Front matter (continued 8)

"Cornelia, you're a devil!" cried Janet, incandescent with anger. "I'd like to know the reason, the real reason for your anxiety to get me married to M. St. Hilaire. Not to do me a good turn, that's one sure thing."

Mazie advanced between them.

"Say, Janet," she called out, pacifico-satirically, "even the devil sometimes does a pal a good turn—just for a change."

Cornelia extinguished her with a gesture.

"Why did you ever run away with Claude," she said, turning to Janet again, "if you were so gone on Robert?"

"How was I to tell the difference between an infatuation that was bound to perish and a love that had scarcely been born?" replied Janet, once more her cool, keen self. "How was I to tell, until I had tried them out?"

"Tried them out! Words fail to describe your morals, Janet. But go on your own way rejoicing, my dear. Hang yourself around Robert's neck, if you like. You'll make a charming picture there, I'm sure. Of course, clinging vines have gone out of fashion. But clinging leeches are always with us."

Janet went out ignoring these insults and mutely denying Harry Kelly's passionate appeal to her not to mind what Cornelia was saying in a vertigo of rage.

"For God's sake, Cornelia," said Harry, making a frantic demonstration, "don't let her leave us like that."

"Hold your tongue, you imbecile!" called out his wife, turning on him fiercely. "When I want to play the fool. I'll ask for your advice."

Her exit, a tempestuous one, left Mazie and Kelly alone and forlorn. Poor Harry Kelly collapsed in his swivel chair, while Mazie hovered around the desk like a gadfly.

"Unless you give her what for," she warned him, "you'll never travel on asphalt."

He looked up and feebly waved her away.

"What can I do?" he said plaintively. "Just jawing back won't help matters."

"No," said Mazie scornfully. "Jawing back won't. But how about knocking her down and jumping on her with both feet? Gee, if I had your strength for five minutes! I tell you what, my frazzled Gorilla, if you don't mop up the floor with her this very minute, she'll make a doormat of you for the rest of your life."

Her tone was slighting, and there was bark in the dose she administered. For a second, he straightened up. Then he shook his head at her, slumped again, and buckled down to the papers on the desk. Poor Harry! His muscle was willing, but his nerve was weak.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

I

The blow which Robert got between the eyes when he saw Janet and St. Hilaire together had left him shunned. And he was on the train speeding to Fontainebleau before he began coming to, a painful process of returning sensibility, beside which the pins and needles of a limb that had been asleep would have seemed the merest child's play.

The wild nomadic images that chased one another across the field of his consciousness! They racked his brain, his world-reforming brain, and limited his feverish introspection to one discovery, the startling discovery of how very much he was in love.

Rather an awkward plight, he told himself, for a young man who had purposed the moral regeneration of mankind and in pursuit of this purpose had sworn to spurn fate, scorn death, and set his hopes above happiness and love. Especially love! Didn't all the Dick Dudgeons and Devil's Disciples begin by renouncing love? Indeed, didn't they make this renunciation a cardinal point of honor?

To think that even Cornelia had cautioned him against making an utter ass of himself about Janet! Cautioned him in vain. And Janet, too, had tried her hardest to warn him off by jibing at his poverty. This cruel kindness had almost worked; almost, but not quite. The poet, the lunatic, the lover—they were the embodiments of diseases (Shakespeare had said it!), diseases that resisted the most desperate remedies.

Of course she preferred St. Hilaire to himself. Why not? According to his own theories, he should be the first to dub her an imbecile if she didn't. When she needed sex to gratify desire, she had taken Claude by preference. Now that she needed a position, she would take St. Hilaire. And rightly so.

He had nothing to offer her but his brains.

Brains and no money! And that in the twentieth century, the triumphant mechanical century, in which any fool with a little low cunning and a good thick skin could make money by the bushel.

What on earth had possessed Mark Pryor to start him on this trail? Confound it! It had all grown out of a chance encounter with Pryor in Charlotte Beecher's studio one fatal afternoon. The fellow had taken him aside and poured out a harrowing story of Janet's miseries coupled with a picture of her dependence on Cornelia! But for that rencontre, he wouldn't have gone on this wild-goose chase from Geneva to Paris to rescue Janet from a gilded cage.

A gilded cage! No, by heaven! He might be living in a gilded cage himself (the gilt being drawn from Charlotte Beecher's gilt-edged securities), instead of in one-third of a model tenement flat in Kips Bay. To think that Pryor, the transcendently practical Pryor, should have been the instigator of this fatuous proceeding! Hang the fellow for his unwarranted meddling and plausible tongue!

He reached Fontainebleau in a drizzling rain and voted it a sleek and stupid place. In the chilly Hotel de Londres he had ample leisure to reflect on his folly. Sightseeing! His business in the world was to create new sights not to see old ones. A fat lot he cared for chateaux in which the greasy Bourbons had entertained their mistresses and in which streams of tourists would be sure to blink in awe at vulgarly showy decorations or childishly ornamented bric-a-brac, not to mention the celebrated, idiotic insipidities painted by Boucher and David.

Merely to read about these "sights" in the guidebook made him sick. Why hadn't he followed his own nose instead of letting Cornelia map, or rather, Baedeker, his course for him?

"What dire offence from trivial causes springs," he silently quoted. His present plight was the result of putting Cornelia into a bad temper at the breakfast table that morning. Afterwards, he had gone to pacify her, a feat he had so often accomplished before. So often, in fact, that it seemed to him rather a joke to watch Cornelia's stony heart melt into abject sentimentality. A double-edged joke, now he came to think it over, in his present plight.

Well, on this occasion she had not been as wax in his hands. Nor had she been sentimental. True, she had apparently let herself be mollified as of old. But he was so absorbed in Janet that he failed to be struck by her unusual manner. In retrospect it stood out. Cornelia had become playful: it was the playfulness of the panther.

She had begged him to go to Fontainebleau, pointing out that everybody went at least once in a lifetime, and that he could oblige her by doing his duty to himself and performing a service for her at one and the same time. The service (it would save Harry a journey!) was to give a commission for a special Paulette design to an artist who had an open-air studio in the famous Fontainebleau forest.

