure inevitable. But did he have to rush off to Pittsburgh the very moment the strike broke out? She supposed his haste was partly prompted by his injured feelings. If not, why had he so needlessly offered to dissociate himself from her, why, indeed, had he written such an entirely cold, unsympathetic letter?

"Like his cold, unsympathetic views on love," she said to herself, recalling with some scorn his severe, intolerant pronouncements on the free love theme.

She reviewed the business-like contents of the letter with a growing sense of desolation. It looked as though she were in for a dismal evening, one of those dismal evenings that are enormously good for us afterwards, because at the time they so thoroughly plough up our deepest feelings.

II

But the facts of the present were too disturbing to permit her to extract much consolation from a philosophy of the future.

For Janet's difficulties were by no means entirely sentimental.

Much as Claude's anger and Robert's coolness tortured her feelings, it was the destruction of her plans that chiefly occupied her thoughts. These were the plans that Robert had referred to in his letter.

Ably assisted by Cornelia, whose power of sketching the most imposing schemes quite exhausted her capacity for executing even the humblest ones, Janet had mapped out a very ambitious career for herself. Her intention was to make the most of her stenographic foothold; to accumulate enough resources to permit a spur, so to speak, to be run into the domain of the law; and eventually to reach a point where the secretarial specialty and its legal intertwinings should be united in one occupation.

It was, as Cornelia all aglow remarked, a time when women were not only casting down the barriers raised by men around the old professions, but were actually bestirring themselves to carve out brand-new professions.

What Cornelia put into enthusiasm, Janet proposed to put into cold deeds.

As a first step in this direction, she resolved that the firm of Barr & Lloyd, which had been born in jest, should be reared in dead earnest. Her work for Mr. Grey, a certain amount of casual work which she was getting from friends of the playwright, and such odd jobs as Robert brought from the Guild League—these three sources were to form the basis of a secretarial office dealing with authors' manuscripts in relation to typing, revision, criticism, and so on.

In short, Barr & Lloyd (Barr first, because Robert, as an advocate of the absolute equality of men and women, insisted that the correct order of precedence was a strictly alphabetical one)—Barr & Lloyd were to be manuscript specialists, handling every conceivable matter linked up with the preparation and sale of manuscripts and the protection of authors' rights.

From Robert, Janet had extracted a promise to supervise the department of criticism and revision. Claude (this was before his flight in a fit of pique) had refused to take the project seriously. Cornelia, in her most pronounced bel canto style, had volunteered to "lend a helping hand" to the typewriting department and to give her moral support to most of the other departments. As Janet's last illusions about Cornelia were being speedily dissipated, and as she judged that some birds in a bush are worth ten in the hand, she contracted for Cornelia's moral support and nothing but her moral support in all the departments.

Then, as regards the legal department. Janet held that, in order to round out her business in the most complete way, one member of the firm ought to be equipped with a first-hand training in jurisprudence. She saw nothing for it but to be this member herself, and accordingly she had already made arrangements to attend the coming fall sessions of an Evening Law School. Needless to say, this part of her dream had not been so much as breathed to Claude.

Janet intended, as soon as she had passed her bar examination, to specialize on all points of law bearing on literary and dramatic productions, the rights of authors, and the relations between the buyers and sellers of manuscripts. She had been put onto this idea by a popular short-story writer, one of Mr. Grey's friends. This man had assured her that the literary field, on its legal side, was practically a virgin field. Merchants, inventors, landlords, captains of industry and the like could, where the law touched their spheres of influence, find appropriate legal specialists with all the precedents, traditions, decisions, appeals, evasions, etc., at their fingers' ends. Authors alone were in no such happy case. The legal background of authorship was a vast morass of contradictions, quibbles and uncertainties. Authors were frequently at sea in respect of their rights, constantly handicapped in the matter of expert advice, and always liable to be done in the eye by the more unscrupulous members of the fraternity of editors, publishers, managers and agents.

This, then, was the field that Janet meant to conquer. She had a roseate vision of Barr & Lloyd occupying a suite of offices on the lower end of Madison or Park Avenue. If fortune favored her, these offices were to be staffed with ambitious young women assistants whom she would help to useful and honorable careers (as far as male prejudice and discrimination would allow). Barr & Lloyd, in other words, besides their primary business as manuscript practitioners, would have a secondary mission, namely, that of multiplying the avenues along which woman might march towards economic equality with men.

Such was the purpose which Janet had already begun to work for. She now saw all her plans collapsing like a pricked balloon. The action taken by Mrs. Grey meant the loss of much potential custom which she had hoped would grow by recommendation out of the Grey patronage. The most galling, stabbing fact in all this sorry business was the reflection that she had failed not merely in her human and business dealings but in her workmanship. If only she hadn't made a mess of those last manuscripts for the playwright, the ones she had prepared under the strain of Claude's tempestuous displeasure! Mrs. Grey's taunt still rankled in her ears: "As a typist, you cut a very poor figure—"

True, Mrs. Grey had tacked on another phrase—the one about her "magic combination." But what did this trumped-up compliment weigh against the maddening behavior of Claude and Robert?

Both of them had deserted her!

Janet was not addicted to the windy heroics cultivated by the Outlaws of Kips Bay, but for once she believed herself entitled to indulge in them. She really felt deserted. By Claude, by Robert, by Cornelia and, of course, by her family.

"How naturally I think of the family when I'm glum!" was her silent comment.

Her thoughts ran back to the time when she had left home in defiance of Mrs. Barr's ultimatum.

Since then, her mother had written one letter full of that spirit of Christian forbearance that has driven so many people into the devil's camp. After that, not another word from her. But there had followed a steady stream of appeals from her father, imploring her to come back at any price, swearing that life at home was not worth living without her, and promising to do anything in the wide world she demanded (except, as Janet sardonically observed to herself, damp down her mother's tyranny a trifle. He had never had, and he never would have, the nerve to do this or to put up the least show of fight.)

As a last effort, her sister Emily had paid a visit to the Lorillard tenements—partly perhaps from curiosity. She affirmed that she had come of her own free will, and probably believed this statement to be the truth. Janet knew very well that her sister was, consciously or unconsciously, the family ambassador. The Barrs always throve best when their right hand did not know what their left hand was doing.

Emily, all a-tingle with the exhilaration which an angel inevitably feels when descending upon a glittering abode of vice, had tried hard not to betray her excitement. In a tone essenced with pious sorrow and celestial distress! She had assured the erring one (though not in these words), that all would be forgiven if only she returned to her home before the world (of the Barrs) should discover that a Barr had abandoned Brooklyn for Kips Bay, and her family for the society of atheists, Bolshevists, and Bohemians!

"But I haven't the faintest notion of abandoning you," Janet had replied. "I believe I can lead a fuller, freer, more active life away from mother's apron strings, that's all. Of course I want to see the family from time to time. I could come on short visits—"

Emily had assured her, not without a trace of exultation, that Mrs. Barr would never hear of such a cool arrangement. Either the prodigal daughter returned once and for all, or the family would treat her as dead.

"Really! But how you'll miss the funeral!" Janet had wickedly exclaimed.

At which Emily had put on her gloves.

All later messages sent by Janet to her mother in an effort to put their mutual relations on a more reasonable footing had been severely ignored. The only communications she had received were growingly infrequent notes from her father, and these contained nothing but the same old appeals—sentimental, pathetic, fatuous.