On his way from Paulette's to the Gare de Lyon he had wondered whether Janet wouldn't be mightily piqued by his unannounced absence of two days. Two days cut clean out of a visit that was not scheduled to be a long one! Well, if she was piqued, so much the better.

Yes, but mightn't she suppose him deeply wounded by her wantonly taunting shot at his impecunious, ineligible pretentions? Possibly. But, as a matter of fact, he had been deeply wounded. A taunt from her lips, at such a moment, and in such a style! It was horribly unlike the Janet he had known in Kips Bay. Had she really become calculating to her finger tips in accordance with the law of the evolution of the Lorillardian female? Did her rapturous return of his kisses mean nothing to her?

Oh, well, after a tremendous love affair like hers with Claude, a young lady was probably as much thrilled by a kiss of rapture now and then, as by an extra slice of toast at breakfast.

So he had reasoned as he was about to jump on a bus running to the Lyon station. He had stopped and retraced his steps to the Maison Paulette, telling himself that as a sane and sensible citizen of the world it would be much better to bid her a brief good-bye.

Here in Fontainebleau his memory retraced these steps for the fiftieth time. Cornelia had been in the exhibition room, thank heaven. So he had hurried upstairs to the gymnasium, stopping to glance in at the private office on his way. That was how he had come to swing open the door and burst incontinently upon Janet and St. Hilaire.

Certainly, there was nothing like a smasher in the face for making you feel things you had been innocent of feeling before.

"Let the pain do the work!" said Robert, quoting to himself the oldest and most respected maxim known to the medical profession. Then he went to bed.

A sleepless night followed.

II

The weather next morning was brisk and clear. Under its inspiration Robert began to recover from the depression of the night before and, for a time at least, to drive away the misgivings that had tormented him. He yielded to the beauty of the forest of Fontainebleau, a fact which made the discharge of his mission for Cornelia much less tedious than he had dreaded.

During his return through wooded walks to the town, he so far regained his self-confidence that he was able to laugh at yesterday's morbid speculations and nightmarish fancies. What a bother he had made about a crisis that ought to have been foreseen, and a sequel that ought to have been taken for granted!

And, as a pure point of information, could he be absolutely sure that Janet really did mean to marry St. Hilaire?

This startling query, coming like a whisper from the void, crystallized a decision towards which he had unconsciously been groping. He would return posthaste to Paris and level the invisible wall that had sprung up between Janet and himself. "An invisible wall!" To suppose that a figment like that could separate two people endowed with good will, quick wit, and flexible tongues, was to insult his intelligence.

Parks, palaces, gardens, and all the other sights of Fontainebleau could go hang!

He tingled with shame as he reflected that now, more than at any other moment since the dissolution of the firm of Barr and Lloyd, Janet might need the friendly counsel or the sympathetic ear that he had pressed upon her with unlimited enthusiasm in their Kips Bay workshop. Yet this was the moment he had chosen in which to act like the screen hero who advances his money or his time to the heroine in amounts arithmetically proportioned to the exact quantity of amorous response from the lady's side. True, this sordid barter was the popular American conception of the course of true love. But did he propose to fall in with this conception? Was he ready to prostitute his gifts to the worship of the great Atlantic bitch-goddess, Success?

If only he had been in a position to make Janet a tolerably acceptable offer of marriage!

Still, no need to blink the fact that he was now better circumstanced than at any time since leaving the Evening Chronicle. Hadn't the Confederated Press given him this assignment at Geneva, the most responsible assignment in its province? He flattered himself that he had reported the proceedings of the Labor Congress with a color, vividness, trenchancy, and fire none too common in American journalism. It ought to make people at home sit up and take notice; it might lead to a much more profitable commission. Look where Hutchins Burley's articles on the Colorado mine strike had carried him, chock-full of rhetorical clap-trap and maudlin pathos though the beggar's work had been!

A pity that the Confederated Press served chiefly radical newspapers with a limited circulation! It kept your tenure on quicksand. He might have to yield to temptation and falsify his better self by sinking into one of the fat jobs that the plutocratic press would now be sure to offer him.

For the sake of marrying Janet? No, no, it wouldn't do at all. Not even if she were insane enough to be willing to take the plunge. He pictured himself and her together in the marital state, saw the cramped Harlem flat in which they'd be boxed up. Both working of course! No conveniences, no facilities for either sociability or solitude, no children (on less than ten thousand a year birth control would be imperative), no health. And the economies they'd have to practice! They'd have to deny themselves freedom of movement, shun social and professional contacts, and take refuge in an isolation paralyzing to their talents.

Until death did them part—

Thousands of childless couples in every big city existed thus. And the lives they led were hell.

In spite of which solemn conclusion Robert had no sooner reached his hotel than he prepared to desert the spacious freedom of Fontainebleau. And he actually took the first afternoon train back to Paris with the express purpose of seeking Janet out for a heart-to-heart talk.

The perfection of French "system," so extensively advertised on paper, is also realized on paper, and there only. This truth was once more brought home to Robert when, grimy with soot, he reached the capital long after his train was due. He decided to skip the supper at Paulette's, partly from a desire to avoid Cornelia, partly from a hope that he might find Janet alone after Harry Kelly and his wife had left, as they often did, for an evening's entertainment.

A bus to the American Express Company enabled him to get his mail just before the office closed. He kept the dozen-odd letters in his pocket, intending to read them whilst taking a snack in a quaint, spotless little dairy restaurant (the a toute heure shop, as he and Janet called it, in allusion to its boast of never closing) in the Boulevard Montmartre.

The waitress having taken his order, he rapidly sorted out his letters, seven or eight of which had official or commercial headings that at once betrayed the enclosures as mere announcements or bills. These he stuffed back unread into his pocket. Of the remaining few, the first one proved to be from the London agent of the Confederated Press. This was the man under whose orders he worked while in Europe. A grudging, carping cuss! Robert hoped that the fellow had at last seen the light (of Robert's merit), and that handsome amends were forthcoming.

The message ordered him home to New York at once!

So much for the recognition and advancement which his gorgeous accounts of the Labor Congress were to bring him. Had the ironical shafts, tipped with caustic wit and aimed at the rancor and obstructiveness of some of the labor leaders, given mortal offence to his own side?

With a horrible sense of the insecurity of life, and with a nameless dread more invasive and powerful than any he had ever known before, he reached the Maison Paulette about an hour later. He met one of the principal manikins at the door.

"Mademoiselle Janet? Hadn't he heard the tragic news? C'est si triste. The whole Maison was in mourning. Mademoiselle had departed that very noon with Mrs. R. H. L. Jerome, the great rich lady without a heart. Ah, comme c'est triste!"

III

The "Touraine" had been two days out from Havre in weather decidedly rough, before Robert got his sea-legs back again. Others on board were doubtless still deploring the pit of instability that lurks beneath the surface of things. But as a rule their reflections had an origin that was strictly physical. Robert, on his first brisk walk around the second-class deck, reasoned from premises of a very different nature.

For he had reached a point where he felt constrained to take a sort of inventory of himself, a mental stock-listing of his reverses, his prospects, and his altered outlook on affairs.

Not that his theories had changed in substance.

From first to last, his mind had been filled with a fierce impatience of the stupidity of man today and an unquenchable faith in a sanity to come. Evil; as he conceived it, was a by-product of human growth, and not, as Shelley conceived it, something imposed on man by a malignant external power on the fall of which the race would at once become perfect. In short, he believed that the incessant conflict of life was largely a struggle between high and low desires, with money and numbers on the side of Satan, and high-spirited intelligence on the side of the angels.

In America, to be sure, where achievements not open to a flat cash interpretation are passed by with a shrug or a vulgar joke, Robert's view of life had excited as much interest as a whisper in the wind. The few who gave his philosophy a brief attention had hastily dismissed it as a matter for milksops or imbeciles; on the fool who preached this philosophy they had bestowed a cynical pity, and on the failure who practised it, an amused contempt.

The failure who practised it! Robert knew that, judged by every standard save his own, he was a failure, a complete, incurable failure. He did not try to dodge this unanimous judgment. He despised it as much as he exulted in his own faith. To be exact, as much as he had exulted in his own faith.

For the blow that had knocked him galley-west in the office of the Maison Paulette had seriously shaken his self-confidence.

A review of his recent conduct led him straight to a very unpalatable verdict. He had behaved as stupidly towards Janet as any average man of stone-age instincts. Because she had made one risky experiment in the field of sex and had almost been tempted to make an even riskier experiment in the field of subsistence, he had displayed in turn his pique, jealousy, anger and scorn. The childish resentment that had mastered him! And this when he owed Janet unbounded gratitude for her wisdom in frightening him off from a suicidal offer of marriage. In his varied exhibition of neolithic folly, where was the high-spirited intelligence he boasted of possessing?

Look how Janet had stuck to her guns! As he might have foreseen (if he hadn't been a perfect donkey!), she was going to make a glorious fight of it, on her own. She had given to Caesar the things that were Caesar's; and for the rest, she had kept her integrity intact.

Incidentally, there was a grain of comfort in the fact that she hadn't accepted M. St. Hilaire after all. A grain! Say rather, several tons.

Suspending this train of thought, Robert turned to his other great problem, his work in the labor movement. He asked himself whether he, like Janet, had kept his integrity intact. Two weeks ago he would have shouted out a triumphant yes. But now the thin edge of doubt had entered his soul. This incorruptible, critical gift—the gift above all others that he prized—was he justified in pushing its exercise to the furthest limit? He had always rejoiced in the uncompromising candor with which he had exposed and flayed the special weaknesses of the radical leaders, the general deficiencies of his own side. But when candor compelled you to smite people in the fifth rib in order to save their souls, weren't you carrying virtue a little too far?

Well, his employers on the Confederated Press thought so. And that they were not alone in their opinion was evident from his several failures. He counted them up: the Evening Chronicle, the Guild movement, the attempt to unionize the mercantile workers, the Labor Party publicity, and now this latest debacle. Not to mention his friendships!

He retained the hearty confidence of nobody.

Ought a successful honest man, then, to show as much discretion in the practice of candor as a successful knave shows in the practice of deceit? It would seem so. Plainly, he who would change the moral standards of his kind could not afford to be one thing to all men. Not a specialist or an extremist, in short.

How to be an aggressive revolutionist and at the same time a progressive evolutionist—this was the paradox that every effective radical had to embody in his own life.

It was clear that he would have to begin again at the bottom of the ladder.

This being so, the first thing to do was to ascertain his liabilities, material no less than spiritual.

Here Robert was reminded abruptly of the half dozen letters—bills, circulars, and the like, as he surmised—which he had rammed into his coat pocket at the a toute heure restaurant. The coat in question was in his stateroom and he would look for the letters when he went below.

Half an hour later he found them. One of the first envelopes bore the heading: Simons and Hunt, Attorneys-at-Law, 150 Broadway. It had two enclosures. The first one he opened read:

..vspace:: 2

My Dear Nephew:

About a year ago you wrote to me suggesting that I do something handsome by you. In your own delicate words you asked me to subsidize your imagination, a quality you believed of sufficient value to your fellow men to be worth preserving. As a proof that you possessed this quality, you provided me with an outline of your career in all its ups and downs, chiefly downs. You were also good enough to favor me with copies of your several articles on social and industrial reform.

As I am in receipt of some ten thousand requests for money every year, it is obviously impossible for me to comply with them all. And I am bound to say that I saw no reason for complying with your request, the more so in that its tone of mockery and sly derision led me to doubt whether it was made in entire good faith. The claim of kinship which you advanced (somewhat belatedly I thought) had little weight with me. You know what family ties are amongst the Lloyds! I was but a youngster of fourteen when my father and my elder brother (your father) ripped up my gilded dreams of a future as an artist and hashed my romantic plans by a single practical act. They pitched me out of the house into the street. There I remained to live on my own wits, and this fate I have had little occasion to complain of.