III

The doorbell startled her out of her long, melancholy reverie. She flew to the threshold, and in came Claude! She had proposed to treat him coolly at their next meeting. But his return was as sudden as it was unexpected. And he was Claude, the same Claude with the same striking appearance, the same telling voice, the same handsome face. Instantly, the magnetic spark that had darted from one to the other at the Outlaws' Ball made its swift, poignant, thrilling leap between them again.

Though words were superfluous, Claude, as he clasped her in a passionate embrace, murmured:

"Janet, darling, forgive me. I was a beast to write a letter like that."

"Confession is good for the soul," said Janet, laughing and trying to release her head.

"Are you angry? Well, you ought to be. And I ought to grovel in the dust at your feet. You are a saint to forgive me, and I should be ashamed to accept forgiveness if I hadn't suffered. Yes, Janet, I've suffered cruelly. I never had so keen a grief and I never so thoroughly deserved one. But I'm nearly ill with worry."

He did look pale, nor did it hurt his cause that pallor became him. Besides, his apologies were as overwhelming as his fits of temper. How could the poor girl help forgiving him?

And so Janet, who but a few minutes before had been considering (mock-heroically to be sure) sundry historic forms of self-slaughter, now forgot all about jumping off Brooklyn Bridge, etc., and poured a heavenly compassion on Claude.

"Something happened in Huntington," she said. "Something serious. Does it involve me? I want you to tell me straight."

"That scoundrel Burley tipped my father off about us, and as a result, the old man is half out of his wits. He is determined that my marriage with Marjorie shall not fall through, for the one terror of his life is that of disobliging Mr. Armstrong. In what form the word was passed along the line, I don't know. But they were at me, one and all, day and night, giving me a hundred and one sly intimations of the general satisfaction that would follow the much desired event. The pressure got to be unbearable."

He said that the older people had left no stone unturned to bring the Armstrong-Fontaine alliance to pass. Pacing the floor restlessly, he spoke of the delicate hints, the veiled references, the consummate skill with which he and Marjorie were engineered into tete-a-tetes. Could Janet picture him alone with Marjorie, and the resultant sessions of sweet, silent thought? Had she any idea of what the imperious will of Armstrong's daughter could do in the way of maneuvering a man into the most difficult situations? Janet had little difficulty in calling up an image of the stately brunette with lustrous dark hair, patrician nose, and sulky, discontented mouth. This imposing young lady had impressed herself indelibly upon Janet's mind at the Mineola Aerodrome, and, such are the unfathomable processes of sex, Janet profoundly pitied Claude. She did this without a suspicion that he might be drawing generously upon his imagination for the sake of that very pity of hers, which she gave him so divinely. Nor did it occur to her that there were few young men in all New York who would have been in unrelieved misery if Marjorie Armstrong had set her cap at them.

As a matter of fact, Claude quite omitted to mention that he had gone to Huntington with more than a vague notion of finding out whether he and Marjorie couldn't hit it off together, after all; also that, if Marjorie, with all her eagerness to capture him, had not so plainly exposed her design of "bossing" the marriage after it had taken place—well, then—

What he did say, was:

"Of course, I was left quite free to do as I pleased. Oh, quite free. They wouldn't lead the horse to water—not they, that would be brutal coercion—they would simply make it drink."

This irony expressed the full truth. Claude had virtually given his father a promise not to marry Janet. But Mr. Fontaine senior put no faith in vows that were subject to the stresses and strains of love. Mistrustful of his son's infatuation and also of the unknown quantity of Janet's ambition, he did not scruple to adopt any tactical measure by which the union of the Armstrong-Fontaine forces might be achieved.

"What do you mean to do?" asked Janet, greatly troubled.

"What can I do? What can any prisoner do? Run away, I suppose."

"What—without me?"

"Well, you see, I'm planning to go to Europe, darling. Separated by the Atlantic I shall be able to make my position much clearer to my father. An ocean is an astonishing convenience when it stands between the giver and the receiver of an explanation."

"Yes, but why can't I go, too?"

"You dear innocent," he said, taking her hand tenderly, "we can't go cavorting over two continents as if we were merely joy-riding from here to Quakertown."

"Why not?" she persisted, with her customary refusal to be sidetracked.

IV

The question embarrassed him. Even had he been clear about the train of thought at the back of his mind, he could not, in all brutal directness, have said: "A man in my station does not flaunt his mistresses in the face of the public. That is all very well for the vulgar rich. But not for my sort. High-class polygamy is strictly sub rosa."

Claude did not explicitly think this, much less say it. His chief difficulty in the way of reaching a straightforward understanding with Janet was that his mind did not work straightforwardly upon the problem of sex relations. His adopted radical professions were entirely subordinate to powerful, instinctive reactions along traditional lines.

Thus, at heart, he had little use for Janet's views about free love. To Janet, the term meant a public abandonment of an obsolete institution. To Claude, it was little more than a polite synonym for illicit intercourse.

Claude, in fact, had no deep quarrel with existing institutions. He prided himself on being tolerant, and his tolerance extended to the institutions of Bohemianism (which had no recognition in law), as well as to the institutions of the established order (which enjoyed this recognition). His support of "advanced" art, his membership in the Outlaws' Club, his philandering among the Lorillard tenementers—these were all ways of escape from the particularity of normal civilized life. Bohemianism, by systematically discarding troublesome forms, costly conventions and restrictive social obligations, really organized these ways of escape for him and provided a maximum of pleasure with a minimum of effort.

He was, therefore, by no means prepared to go as far as Janet wished to go, openly; yet he was fully prepared to go to the limit, clandestinely. So much so, that a severe critic like Robert would have said that Claude was deliberately taking advantage of Janet's inexperienced outlook on life. And it was quite true that Claude was willing to profit by her belief in free love, although he was far from willing to champion this belief, much less to become a martyr in its promotion.

But if he was exploiting Janet's infatuation for him, he was not doing so consciously. And the fact remained that, had she been so minded, she could just as easily have exploited his infatuation for her. Indeed, the latter would have been easier. Claude was not aware of this. He was aware only of his own power, and he believed he was exercising almost superhuman self-control in an effort to avoid compromising her future.

He believed he was doing this now, whilst fishing for an answer to Janet's candid "why not?" A few hours earlier, in Huntington, under the concerted pressure of the Armstrong family, he had realized that he would have to give up either Marjorie or Janet; and it had occurred to him that if he took Janet now, Marjorie was not lost to him later; whereas if he took Marjorie now, Janet was lost to him forever.

Naturally, it was not in terms of pitiless realism that he sought to explain his choice.

A more heroic explanation was that he had given up Marjorie for Janet's sake, and that, on a peremptory summons of the heart, he had run away from Huntington determined to risk everything—from his father's wrath to the loss of Mr. Armstrong's protection in the matter of smuggled diamonds. The heroic explanation was the one he meant to give to Janet.

Looking, at the moment, into Janet's gray eyes in their superb setting of long, dark lashes, he was ready to give his thoughts any form that might be acceptable to her. Surely, such a mixture of radical daring and native good sense, of enticement and candor, of self-reliance that ennobled her and soft yielding that flattered him—such a mixture had never before been found in one woman. It made her exquisite, enigmatic, thrilling and quite indispensable to him.

So reasoned his heart. And all his commanding nonchalance returned.

V

The result was that when Janet, failing to get an answer to her question, repeated anew her wish to accompany him abroad, he enfolded her in his arms and said:

"After all, why not?"