But to return to your letter. It did not win me to your way of thinking. Nor, to be candid, did your articles on "the collapse of modern society." I will admit that your attacks on land speculators (like myself) were witty, if not wise. And when you sailed into the monopoly on land values, you wrote with astonishing authority; indeed the only flaw I could find in your otherwise perfect qualifications for solving the economic problem of land was the trifling fact that you had never owned a foot of it.

This might have passed. Not so your observations on the distribution of the country's wealth and other related iniquities. Here you repeated the usual flub-dub with the usual fine flourish of the man who imagines he has made a startling discovery. Thus, you solemnly pointed out that there are only two kinds of people on earth: those who prey and those who are preyed upon. You announced that you had never seen the profiteer forsaken, nor the preying man begging his bread. And you informed the world that the [Transcriber's note: some text appears to be missing from the source book] intensified every year, the sheep being now more securely muzzled and more efficiently fleeced than ever before.

Now, my dear nephew, there is nothing new in your "discovery." Since the days of Plato all prudent men have been of one opinion respecting the class war, but no prudent man has ever admitted it. Conscious of this, I was unmoved by your ringing call to the sheep that they had nothing to lose but their muzzles; and your desire to see them organize for the purpose of destroying the wolves by mass action, left me cold. A world of sheep—and nothing but sheep—would not be to my taste. For the wolves, whatever else we may say of them, at least vary the drab monotony here below. Besides, I suspect that your indignation in the matter of the muzzles is largely shandygaff. It is not necessary to muzzle sheep!

In fine, your credentials did not greatly impress me. Your writings, it is true, were clever, witty, imaginative.

But what is imagination without matter or money to work upon? Like a spark without tinder on a wet day in the woods. At all events, I could scarcely overlook the fact that, whereas I had made a fortune by my real estate speculation, you were unable to make so much as a bare living by your real estate denunciation.

Have patience a little longer with the garrulity of a dying man. A few weeks ago, I was taken ill with a fatal dilatation of the aorta, and the end may come in a day, a month, a year. What to do with my investments became an immediately pressing problem. The charities I had named in my last will were administered, as I well knew, by a host of charity-mongers even more distasteful to me than kith and kin.

In this painful dilemma I read your letter again, thinking that my reaction to it, a year ago, had been hasty or unfair. Perhaps the wish was father to the thought; perhaps my infirmity has softened my brain. Whatever the cause, one passage in your letter struck me. My eyes were opened and I saw, or believed I saw, that you were a chosen vessel to bear my name and fortune before the American people. Accordingly I revoked all charitable bequests and appointed you as my principal heir and assign.

The passage that took my fancy was the one in which you declared that it is nobler to spend a fortune than to make one. Unhappily, I have never been able to practice this sentiment in full. Not that I have failed to try. I have spent millions in my time. Indeed I feel justified in saying that I have been a constant and deliberate spendthrift in the most literal sense of the word. But, like you, I have an imagination (although, unlike you, I have always prudently given my imagination the wherewithal to work upon). Thus, in the teeth of a free and incessant expenditure, my mind has always produced far more than my body could possibly consume or my hands give away. And so I come at last to the most tragic moment in a rich man's life: that in which he arranges for others to spend what he himself has earned.

But spent it must be. And when I consider your Lloyd heredity, your childlike ignorance of the ease with which money is made, and your crushing innocence of the difficulty with which it is spent, I feel I can hardly put my future in better hands than yours. God bless you, my dear nephew, and may your efforts at noble disbursement be attended by success.

Your affectionate uncle,

Allan D. Lloyd.

Robert's feelings beggared expression.

Half dazed, he took out the second enclosure, a brief communication from Messrs. Simons and Hunt, his uncle's attorneys. This notified him of Mr. Lloyd's death, and confirmed the fact of his designation as the residuary legatee. After putting an estimate of two million dollars on the minimum value of the estate, Messrs. Simons and Hunt placed their services at the disposal of the heir and announced their readiness to receive his instructions.

Followed a blank in Robert's consciousness. Slowly, very slowly, this was replaced by the sound of the steamer throbbing its way across the Atlantic.

IV

The day after landing, Robert paid Messrs. Simons and Hunt a visit, with the result that, on leaving their offices in lower Broadway, he was a little less haunted by the suspicion that the reality was a dream. A most reassuring item was tucked away in his pocket in the shape of an advance of cold cash amounting to two thousand dollars, a sum far larger than any he had ever been in possession of before.

On the theory that excess of joy, like excess of sorrow, had better be skimmed off by a long, brisk walk, Robert trusted to his two legs to get him back to Kips Bay. He had planned no change in his habits as yet; hence he still shared part of a model flat with the sporting editor of one of the evening newspapers.

He had just turned from the open court of the Lorillard tenement block into the rather dark entrance, when what appeared to be a shadow on the wall assumed solidity and life, stepped alertly forward, and tapped him on the shoulder.

"The one man in New York I particularly want to see," cried Mark Pryor, in his cool, staccato tones.

"The one man in New York I particularly want to avoid," retorted Robert, not ill-naturedly, but with a lively remembrance of Pryor as the engineer of his Parisian misadventures. "How in thunder did you know I was back?"

"I didn't. Luck simply drifted my way."

His cordial handshake accelerated Robert's returning sense of the reality of earthly affairs. Pryor might be slim and wiry enough to slip in or out of the most impossible places. He might be as elusive as a ghost. But there was nothing weak or spirituelle about his grasp of one's hand or his grip on life. As for his voice, which had a ring of decency and good intent always attractive to Robert, it dispelled fanciful grudges and installed common sense.

They went to lunch together in a favorite restaurant of Pryor's, a little Austrian place in one of the side streets east of the Pershing Square district.

"A fine scrape you got me into with your tip about Paris!" began Robert, as soon as they were served.

"I've never seen you in better spirits," returned Pryor, cool as a cucumber. "Are you engaged to marry Janet?"

Robert stared at him.

"No," he said emphatically.

"Then you're not the man I took you for."

"I'm not," said Robert, chuckling.