And after a fervent embrace, he added:

"Janet, I think you ought to face what's in store for us."

"Don't let's cross bridges, Claude," she pleaded.

"We'll get married, of course," he went on, unheeding her. "Frankly, my father won't like it. He'll probably make Rome howl. However, he'll get used to it in the end—especially when he meets you. But, though there's a storm ahead, you are brave and we'll weather it, I'm sure."

"Your father won't raise a storm," said Janet, with a strange smile, "for a small but important reason. Remember, I'm not going to be married."

"Janet!"

"You know I don't believe in it."

They argued the matter pro and con, she spiritedly, he lamely. Janet pointed out, among other things, that when Mr. Fontaine senior learnt of their free union he was little likely to attempt any serious interference, but would count on time to separate them.

"'Love's not Time's fool!'" said Claude, quoting dithyrambically. "We'll never be separated, darling, will we?"

"Well—not for the present," said Janet, with dancing eyes. "I won't vouch for our dim and distant feelings."

"No teasing, you darling imp!"

"Claude, I mean it. If—if it should turn out that your father was right, that will merely prove that we were wrong."

He was at a complete loss how to treat her incredible self-surrender. As a man of the world, he was part scandalized, part uneasy, according as he swerved from the conviction that Janet was candid, to the suspicion that she was designing. Again, as a gay Bohemian trifler, he saw in her attitude an easy way out of possible complications. Whether he should or should not carry out his offer of marriage was now a question he would not have to face. She did not mean to put his vows to the test! This was breath-bereaving, staggering; it was even slightly annoying. But, her eccentric choice being a fact, surely the consequences did not rest on his soul?

"Janet, you don't know what you are doing!" he cried out involuntarily, being torn many ways at once.

She, too, was greatly agitated; but, under the pressure of her theory, she kept her head. While he stood there as if distraught, she poured out a flood of reasons to which he scarcely listened. For instance, she said it was criminal for two people to form a permanent union or bring children into a family until they were sure of being well-suited to each other and of establishing a family that children would wish to enter.

All marriages ought to be trial marriages of the kind that George Meredith had suggested long ago.

Moreover, until she became independent in the matter of money, she couldn't dream of subscribing to any permanent arrangement.

He replied that this was all nonsense and derided Meredith as a bookworm and a dreamer. For his own part, hadn't he money enough to provide for them both? If she wouldn't take half his money, she didn't love him. That was flat!

"I do love you!" cried Janet, with more visible emotion than before. "That's why I mustn't marry you."

He rose with a wild movement.

"I must save myself—and you, too!" he murmured. "I'm going abroad by the first steamer."

But these words were dashed with insurgent passion. Handsome, hypnotic, intense, his whole being vibrated towards her. She surrendered incontinently.

"Not without me!" she said, enchaining him in her arms.

He kissed her tempestuously.

"It's a daring step, and a perilous one," he said, more in weak protest than in forceful remonstrance.

"No, no, no!" she cried, as with a gesture of ecstasy she hid her face on his shoulder.

PART IV

NEMESIS

CHAPTER TWENTY

I

One morning in the middle of August, Harry Kelly cut short his gymnastics and went downstairs to get fruit, cream and rolls for Cornelia, as he had done daily since Janet left. The letter box held one letter, a fat one, postmarked Paris. Cornelia was inclined to be lackadaisical before breakfast, but a letter enlivened her at once, especially if it came from a long-lost friend or bore a foreign postmark. Kelly sent his powerful form bounding up the staircase, the victuals being safeguarded by a miracle of balancing.

"A letter from Paris," he called out joyfully, as he entered Apartment Fifteen.

"From Janet!" exclaimed Cornelia with conviction. One glance at the handwriting verified her guess.

"Janet's hand," she said, and tore the envelope open feverishly.

"Wouldn't you enjoy reading it more after breakfast?" he said wistfully as he watched Cornelia unfolding a great many pages of writing.

"What an idea! Make the coffee, Hercules, there's a good boy. The water is boiling; all you need to do is to pour the water on the coffee and let it stand."

As Kelly had fallen sole heir to the daily duty of preparing her breakfast, he uncomplainingly went to work. Meanwhile, Cornelia, in a very becoming green-and-gold Mimosa jacket, sat down on a lounge and buried herself in Janet's letter.

II

Dear Cornelia:

Here I am in the Luxembourg Gardens, alone with my fountain pen and my pad of paper, Claude having gone to the races as the guest of a Russian Grand Duke. I feel ages removed from the days of Kips Bay, though by the calendar only four weeks have gone by.

Why haven't you heard from me in all this time? That, I imagine, is the first question you would ask me if we met face to face. No, you wouldn't. You would divine the answer. You would know that the blinding, paralyzing, notoriety into which we were suddenly plunged, left me with but one desire, the supreme desire for solitude. A desert without a single oasis would not have been too lonely for me to live in. For a few days even Claude—

Those cruel headlines, those stabbing capital letters! Like points of fire in a demon dance they riot in and out of my memory yet. "Affinity or Elopement!" "Fontaine Heir Meets Enchantress on Baronia!" "Diamond King's Son in Joy-Ride to Europe!" How did the inquisition happen to overlook such exquisite weapons of torture as huge red capitals on a smooth white space?

Writing the letters down affords a mild relief. To my physical sight, not to my mind's eye. Oh yes, I actually saw the headlines that Hutchins Burley fabricated in his newspaper story. Some thoughtful enemy of Claude's took pains to have a copy of the Evening Chronicle forwarded to his Paris address.

Didn't you guess at once that Hutchins was the beast responsible for the publicity we got? That vicious man has a mortal grudge to pay off against me or against Claude or perhaps against us both. But what for?

How he got on our track, heaven alone knows. Heaven and Mark Pryor.

Yes, Cornelia, our own Mark Pryor (the human embodiment of the theory of protective coloration, as Robert called him)—he it was who brought me the fateful news. In this wise.

On the second morning out, I was taking a turn around the deck by myself, while Claude was chatting with the captain. (The "Baronia's" captain is an old friend of Claude's family, the Fontaines being heavy shareholders in the steamship company. This was the connection that enabled us to get accommodations at such short notice, the purser's room having been given up to me and the second engineer's quarters to Claude.)

As I said, I was roving about the upper deck, when one of the ventilators or posts or something, suddenly became alive. Or so it seemed to my startled eyes. Walking remorselessly towards me, this no longer stationary object magically assumed the form and voice of Mark Pryor! You could have knocked me down with a feather. (By the way, I'm more certain than ever that he's a detective or a spy or a Soviet propagandist—or can he be merely an American novelist studying life for the Saturday Evening Post?)

Whatever the key to his inmost mystery, I've always been greatly taken with him. He's like a flash of lightning on a pitch-dark night: his comings and goings are never more sinister or mysterious than when his sudden vivid presence gives them a momentary relief.

Without letting me into the secret of his skill at sleight-of-hand (or rather, sleight-of-feet), he drew me aside and told me in a most sympathetic way of the story about Claude and me that was being headlined in the Evening Chronicle and that was soon to be the gossip of two continents. The information had breezed his way—by wireless. Out of pure regard for me, he had bribed the radio man to keep mum. Wasn't it splendid of him? But he warned me to prepare for a leak. "The only thing you can keep dark nowadays is the truth," he said, in his quiet way, without a twinkle in his eye.