So Pryor knew nothing of the inheritance! And if Pryor knew nothing, who would know? He had rather supposed that the news would create something of a stir. The Lorillard tenements and Kips Bay generally should, in all conscience, have been agog with it. But so far not a word had been said by anybody he had met.

Clearly, it took a good deal to ripple the pachydermatous surface of this monster city of New York!

Well, he would volunteer nothing. It was just as well to keep one or two cards up your sleeve, especially when you matched your wits against a clever man like Pryor.

Meanwhile Pryor did the talking. Did Robert mean to sit there and tell him that he had missed the opportunity of a lifetime? He'd be blessed if he ever threw him a chance like that again.

"A chance!" interrupted Robert. "Are you sure it wasn't a noose?"

"Don't talk through your hat, Lloyd," said Pryor, affecting indignation. "Janet's a girl in a million. Whoever marries her is a made man."

"You are a cool hand," said Robert, lost in admiration. "I don't know what in thunder your game is. Let me say this, though. As a man of mystery you may be as superb a demon as Mark Twain's Mysterious Stranger. But as a matchmaker you're a hopeless old blunderbuss."

He briefly outlined his recent experiences in Paris, including the tableau of himself in the act of stumbling upon Janet and M. St. Hilaire; he also sketched the sequel to this climax.

Pryor's restless eyes remained singularly still during this recital. At its close, he offered one enigmatic remark:

"If Janet's coming to New York, we may yet be able to pull the chestnuts out of the fire."

In response to further questions, Robert gave a few intimate word pictures of unpublishable incidents at the Geneva Labor Congress. He also touched rather pepperily on his recall by the Confederated Press.

"Serve you right," said Pryor. "To a plain man like me reformers who try to change moral standards, whether for better or for worse, are a nuisance. Too many obstacles cannot be put in their path."

"All I did was to tell the truth about my own side," said Robert indignantly.

"What! Peach on your own side? Why, even the yeggmen consider that bad form."

Robert smiled in spite of himself.

"Nonsense," he said. "Facts are facts. The truth is, Americans habitually act like feeble-minded weaklings in the way they receive criticism. And we radicals share the national infirmity. Let the least suggestion of disapproval be levelled at Columbia, the gem of the ocean, and all America foams at the mouth. This is a joke to foreigners; it's a tragedy to us. I tell you, Pryor, unless Americans learn to stand up to criticism like men and to tolerate dissent as the English, the Germans, and even the French do, they'll stand where they are—at the tail end of the procession of nations. Don't you agree with me?"

"Lord, yes! Have it your own way. Pull your fellow radicals to pieces if necessary. Treat 'em rough. But don't slaughter 'em. Remember they're the only leaven in the slimy dough."

"For an avowed conservative, Pryor, that's going pretty far."

"Oh, I'll go farther than that. I'll say that if the Confederated Press were to come to grief—which Heaven forbid!—I should have no means of getting at the real news of the world. None whatever. Unless I could sneak into some private whispering gallery in Washington, D.C., or in Wall Street, N.Y."

"You perverse standpatter, what do you mean by sticking up for my side? It looks fishy to me. What's your little game now, I wonder?"

"Lloyd, the time has come to give you a straight answer to that question. I'm an agent of the Secret Service; at present, I'm detailed to help the Department of Justice."

"The deuce you are!"

"My game has been to watch the most dangerous radicals in New York—some five hundred of them—whose names are listed in the department's books. You are one of the five hundred."

"Really! I hope I've been a source of ample diversion? As a friend, I'm always glad to oblige."

"Dienst ist dienst, as the Germans say. While on duty, I had no friends; I merely had five hundred suspects to keep track of. In point of fact, my men have been through your effects several times. We found nothing treasonable, nothing seditious, nothing compromising, except a copy of the Declaration of Independence with the first eight lines underscored. I tried to have your name removed from the black list. But the damaging evidence aforesaid was the ground on which my recommendation was ignored."

"Is this a joke?"

"No, it's the gospel truth. But you needn't feel as though you had been singled out for persecution. Not at all. I'm a marked man as much as you. If the Intelligence Service of the Government detects an atom of intelligence in one of its agents, it makes it a special point always to ignore that agent's recommendations. Never mind. I wrote out my resignation this morning. Here it is. It goes to Washington at once."

"Surely, Pryor, you have other reasons for resigning the job?"

"Ah, now you're coming to it. For weeks past, I've been saturating my mind with radical literature. Tons of it. From professional motives solely, of course. After a studious and impartial consideration of facts and principles, I've come to a very curious pass."

"You don't mean to say that you've been converted!" said Robert, rising excitedly from his chair.

"Yes, I've been converted. Not to radicalism, mind. Personally, I'm a firm believer in the aristocratic state as championed by Plato, Ruskin, and Carlyle, the state in which the Government is carried on by those whose equipment best fits them to govern. We'll reach this state—in about a thousand years. Meanwhile, I've been converted not to radicalism, but to the view that the radicals are right in theory and the Government wrong in practice; the former right in demanding a complete restoration of civil liberty and an enormous grant of industrial liberty, the latter wrong in thwarting these demands."

After a few moments spent in digesting Pryor's astonishing admissions, Robert said:

"One good surprise deserves another."

"Fire away."

"I've just inherited two million dollars!"

Pryor was stupefied.

"Where the blue blazes did you get it from?" he cried, his long neck rising telescopically out of his stand-up collar.

"That's one piece of information that hasn't drifted your way, at all events," said Robert, taking a malicious pleasure in Pryor's stupefaction.

A marked pause followed. Then Pryor, having congratulated Robert, said abruptly:

"As far as I can see, nothing now stands in the way of your marriage to Charlotte Beecher."

"What do you mean?"

Searching glances were exchanged. Each recognized in the other a man of rare talent and unusual probity, and trusted him accordingly. Pryor took the plunge.

He remarked quietly that, during Robert's absence abroad, he and Charlotte had become very good friends. He was well aware of her intense attachment to Robert. She had, in fact, talked about it freely and frankly to him. Thus he knew that she had taken the initiative in proposing marriage to Robert, a very natural step, inasmuch as she was in the vastly superior position. He knew, however that Robert had refused on the ground of the extreme inequality of their circumstances.

With the best will in the world, Robert found it difficult to reply. Habit and custom were strong against a ventilation of his refusal and of the real reasons underlying it.

"The truth is," he said, after a second's hesitation, "Charlotte and I would be very poor partners on a long dull grind, and this is what modern marriage has become. We're excellent friends. We put a fine edge on each other's faculties. When we meet, the blue sparks fly. In fact, they fly too much."

"Say what you like, she could at least take you to art galleries and concerts, and count on you as a sympathetic companion. That's where I failed her. I'm such a duffer in matters of art. And as for music! Lord, I hardly know the difference between Beethoven and a beet."

"Don't let that worry you. For all that Charlotte and I pull so well together, our points of agreement are mostly on the surface. True, we both get recreation from looking at pictures or sculpture and listening to music. But not from the same pictures or sculpture, nor from the same music. She's all for chastity and restraint in art—Hellenism or aristocracy, you'd call it. She resents Strauss's volcanic turbulence; Epstein's rough-hewn symbolism merely disgusts her; the brutal abandon of Augustus John drives her mad. Yet I swear by these artists as she swears by the Donatellos, Brahmses, and Raphaels whose exhibitions of technical mastery bore me to extinction. We really have nothing in common except our recognition of honest craftsmanship and our joy in the clash of temperaments, instincts and opinions."

"These differences that you speak of: how do you know that they matter?"

"Because they go so deep. Her hopes are not my hopes, her dreams are not my dreams, her gods are not my gods. These things are of the essence of comradeship, and comradeship is the soul of love."

"Well, I'm as much in love with Charlotte as any normally sane man can be in love," said Pryor, quizzically. "But on the points you mention, I don't hit it off with her, either. Her Brahms and your Strauss are equally Greek to me, and I'd give up their collective compositions in a jiffy for half an hour of the "Mikado" or the "Gondoliers."

He supposed he'd have to work backwards and find out what the essence of comradeship consisted in. He sincerely trusted that it was not bound up, in his case, with Charlotte's money. As it was, she was terribly suspicious on that score. She was quite unshakable in the conviction that Robert was the only man she had ever known who was not a fortune hunter.

"You see the devilish harm you've done," said Pryor, in conclusion, "with your reputation for disinterestedness."

"Quite an undeserved one, too," replied Robert, smiling. "Like most reputations it was founded on my deficiencies and not on my accomplishments. If I had known as much about money two years ago as I do now, Charlotte might have a very different opinion of my disinterested motives, as well as of me."

He assured Pryor that he would do his level best to free Charlotte from her delusion. In return, Pryor was to keep secret the fact of Robert's accession to a fortune.

"I'd like to enjoy the luxury of being a poor man with plenty of money in my pocket," he said.

Nobody was to be told and, in particular, the news was to be kept from Janet. He didn't expect to indulge this rather childish whim for more than a few days. All New York would be talking about his good luck by that time, no doubt.

"My dear fellow! A paltry two millions?" said Pryor with a short laugh. "A mere pebble on the beach. Why, the reigning plutocrats here hand out millions to charity as I'd give pennies to a beggar."

They settled their bill.

On their way out, Robert said:

"Now tell me how you caught that blackguard Burley smuggling diamonds for the Fontaines."

"Who told you I caught them? In the strict etiquette of the Secret Service, the names of the agents in specific cases are never made public."

"Oh, the information just drifted my way," said Robert, bantering him. "Even without it, though, I should have put two and two together. Nobody admires the richness and variety of your knowledge more than I do, Pryor. Yet I'm bound to say that your disguises seem puerile to me. Among the Outlaws, although we didn't guess the Secret Service, we spotted you as a Pinkerton, or something of that sort, almost from the first."

"Precisely what I wanted you to do, my friend. My game was to spread the truth broadcast. People simply will not believe the truth. Ask any detective worth his salt and he'll tell you that being himself is the best of all possible disguises, one that saves no end of trouble in 'make-up' and character acting. It causes every suspect to feel that he and the sleuth are in each other's confidence, as it were. And this puts people so much at their ease that they positively can't help giving themselves away."

"So that's how you double crossed Hutchins Burley?"

"It's a long, amusing story, Lloyd. I'll keep the details for another day. The poor wretch is doing five years in a Federal prison. Mr. Rene Fontaine, for whom he was a mere tool, paid a fine of three million dollars (not your beggarly two million!) without turning a hair, and then decamped to England, where he lives in a regal villa somewhere in Essex.—Lord, it's nearly three! I must make a move. Where are you bound for?"

"Home, now. California, the day after tomorrow."

"California!"

Robert explained that all his uncle's realty holdings were on the Pacific Coast. His mother, too, was there. What with one thing and another, his presence out West was imperative.

"I shall return in two months for a quest of quite another sort," he added, significantly.

"Walk a few blocks towards the Subway with me," said Pryor, "and I'll show you one of the high lights of our low life."

As they drew near the Grand Central Palace, the streets grew thick with people. Traffic along Lexington Avenue was suspended and a cordon of New York's "finest" was drawn up in front of the Palace, with night sticks polished to a turn.

Robert and Mark Pryor had just reached the outskirts of the crowd, when several imposing motor cars drew up in front of the exhibition building.

"What on earth's the matter now?" said Robert. "Has our Anglo-American Prince of Wales returned?"

A very handsome young man with two richly dressed young ladies alighted from the first car, whilst the moving picture brigade went into immediate action and the crowds thundered out cheers.

"It's the first day of the great Allied Armies' Bazaar," said Pryor. "The Duchess of Keswick and Mr. and Mrs. Claude Fontaine are to open the affair at three o'clock. There they go now."

"What a match for him!" murmured Robert, setting eyes for the first time on Marjorie Armstrong's proud beauty.

"More than a match," said Pryor, softly.

CHAPTER THIRTY

I

"You don't love me, Robert!"

"It's false," he said, retreating. "I do love you. I've loved you madly ever since you fled to Paris."

"Then why do you run away? I don't want you to marry me. You're too poor! But you might at least kiss me. Come back, Robert, please come back!"