He also said that Hutchins Burley was certainly at the bottom of the whole scandal. He was sure of this, because he had seen Burley on the pier shortly before the "Baronia" left, and because of other reasons which he declared he was not at liberty to divulge.

After predicting that we should meet again, Mr. Pryor "faded away" as imperceptibly as usual, leaving me a prey to my thoughts. My heart was mostly in my boots and I can tell you I was getting pretty limp when I pulled myself up short with the reminder that I must pluck up a little courage if only to show that I deserved a disinterested friend like Mr. Pryor. (He's in France at present, on some dark business or other. I don't care how dark, I'm glad he's here. The mere fact gives me the sensation of being watched over. I'm confident that Mark Pryor's keen sight is at least as far-reaching as the long arm of coincidence.)

It wasn't exactly a picnic to tell Claude the news. Like most of us, Claude thrives wonderfully well on good luck but takes bad luck hard. Naturally, to a man who has so many important friends, newspaper notoriety is a bitter pill to swallow. Claude raged at his fate with a violence that frightened me. He tortured himself by anticipating the libels to which his character would be exposed, the pictures of himself and me that the yellow newspapers would print, the slanders that the busybodies would privately circulate. How his father and the Armstrongs would take the affair was another source of torment. And then there was the fear that the story might leak out on the "Baronia" and that we should become the talk of the ship.

It was a calamity. And the worst of it was that Claude appeared to think I was in some way directly responsible for it. His anger worried me far more than the notoriety did; the angrier he got, the more the notoriety sank into relative insignificance. He accused me of being callous! Wasn't that monstrously unjust? Merely because my advice was that we should make the best of a very bad matter and face the world as if nothing had happened of which we were ashamed. He took my calmness, which was all on the surface, as a personal affront. It infuriated him more (if that were possible) than the exposure, and caused him to accuse me of disloyalty and lack of sympathy. Are men ever satisfied? They pretend that they can't endure a weeping woman. Yet, give them a stoical countenance, and they'll ask for tears.

No, Cornelia, this was not the first rift. That had come on the very evening we sailed, when the passengers held a dance on deck in the moonlight. I was not feeling very well and danced only once, but Claude did full duty as a leader of the cotillion. During his absence from my side, a young British captain in mufti (he had been an ace in the war) sat down in a steamer chair next to mine and helped me, what with his charming manner and his gorgeous British accent, to while away the time.

All went swimmingly until, in an interval between dances, Claude came back to me. Can you call up an image of Claude, the magnificent, approaching at a temperature of absolute zero? His manner, of the ice icy, froze the poor captain dead away. This done, he turned on me and asked me what I meant by "picking a man up!"

You can imagine that I replied pretty tartly, and one word led to another till we reached a point where Claude threatened that he would never marry me—no, not for all the king's horses and all the king's men. At this, I burst out laughing. My laughter was immodest, unladylike, spiteful. And I should have regretted it, had Claude understood me. But Claude is in some respects a reincarnation of Kipling's famous vampire lady. He had never understood, and now, he never will understand.

But I'm running ahead of my story.

As we feared, rumor and gossip about us soon had free rein on board the "Baronia." Poor Claude had to bear the brunt of this annoyance and of the Captain's anger too. That Claude and a lady were together on the voyage had certainly been a secret, but a secret to which the old sea-dog was a party. The Captain's sense of propriety was not outraged by the secret. It was outraged only when the secret became a matter of common knowledge. And he did not permit a feeling of delicacy to restrain his indignation against his fellow conspirators.

What happened on the "Baronia" was trifling compared to the furor of our landing at Southampton. We were met by "all the latest London papers" filled with the wildest details of our "elopement." That is the way they featured our experiment over here. It was described as the elopement of a young multimillionaire with a poor plebeian stenographer, an elopement carried out in the teeth of a tyrant father with invincibly aristocratic prejudices. Shades of the Barrs and their Mayflower ancestry!

Worse remained behind. The English reporters promptly spotted Claude. You can't be six feet two in your socks and have the airs and graces of Prince Charming, without being conspicuous even amongst a crowd of first-class passengers on a fifty-thousand-ton liner. When the newspaper men plied poor Claude with questions, I began to weaken at the knees. But Claude was a trump. He kept his most nonchalant air, gave cleverly evasive answers, and even begged one of his tormentors for a cigarette quite in the style of the imperturbable villain of a screen play. Then a battery of motion picture men turned their cameras on us. Mark Pryor and the British captain swooped down to the rescue at this critical moment, which was very lucky for us, as we had just about exhausted our nerve (to say nothing of our nerves).

We stayed in London barely forty-eight hours. In spite of our assumed names we were bundled out of three hotels, thanks to the curiosity of reporters who kept after Claude as though he were a ticket-of-leave man. I had supposed that only American journalists hounded people, but evidently the London tribesmen have taken a leaf out of the New York book in the matter of pitiless persistence. Claude felt so harassed, outraged and persecuted that he could not get out of London fast enough. He saw a reporter in every strange face and lived in constant dread of another forced interview until we were safely across the Channel.

And now I had better answer the question that I know is uppermost in your mind.

We have been living as a married couple! Now it's out. Your Janet, the bold and fearless advocate of free unions, has been masquerading as a wife, a timorous and trustful, cowering and respectable wife, differing from other wives only in being a fraud.

It's a terrible comedown, a sickening fall from grace, isn't it?

But what else could I have done, short of leaving Claude entirely?

You see, Cornelia, the stark fact was that we couldn't get accommodations anywhere except by pretending that we were married. Had we declined to make this pretense, we couldn't have remained together at all unless we adopted all sorts of secret, underground, time consuming devices. It was a choice between the pretense and the secrecy—a Hobson's choice, so far as I could see.

Cornelia's lips curled with contempt. She could not escape the reflection that she had showed much more courage when she had been in London with Percival Houghton.

I must add that free love, at any rate in my case, has proved a failure, a dead failure. I do not say that trial experiments in loving and living together should not be made, but I do say that the time is not ripe for them. At present, the two scores I have against free love are: First, that it simply won't work; and second, that the only thing about it that is free is the undesired advertising one gets.

This conclusion has not been reached in what Mrs. Grey calls the cool, disinterested spirit of the dispassionate investigator. All the same, it is my conclusion.

Of course, it is an abominable thing that a unique, intensely individual experience like love should have to be made the subject of public inquiry and official registration before it can claim to be legitimate. In a more highly civilized nation, such a state of affairs would be unthinkable. But amongst us! Well, when you think of our housing, transport, and domestic arrangements, when you remember how primitive and rigid these still are, can you expect more fluid and elastic relations between the sexes to be welcomed or even understood?

"Huh," exclaimed Cornelia, half aloud, "she got all that from Robert."

Please don't picture me as sitting down and wringing my hands. What's done is done and can't be undone. I've made an experiment in love. And if the result hasn't been what I expected, I have, like the experimental chemist, made discoveries I never dreamed of, discoveries about myself, about other men and women, and about human institutions. I can truly say that I haven't spent four more unhappy weeks in my life, nor—mark this—four weeks that have done me more good.

I call them unhappy weeks. But suppose I had married Claude!

Well, I dare say you've been thinking to yourself: "She is capable of anything; now she will try to sell out to smug respectability and settle down as Claude's duly wedded and articled wife." I admit this would be the logical sequel to my new conclusions about love and marriage. But though I'm still fond of Claude, a great streak of doubt has crossed my dreams of a happy future with him.

Shall I tell you the truth, Cornelia? Claude and I would make a very poor team. I have in mind, not his fits of bad temper, which are very annoying, nor his attacks of jealousy, which are monstrous. I have in mind his outlook on affairs and his active interests, which are in every respect different from mine. Claude is in love with the pomps and trappings of life; and I am not. He goes in passionately for elegance, luxury, all the externals which men admire in society or public institutions; and I do not. He wishes to study and master the ritual of social intercourse in all its forms (even in its Kips Bay form); and I will not. He is fond of the gay boulevards, the fashionable restaurants, the crowded promenades; I am fond of quiet places and a chair to myself in a corner of a park. Our divergence of tastes is almost absolute. We don't like the same theatres, concerts, pictures; we don't even like the same games.

The only game we ever enjoyed together was the great game of love. "What," you will exclaim, "you mean to contend that this game, which you played with such abandon, so thrilled and absorbed and united you both as to smother the thousand differences between you?" Precisely. That is what I contend, for that is what happened. It is weird, disconcerting, inexplicable, yet it is true.

Equally true is the fact that Claude lacks the talent for companionship. With women, at all events. He has no use for a woman except as a plaything or a wife. And he does not want his wife to be a companion or a partner in his work. He wants her to be an ambassador plenipotentiary, representing him in polite society, and also a species of superior twentieth-century domestic scientist taking full charge of his creature comforts at home. I don't see myself in either role. Do you? Can you picture me as a sort of mother, nurse, housemaid, valet, cook and errand girl rolled into one?

All of which means that I'm not quite ready yet to handcuff myself with Prince Charming's household keys. "Hoity-toity," say you, "isn't this a bit like piling the evidence sky-high to prove that the grapes aren't sour?" Perhaps it is, but I think not. It is true that Claude hasn't asked me to marry him yet. It is true that whenever he is out of sorts with me he tells me that my reputation is damaged beyond repair and that I need not look to him to patch it up. It is true that when I smile at this he invariably insists with explosive fury that he will never, never ask me to marry him. He repeatedly insists that he will not. Still, I believe that he will. My problem is not what will become of me if Claude doesn't marry me, but what will become of me if he does.

As for my damaged reputation, I'm really not worrying about that. Say I have sullied my character. In one respect, a spot on a character is like a spot on a fine satin dress: hard work will wash all spots away.

But it stands to reason that things can't go on like this much longer. The little Sorbonne pension in which we are staying (as Monsieur and Madame) has its good points. And there are evenings when Claude, a little tired of all the famous and imposing Parisians he has met, expresses a longing to be quite alone with me again, and transforms himself once more into the Claude he was before we lived together. Then we walk along the Seine or drive on the wondrous roads towards Fontainebleau or Versailles. And these evenings are very delightful.

But they cannot be repeated forever. Any day I may take the step that I ought to have taken some time ago.

Write to me, Cornelia dear. Tell me all the news about the tenements. I suppose the Outlaws are as tame and bourgeois as ever. Does dear old Harry keep you fit and sylph-like with his rising exercises? And how is Lydia Dyson shaping? I see she has another serial in the Black Baboon (I found a copy in Brentano's here)—she must have coined bushels of money by it. I wish I could work as copiously on my diet as she does on hers of cigarettes and Haig and Haig. Charlotte Beecher, I fear, will be "through with me" as the cinema heroes say. Has she exhibited again or married Robert yet? Tell Robert I shall write to him as soon as I've done something he'll approve of.

Need I give further hints of my insatiable hunger for news? Don't let me continue to be cut by the postman. Write and write soon to

Your affectionate friend,

Janet.

III

"Janet's a little fool," was Cornelia's laconic comment as she folded up the letter.

Under Kelly's persuasive service, she attacked breakfast. Between mouthfuls she epitomized the contents of the letter, a proceeding that she punctuated with caustic exclamations. At the end, Harry Kelly expressed much sympathy with Janet's predicament.

"She has made her bed; she'll have to lie in it," said Cornelia.

This was a far cry from the line Cornelia used to take when she told Janet that "marriage is either a vulgar sex deal or a legalized debauch;" or when she declared in lyrical accents that "a free union is the golden key to the garden of spiritual love." Her sentiments on this subject had undergone dilution since Harry Kelly with his athletic build, fair prospects, and standing offer of marriage had become a fixture in Number Fifteen.

But then Cornelia had never really had the courage of her radical opinions. Beneath her advocacy of new forms of sex relationships there lurked a strong affection for the old forms. Essentially, her instincts fitted her for the orderly virtuous days of bustles and bust pads, not for these latter days in which established conventions were being summarily overhauled. For her, the time was decidedly out of joint.

It had been so since her affair with Percival Houghton, the artist who had "stolen her soul." This affair had been an accident of conduct and circumstances, and not, as she always declared, a logical outcome of her character and convictions. And it was as a result of this accidental episode that she was now an irritable, spiteful, new-fangled woman instead of the old-fashioned wife and mother (of seven children) that she should have been.

Some dim perception of all this stirred in the head of Harry Kelly the ex-Harlem Gorilla. Kelly's mentality fell far short of his bodily development. Still, he was no fool, and he rightly guessed that Cornelia was unfair to her former protegee. He did not approve of Janet's flight with Claude. But he had seen too much of life in the Lorillard tenements to be easily scandalized. Moreover, his fondness for Janet disposed him to put the blame, if any, on her lover. Like many amiable persons, he reserved his moral censure exclusively for people he did not know or did not like.

"The poor kid's down on her luck," he ventured gingerly. "It's not up to us to hurry the post-mortem."

"Down on her luck! With a man like Claude at her side?" cried Cornelia, the words curving by slow ascent to an unmusical top note.

"Claude's a grand looking man, that's true. But I've known many a grand looking man who was no better than a four-flusher when you had to share your bunk with him."

"Poor Hercules, what do you know about it? If Claude was a rotter, she should have left him. In all decency, she should have left him the moment she saw that her passion was merely physical. What has she done? Nothing. They are still together on the most intimate terms."

Kelly put his arm soothingly round her waist. It was a privilege she had allowed him in the dull days of late—though not often and always grudgingly.

"I don't suppose she's going to have a child," she went on, in a bitter tone, "yet that would be her one solid happiness. She's too selfish, I fear. Look how idiotically fate deals out the cards. She could have a child, but she doesn't want one, while I want one so much, but—"

It was a generous hiatus, and her voice softened as she approached it. She was forever telling men that she wanted a child of her own; they were usually embarrassed or piqued by the information; and whatever the effect she enjoyed it.

For once, Kelly was not nonplussed. He drew his arm tighter.

"Listen, sweetheart," he said, sentimentally, "what's to prevent it? I want kiddies, too."

"Do you indeed," said Cornelia, with a dangerous light in her eyes. "I said I wanted a child. The difficulty is that I don't want the father for it."

"Why not, if we're married?" he proceeded with unexampled obstinacy. "I'd rather follow Janet than go on being tormented like this," he concluded, drawing the long bow at a venture.

She withdrew from him and rose, her cheeks parading an angry red. Ordinarily, a look was enough to make him quail, but, lo and behold, he was marching with unprecedented independence to the door. And how could Cornelia know that his body went hot and cold by turns for fear that she would let him walk out?

She could not afford to lose him, so she called him back.