Following him, she put her arms around his neck and clasped him tight.

"Let me go, Janet. I won't marry you. I won't! I'll never, never, NEVER marry a woman who has had a free lover!"

Still he receded, and ever so gently tried to unclasp her hands.

"You needn't marry me, Robert. Only treat me just as you'd treat a man. Don't you remember that you promised you would? You promised on the pier in Kips Bay, when your heart was a free and a fetterless thing."

She concentrated all her magic upon him, upon his pale thoughtful face and discerning hazel-brown eyes. But look! The eyes were not hazel-brown—they were a flashing blue! And these were not the mobile sensitive features of Robert, but the bold virile features (somewhat distorted by angry passion) of Claude.

"What!" he cried. "Marry you here—here in Brussels—after all I've suffered on your account? Serpent! Shall I never escape your sting?"

Hovering somewhere in the background, a thin-edged female with horn-rimmed spectacles took a malignant joy in fanning the flames of his rage.

Claude wrenched both her hands loose and flung them off, the violence of the action sending her prone to the floor.

II

Janet sat up in bed and shook back the tangles of her nut-brown hair.

What a horrible nightmare!

All on account of the rumpus started last night by the thin-edged female with the horn-rimmed spectacles.

Not in Brussels, but in New York. Not in the Grand Hotel, Boulevard Anspach, but in the Susan B. Anthony House, Park Avenue, Mrs. R. H. L. Jerome's new apartment house for self-supporting professional women with children.

Well, this particular rumpus had been settled, and the attack of officious Pharisaism upon Janet's reputation had received a black eye. Janet wondered whether the blow was to be recorded as a knockout or merely as the end of the first round.

Time would show. Meanwhile, she dressed and breakfasted; then, with all the gravity of her twenty-seven years, she began to discharge the responsible duties of manager of the House.

But the memory of the nightmare would not down. Not even the excitement she still felt in making the rounds of her three departments sufficed to dispel it. In the children's section, she applauded the new floor games which the kindergartner had invented for her wards; she became a ready listener to the woes of the matron in charge of the household division; on her way through the cuisine, she devoted her faculties to the task of adjudicating the claims of the cook against the dietitian in command. And she sought distraction in the stupendous thought that these three great departments of the Susan B. Anthony House were coordinated in the person of Miss J. Barr, the business manager and personal representative of Mrs. R. H. L. Jerome.

Yet, although these occupations drove away the haunting nightmare for minutes at a time, they were impotent to banish it permanently.

The chief trouble was, of course, that her nerves were still shaken by the emotional explosion in which the whole House had been involved the day before. The explosion was the cause of the nightmare. And the nightmare itself, its several metamorphoses and all, had marched in such a logical, well arranged order, that she was greatly tempted to tell it to Lydia Dyson, the novelist, who was a crank on the subject of Freud and dreams.

Lydia, to be sure, would pronounce it a contemptible dream, lamentably short of knives, pitchforks, corks, bottles and other shining symbolic materials. Contemptible or not, she would none the less insist that it must be submitted to a psychoanalyst.

Yes, Lydia Dyson would torment her to be psychoanalyzed. With a smile she recalled the novelist's visit to the Susan B. Anthony House a week ago. Lydia, in search of material for her new novel, The Soul Pirates (expression derived from Cornelia Covert), had set the members of the house to narrating their worst dreams. Then she had beguiled more than half of them into having themselves psychoanalyzed by Aristide Cambeau, an amazingly brilliant speaker whose lectures (at the Ritz—five dollars a ticket!) were the latest social rage, and whose clinic was daily besieged by a long queue of fashionable ladies impatient to have their souls laid bare.

Janet believed she could interpret her dream fully as well as the fascinating Mr. Cambeau.

Her attempt to do so led her to a review of her own recent history.

Seven weeks ago she had returned with Mrs. R. H. L. Jerome to the United States. Mrs. Jerome had resumed training her as soon as the Statue of Liberty was sighted. Thus, the good lady reminded her that they had come from England (where plenty of explosive insurrectionary material was lying around) to their own land with its "tendency to normalcy" as a noted politician expressed it. That is, they had come back to the America of the women's vote, the high cost of living, the housing shortage, the unemployment menace, the deportation of radicals and Japanese, the reception of hoards of unhealthy South-European immigrants, the ouija board, the stock market slump and jazz. The same old America! It was reading "Main Street" just then; and Mrs. Jerome opined that all America was reading the book, not because it gave a memorable picture of the soul of a nation in all its drab, desolating mediocrity, but because it gratified the furious national craving to be paid attention to and talked about, it mattered nothing whether in terms of praise, disparagement or abuse.

Mrs. Jerome's gloomy view rolled off Janet like water off a duck's back. She had youth, enthusiasm, vigor; there was a great civilizing work to be done. And though, as Mark Pryor took pains to assure her, it might take a thousand years to do it, she threw herself into it heart and soul, just as if the goal were attainable next year.

Two weeks after their arrival in New York, the Susan B. Anthony House had been opened, undemonstratively but successfully. Mrs. R. H. L. Jerome, an omnipresent deity at first, relinquished the reins of government gradually; all the reins save one, for it was well understood that she was to be the power behind the scenes. Within a week, every suite in the house was occupied and hundreds of applicants were turned away. The rents, though far from low, were not unreasonable; and, as special provision had been made for the care of children, and competent experts placed in control of each department ("quality not quantity" was the specific motto throughout), the house was a godsend for precisely the ones it was designed to serve, that is, for self-supporting professional women with one or two children.

For a time, things had gone swimmingly. Almost too swimmingly. As the news spread, social workers and social science students began to pay the place a visit. Before long the unofficial busybodies followed and, with the kindliest intentions in the world, did their level best to disorganize the machinery of the house and subvert the discipline.