"Here, goose!" she cried, coming swiftly down from her high horse. "Here's Janet's letter. You'd better read it through before you quarrel with me about it."

He took it happily and obediently, she getting little pleasure from such an easy victory.

While he read it, she reflected once more that she could not afford to lose him. She set small store by his doglike devotion and, though he had recently obtained an excellent position as physical trainer in a fashionable men's club, she considered him vastly beneath her. That he was physically a veritable Borghese Warrior was wholly offset by the fact that he was socially little better than a superior handicraftsman. In her eyes, that is to say, he had his points, but they were not the points of a polished gentleman.

Yet he was the one friend left to her in Kips Bay, the one friend whose constancy to her was undeviating and unimpaired.

Cornelia's decline from glory had proceeded rapidly since the departure of Janet. The renaissance of flat Number Fifteen as the social and artistic center of the Lorillard tenements had been shortlived. That renaissance (which Cornelia tried to believe was of her own making) had really begun with Janet's advent. While it lasted, the Outlaws and their cohorts had paraded back, with all flags flying, and had restored the flat to the pinnacle of importance which it had occupied when Cornelia, in the full flush of the Percival Houghton notoriety, had first settled down in Kips Bay. For a brief space Cornelia, glittering like the morning star, had been "the first lady of the model tenements," and had tasted again what she called life, splendor, joy.

But Janet had gone, and Claude had gone with her. As a direct consequence of Janet's flight, Robert had more and more often invented excuses for absenting himself from the Lorillard flats. Charlotte Beecher's visits ceased as soon as Robert's did, and Denman Page's as soon as Charlotte Beecher's. In its turn, the loss of Claude deflected a whole galaxy of feminine stars, including Lydia Dyson at the top of the scale and Mazie Ross at the bottom. And so on, ad infinitum.

Thus, almost in a week, the brilliance of Number Fifteen had been extinguished. Forever, or so Cornelia feared. True, her queenly state had ended in a burst of radiance, as a sky-rocket ends in a dazzling shower of gold. But this was cold comfort at best. Cornelia knew that, without some novel attraction, there was no hope whatever of recapturing the fickle homage of the model tenementers. And no such attraction was in sight. For once, no other adventurous young lady was ready or eager to step into Janet's shoes as Janet had stepped into those of Mazie Ross. Cornelia's stock had fallen to its nadir.

She felt deserted. In a mood of bitter, unreasoning resentment, she gave Janet full credit for dimming the splendor of Number Fifteen, the splendor she had never given her any credit for enkindling.

She was very angry with Janet on another score. This adventurous young lady, after a gorgeously romantic time abroad with Claude Fontaine, had apparently come a cropper, as her tirade against free love sufficiently betrayed. Reading between the lines, Cornelia fancied that she detected a veiled reproach. It was as if she were being held responsible for pointing out the step that had landed the writer in disaster. Cornelia repudiated this responsibility and was intensely irritated by the reproach.

What, hadn't she and Janet threshed out the whole question of sex in the most open and aboveboard fashion? And hadn't she drawn a sharp line between free love as she sincerely advocated it for the sake of a woman's rights, and free love as it was practiced among the Outlaws and in Greenwich Village for the sake of a woman's pleasure or gain? She had told Janet (and told it with some feeling) that many young women nowadays regarded free love as simply a very convenient antidote against man's growing disinclination for matrimony. It was a new bait for the old trap, and a very successful bait, too, as numberless marriages growing out of free unions attested. In Greenwich Village marriageable girls used this bait by instinct; in Kips Bay they used it with cool professional dexterity, as a surgeon uses a knife.

For Janet to insinuate that she had been taken in, was a trifle strong. If she had been duped at all, she was self-duped. And was this likely? The curve of contempt in Cornelia's lips indicated her belief to the contrary. There was such a thing as carrying a pose of artless inexperience too far. And what did Janet mean by all this talk of casting Claude off? Casting Claude off, indeed! What was she really up to?

Harry Kelly, having finished the letter, now handed it back.

"Janet's getting a bit flighty," he remarked with true male cynicism. "Seems to me Claude has got somebody else on a string."

Cornelia gave a scornful laugh.

"Don't be an idiot, Hercules," she said. "More likely, Janet has got somebody else on a string."

Kelly held his peace. Like King Lear's daughter, he adored and was silent: his love was mightier than his tongue.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

I

By the time Cornelia's answer reached Paris, Claude had taken Janet to Brussels. The immediate cause of this move was a stringency in Claude's funds. A brief and somewhat acrid correspondence between father and son had followed hard on the latter's international adventure. After much shilly-shallying on Claude's part, Mr. Fontaine had laid down the terms on which alone he proposed to continue polite relations.

Mr. Fontaine proceeded on the theory that in some cases the most effective sort of moral force is material force. He did not demand that Claude abandon Janet, although this was the goal of his desire. He simply made it emphatic that until his son did leave Janet, the old days of independence coupled with generous financial supplies were over.

Meanwhile, he made a point of thwarting Claude at every turn. Claude longed for leisure and also for a fairly free hand with the Fontaine Company's bankers in Europe; Mr. Fontaine offered him definite work at a far from princely salary. Claude wanted to travel (as heretofore) in the role of a commanding member of the firm; Mr. Fontaine allowed him no choice but a paltry assistancy to one of Fontaine's European agents. Claude vastly preferred the conspicuous agency in Paris, if an agency he had to be reduced to; Mr. Fontaine detailed him peremptorily to the humble agency in Brussels. And so on.

Clearly, Mr. Fontaine believed that a series of pin pricks, tirelessly administered here and there, would serve his purpose much better than a dagger inserted under the fifth rib.

Claude, having some means of his own, planned a summary rejection of his father's terms. But his available funds were pitifully inadequate to his tastes and habits. It was in vain that Janet threw herself sturdily into the task of retrenchment. She lacked experience; and as for Claude, he was born to the purple and had inherited the aristocratic idea that economy consists in making lesser people do the saving. He could not refrain from living on a handsome scale or from entertaining his Parisian friends at costly parties. The day of atonement drew swiftly nearer.

And came in due course. All his pecuniary sins were visited upon him at one and the same inopportune moment (when ordering a dinner at the Ritz in honor of the Prince de Cluny). At that moment he experienced the novel sensation of finding himself suddenly without a single penny of credit. Had the ground been abruptly withdrawn from his feet, the shock could not have been greater.

There was nothing for it but an immediate acceptance of the terms on which his father had proposed a truce. The Brussels agency was in charge of a hard-headed Walloon between whom and Claude little love was lost. The pin pricks were warranted to do their work to a nicety.

Thus it was that in no very amiable frame of mind Claude set foot in the Belgian capital and reported to the Fontaine agent there. Janet shared his contracted fortunes, accompanying him from Paris in spite of a series of quarrels which had chequered the weeks preceding their departure.

She accused herself of weakness for remaining with Claude. But she felt she could hardly leave him when he was so completely down on his luck. True, their quarrels furnished her with a pretext, but not with a worthy one. They were all in the nature of petty bickerings, trumpery matters seemingly unrelated to the real issue.

But she began to suspect that the real issue between herself and Claude would never be brought into the open.

II

Their hotel was in the aristocratic Quartier Leopold. Scarcely a year had elapsed since the armistice was proclaimed, yet the Boulevard Anspach and other central highways were again the glittering rendezvous of international idlers indefatigably bent on expunging the last unpleasant memories of Armageddon. This expunging process appeared to involve the consumption of much bad food and the production of much loud noise.

Early in the morning of his seventh day in Brussels, Claude was awakened by the penetrating backfire of a motor car in the street. Having already been aroused by disturbances twice, he sprang from one of the twin beds in the room and closed each window with a furious bang. Janet, in the other bed, changed from her right side to her left, but was too deep in sleep to wake up.

"Damnation!" he called out, first towards the street and then, as this bore no fruit, in the direction of the occupied bed.

Getting no response he stalked to the sleeper's side.

"How can a man get any rest," he shouted angrily, "with pandemonium in the streets and every window in the place wide open?"

The world in general showed no interest in this conundrum propounded by a very good-looking young man in pajamas. And Janet, after stirring uneasily for a moment, returned to a motionless slumber. The street noises had kept her, as well as Claude, awake until the small hours of the morning. Once asleep, however, she slept soundly and could defy Bedlam.

Seeing no prospect of petting or sympathy from this quarter, Claude nursed his anger to leviathan size. He paced the room like a madman, distributing a liberal supply of imprecations on everything and everybody as fast as the images raced into his thoughts. This proceeding relieved him of a part of his fury. The rest he sublimated in the act of tidying up the room.

He went at this task with breakneck speed. His method was to set chairs and tables in and out of place with vicious thumps; then to pile books, newspapers, brushes, combs, wearing apparel and the like into roughly classified heaps. He took special pains to pick up Janet's scattered articles of underwear and to fling each one on top of the last with the force of an invective.

Under this steady percussion and repercussion, Janet finally woke up.

"What's the matter?" she murmured drowsily, pushing the rebellious dark curls from her face.

Claude bombarded her with reproaches.

"The matter! The matter is that you have the nerves of a rhinoceros. I can't sleep with the windows open, while you could sleep with them shut. But it means nothing to you that I haven't slept a wink for seven nights running, just because you insist upon keeping the windows open."

(Janet's hands gestured: "Oh dear, another tempest in a teapot!") She sat up in bed and, with her feet tucked under her and her hands folded over her knees, braced herself for the storm.

"I thought we agreed to compromise by changing off," she said mildly. "The windows have only been kept open every other night."

"Compromise! Compromise!" He sprang from his chair with a violent laugh. "How can oil and water compromise?"

"I'm sure I don't know. I'm not a chemist. They don't mix, but they may get along very amicably together side by side, for all I can tell. What difference does it make, anyway? The real trouble is that you've been made nervous and irritable by your father's letters. If you'd only let us talk the whole matter over sensibly and in good humor—"

"My father's letters have nothing to do with the case," he cut in savagely. "The trouble is with your idiotic superstition that the sooty, dusty air from the street is more important than peace and quiet."

"What is the use of saying the same thing over and over," said Janet, with a touch of asperity in her clear, soft tones. "You are in a perfectly childish temper, Claude. If I were your wife I'd have to put up with it. As I don't have to, I won't."

"My wife! If you were my wife, you wouldn't dare to be so selfish, or to ignore my rights so shamelessly."

"Luckily, I'm not your wife."

"No, thank Heaven. It's also lucky that you're so well satisfied with your limitations and your sorry future. Like all the Barrs of Brooklyn, you may well glory in your irresponsibility. It's all you have."

"Oh, I have my freedom. I glory in that, too. If I were married to you, I dare say I should have to cringe and even ask your forgiveness. As it is, before this day is over, you will probably ask mine."

"Don't flatter yourself! I'm going for good. That'll spike your prophecy."

He began to dress posthaste in order to put time and space between his threat and its retraction.

Janet watched him through the long dark lashes of her half-closed gray eyes. He was spoilt, tyrannical, contemptible. Yet his energetic masculine beauty and the seductive ring of his voice still had power over her.

"Don't imagine I can't see through your game," he flung out, recklessly scattering the heaps he had so painfully assembled, in a frenzied search for a necktie. "Your fine pretense of not wanting to marry me is a clever way of getting me to do it. Exceedingly, overwhelmingly clever! But it hasn't fooled me. Not a bit! There are some things I don't swallow."

"Thank goodness. Perhaps you won't swallow me then, though you seem on the point of doing so."

She lay down again. Her averted face permitted only her dark curly head to show.

"I might have married you," he shouted, brandishing the recovered necktie at the bed. "I might, if you hadn't shown yourself in your true colors. Thank God, I found you out in time."

"Yet you don't seem a bit pleased."

"You little serpent! Is there no escaping your sting?"

"A minute ago I was a rhinoceros, now I am a serpent. A pretty swift evolution, isn't it? Of course, the 'Descent of Woman' would beat the 'Descent of Man' all hollow."

And she turned her back upon him contemptuously. Stung by her disdain, he moderated his temper somewhat and said:

"It is the trick of women to put men subtly in the wrong. You fight, but you never fight in the open. You send us into a devil of a temper, and slyly perpetuate the quarrel until you can make capital out of our degraded condition. Patient Griseldas, martyred angels, persecuted saints! If only you'd drop the pose of injured innocence!"

This impassioned speech was really a bid for a truce. But Janet, her heart hardened, lay quite still, the back of her head expressing defiance.

The silence maddened him more than a flood of reproaches, and he continued dressing fortissimo. Finally, he reached for his hat, sending her, at the same time, a parting shot.

"Keep it up," he said, "and you'll be a past mistress in the art of demoralizing a man."

He went out with a spectacular exhibition of bad manners.

Poor Claude! He did not feel entirely guiltless. But he was absolutely certain that the fault lay vastly more on her side than on his. In the breviary of love, he had pledged his soul to an eternity of devotion, but not his temper to a five minutes' trial.

III

The door had scarcely been closed before Janet turned out of bed and began to put on her stockings. She got no further than the first one before she heard returning footsteps. Quick as a flash she resumed her former position in bed, so that when the door opened, her face was buried in the pillows and the back of her head was one obstinate, unconciliatory curve.

Claude had come back on the pretext of getting his walking stick, really in the hope of finding Janet penitent or at least willing to placate him. When he saw that all the advances would have to come from his side, he turned sharply on his heels and marched out, in his anger forgetting his cane.

Janet now waited until she was sure that he had gone in good earnest. Then she finished dressing, reflecting the while that for the third time within a week she was left quite alone. It was the discord that troubled her, not the solitude. Solitude had no terrors for her, although it had a drawback of a practical sort.

Namely, in the matter of the language. She was almost totally ignorant of French, her opportunities in Paris for acquiring the vernacular having been extremely few. She knew that Claude expected his absence to make a virtual prisoner of her. In fact, with this punishment in view, he had stayed away until late at night on the two occasions of their recent quarreling. And she did not doubt that he meant to punish her in the same manner again.

She went downstairs to breakfast full of pity for herself and of indignation against Claude.

Breakfast changed her mood completely. It occurred to her that Claude might feel the discord between them as keenly as she did, though he might not be as conscious of the reasons. This led her to feel sorry for him and to wonder whether she might not have been more conciliatory.

Her nature was so essentially sound that she was inclined to look on Claude's outbursts of rage as symptoms of a mental disorder. She told herself that her equable temper gave her an immense advantage over him, an advantage she ought not to exploit too far.

It was Robert who had first made her conscious of the worth of her well-poised temperament, not to mention other good qualities which had seemed as inevitably her own as her two arms and two legs. Lately, since realizing what a surprisingly large number of people were ill-humored and bad tempered, she had begun to prize her even-mindedness for the rare gift it was.

Her self-esteem improving, her spirits followed suit. It was too fine a day to spend indoors. And, Claude or no Claude, she made up her mind to gratify a desire to wander through the fashionable shopping district.

She bethought herself of a pocket English-French dictionary, and a little "Colloquial French in Ten Lessons," which she had picked up at Brentano's in Paris. Thus equipped, she sallied out on an adventurous journey in the direction of the Hotel de Ville.

Her course from the Quartier Leopold to the Boulevard Anspach was intentionally zigzag. Walking leisurely and observing critically she was able to confirm or correct impressions of the capital gathered while riding with Claude in taxis or motor buses.

It struck her that Brussels was cleaner, wholesomer and more competently managed than either New York or Paris. Had the Bruxellois taken a leaf out of the book of Prussian efficiency or were they a more competently executive people?

Brussels was, of course, much smaller than Paris, less ostentatiously "grand" or "cosmopolitan." Janet did not agree with the orthodox tourist opinion that the Belgian capital was merely a pocket edition of the Gallic. Brussels was lively without being chaotic, and picturesque without being dirty. Paris, on the other hand, was in some respects a very American city. Its Rue Royales, Champs Elysees, Faubourg St. Germains and other show sections were perhaps more numerous and certainly more beautiful than the corresponding show sections in New York. But apart from these picked quarters, Paris and New York had the same tawdry glitter, the same rag-bag dishevelment, the same noisy, neurotic people, the same morbid chase after pleasure.

These results of modern civilization seemed by no means entirely missing from Brussels, but they existed in a smaller degree, even in proportion to the city's size. Life on the streets of Brussels still had an appearance of being orderly, sane. You could walk along the main thoroughfares without the sensation that you were steering your way through scurrying, erratic, homicidal pedestrians. In a crowd in New York or Paris you might well become a prey to the fear that Darwin was right, after all, and that the evolution of man was guided chiefly by the principle of chance, Nature being a sort of brute Junker force which imposed Kultur on the survivors.

With these reflections, Janet sailed along, and though remembrance of the quarrel with Claude gave her an occasional sinking feeling, this was but the ground swell after the storm.

IV

At the Grands Magasins de la Bourse, Janet experienced little difficulty in making several minor purchases. Not because she had memorized a score of colloquial questions and answers from her little book, "French Guaranteed in Ten Lessons." For the questions and answers which she had conned so trippingly from the text were amazingly inapplicable to her needs. In the realm of trade or barter the phrases she needed always called for a subtly different twist from the high-flown phrases in the text-book. The book model advised her to say: "Sir (or Madam), have the kindness to direct me to the street by which one may proceed to the Rue Royale." She actually wanted to say: "What's a good short-cut to the Rue Royale?" But as to this racier version the text-book was mute.

These difficulties proved no insuperable barrier to Janet. A glance, an eloquent gesture, and a copious use of the phrase comme ça, bridged the worst gaps in the course of communication. Comme ça alone, used at the end of the index finger, so to speak, worked wonders. Single-handed, it was mightier than a whole battalion of text-book phrases. Yet Janet flattered herself that she could, at a pinch, have dispensed even with this omnipotent demonstrative. To be sure, she was far swifter at divining other people's wishes than at getting her own wishes divined. Still, though she had a genius for the first process, she had at least a talent for the second.

"It would be strange," she thought, "if a New Yorker could not talk inarticulately in more languages than one."

The shop assistants met her attempts to communicate with them fully halfway. Their friendliness and courtesy in difficult situations astonished her. So did their efforts to comply with her precise wishes.

It was all very different from the American shop men and girls that she was accustomed to. A New York salesman, who slept in a hall room in the Bronx and lunched at Child's, on a ham sandwich and tea or on griddle cakes and skimmed milk, was professionally guiltless of every effort save one, and that was an effort to convey to each customer a sense of the latter's abysmal insignificance; also an intimation of his supreme good luck in being waited on by the most distinguished clerk in the metropolis.

Standing at a counter in New York, one might be excused for supposing that the salesman accepted the purchaser's custom only as a grudging favor to the purchaser. Standing at a similar spot in Brussels, one might hope that the favor would be allowed to be the other way.

Perhaps the Brussels salesmen did not really feel favored. In view of the final disposition of the profits, they probably merely pretended to feel so. If this was the case, their pretense carried conviction, by virtue of the artistry of their politeness. Were there not, then, as many fictions in the life of New York as in the life of Brussels? Yes, but they were neither convincing fictions nor polite ones.

Artistry and politeness, Janet concluded, though they might be minor virtues, were not the minor virtues of an industrial republic.

Her last errand in the Grand Magasins was to buy Claude several pair of socks. The redoubtable comme ça, in a choice variety of modulations, did yeoman service in facilitating the selection of the correct color, quality, size.

She was sure Claude did not deserve the pains she was taking over him, particularly in view of his conduct that morning. But Janet's indignation had failed to blot from her mind a picture of the night before at bedtime, when Claude had pathetically drawn attention to the spectacle of both his great toes protruding rudely from the tips of his socks. This picture of Claude walking about Brussels with protruding toes offended her sense of the fitness of things. And, as she did not believe that the fitness of things should be tempered with revenge, she made the necessary purchases without pluming herself on her magnanimity.

Parcels in hand, she came close to a section set apart by a low railing. A somewhat depressed looking woman in front of the railing was talking humbly to a magnificent young man behind it. From a sign which read Bureau d'Emploi, Janet guessed that this was the section in which applications for employment were received.

If only she knew the language well enough to apply for a position herself, what a lot of problems this would solve!

The magnificent young man, who was patently the absolute monarch of the section, looked disapprovingly at the somewhat slatternly applicant who was abasing herself before him. With an air as superb as his sartorial equipment, he concluded the interview. So Cophetua might have concluded an interview with an unavailable beggar maid.

The dismissed applicant was the picture of dejection as she walked past Janet, who pitied her from her soul.

Suddenly Cophetua saw Janet.

Was she a lady or was she a beggar maid? He reasoned that ladies rarely burden their arms with a load of parcels, nor were they in the habit of making lingering stops in front of a Bureau d'Emploi. On the other hand, the object of his speculation was young, supple, well dressed; her gray eyes glancing his way thrilled him as no salesgirl beggar-maid had ever thrilled him before.

Decidedly, if she was a beggar maid, she was a most uncommon one. Cophetua saw that she was still looking at him, not artfully, and yet not disinterestedly either. The problem was disconcerting and insoluble; the call of the blood was peremptory and imperious.

He resolved to chance it.

Unbending as much as so magnificent a young man could unbend, he called out to Janet in a most inviting tone.

Alas, she couldn't understand a single word. All she could catch was the note of interrogation.

"Je ne comprends pas français—I'm sorry, but I don't understand," she informed him in polyglot. She wondered whether he could possibly be offering her employment, although she doubted this, for his glances were far from businesslike.

Again Cophetua spoke, more slowly. Yet on the same suave, interrogative note. He eyed her with immense favor. She understood his looks; and, as it was clearly not a case for the use of her pet comme ça, she lost all desire to understand his words.

Flushing and not quite knowing what to make of it all, she prepared to walk away, discretion seeming to be the better part of valor.