And the reporters took up the scent! All the magazine sections of the Sunday newspapers had articles describing Mrs. Jerome's "latest hobby." Interviews with Mrs. Jerome—some real, some alleged—appeared in increasing numbers and with increasingly pungent specimens of this lady's sprightly wit. Writers of special features in the evening sheets praised or deplored the "communal upbringing" of the children. The photogravure supplements took up the sport and favored their readers with pictures of every conceivable corner of the house, and also with tableaux in which the children, looking remarkably happy and well dressed, were grouped about three adults (from left to right): the Duchess of Keswick, Mrs. R. H. L. Jerome and Miss J. Barr.

Finally, the Infamous Players-Smartcraft Company offered a fabulous sum for the use of the Susan B. Anthony House as the scene of an "action" (with adagio "close-ups"), which it insisted on calling (doubtless in irony) a "moving" picture.

But the marvel of marvels was that, throughout this period of unbought, unsought advertising, nobody breathed the suspicion that Miss J. Barr, the calm, collected young manageress in the neat blouse and trim skirt, might be the notorious Janet Barr who had eloped two years before with Claude Fontaine!

Then, one fine day, as she was leaving the Broadway side of Wanamaker's, a man had leapt out of a magnificent limousine drawn up at the curb, and had seized her hands.

It was Claude himself! Handsome and imposing as ever, with perhaps a dash less of self-confidence.

He had implored her for a meeting later in the day. No, no, he wouldn't make love to her, he solemnly swore he wouldn't! He wanted to get a load off his conscience. His wife? Oh, he got along well enough with Marjorie, only— Well, surely Janet knew why he had married her? There had simply been no alternative! If Colonel Armstrong hadn't stood back of Fontaine and Company at the time of the smuggling exposure, the firm would have gone to smash. And so on—

Janet peremptorily refused to meet him. There was no sense in a meeting, she urged. He was importunate. "What about my House?" said she. "What about my state of mind?" said he. She had tried hard to be firm.

"Come not between the lion and his wrath or the tigress and her work," she said, torn this way and that between the comedy and the tragedy of the situation.

To get rid of him, she had at length made an appointment for the afternoon.

The appointment was never kept!

The sequel proved that her encounter with Claude had been observed. That night the bloodhounds of scandal were unleashed in the Susan Anthony House. The ring-leader was the thin-edged woman with the horn-rimmed spectacles.

This precious female was the mother of a whining little boy whose father was authenticated by due process of law. The law had not sufficed, however, to keep the gentleman faithful for long to the nuptial vows. After his disappearance from New York, his wife was left to support herself and to wreak vengeance where vengeance was not due.

The first that Janet knew about the coming storm was when the dietitian took her aside and told her that the house had been divided into two camps: for and against Janet; or, as the anti-Janet crowd put it: for and against Morality.

Two days before the nightmare, things had come to a head. In the absence of the manager, the anti-Janet faction had assembled under the chairmanship of the thin-edged agitator.

This lady had opened the meeting with the bitter announcement that those present were liberal and fairminded, but that they had their children to think of. Their darling children! Mothers, married mothers, mind you (and she, for her part, had consented to join the Susan B. Anthony House only on the confident assumption that all the mothers were as regularly married as herself)—mothers, as such, could afford to take no chances! Unhappily, she was persuaded that in the other camp there were ladies who had more than one good reason for standing by the manager. She surmised that some of these ladies were unmarried mothers! Scarcely mothers at all (if morals counted for anything), and certainly no better than they should be.

After much nursing of self-righteousness, suitable resolutions were moved, and a deputation was appointed to present the facts to Mrs. R. H. L. Jerome; also to demand the discharge of Janet and the vindication of American morality.

The great impeachment had occurred last night. Mrs. Jerome had motored into town, and both factions had turned out for the occasion in the large reception room on the ground floor. Mrs. Jerome had refused to start the proceedings until Janet was seated at her right hand. This settled, the thin-edged spokesman had made the formal charges.

Then the fun had begun—

At this point, a telephone bell jangled across Janet's reflections.

"Who is it?" she asked the switchboard girl.

"Mr. Pryor."

"Let him come up," said Janet eagerly.

III

As usual, Mark Pryor's spare form was dressed from head to foot in materials of one color. But even Janet noticed that, for once, the inevitable stand-up collar, with its two prongs tilting its wearer's chin upwards, had been replaced by a low-lying collar of creamiest silk.

"Circles under the eyes!" he began severely. "What's wrong?"

"Nightmares, witches, broomsticks," she replied laughing.

"Out with it!" he commanded.

In her calm, clear tones she gave him a graphic account of the unpleasantness of the last few days, from its inception in her chance encounter with Claude Fontaine down to the demand made upon Mrs. Jerome for her dismissal.

"And how did little Apple Dumpling meet this demand?" inquired Pryor.

"Like a trump! Said she'd stand by me to the limit—also that the Susan B. Anthony House, being designed for busy people and not for busy*bodies*, Mrs. Farrar (the one with the horn-rimmed spectacles) would have to vacate at the end of the week. Further that, in the future, it is to be a fixed rule of the house that any mother, married or unmarried, may become a tenant, and no questions asked other than those needed to satisfy Mrs. Jerome or her representative that the applicant is both self-supporting and self-respecting—"

"Bravo!"

"And, furthermore, she then and there dictated a letter to be sent to the liberal weeklies in New York, informing their readers of the adoption of this new rule."

"Hurrah!" cried Pryor. "The next time anybody queries, in the words of the immortal William:

"'What king so strong

Can tie the gall up in the slanderous tongue?'

I'll answer: No king; but let me tip you the name of a queen—Mrs. R. H. L. Jerome, the magnificent. She can turn the trick."

"Yes, she's a perfect darling. Do you know, I didn't mind the backbiting of those silly women a bit. But Mrs. Jerome's unhesitating support made me want to cry."

She added that in a private conversation with the dear lady she had urged her own resignation as a matter of practical wisdom. Wasn't the cause greater than the individual?—"Rubbish!" Mrs. Jerome had replied with a considerable show of heat. No cause was worth the cowardly abandonment of a comrade! For two thousand years men had prated of the holy duties of friend to friend, and had committed one crime against friendship after another. And when these crimes were committed, what did they do? They folded their hands, raised pious eyes to heaven, and sang (through their noses), "Alas for the rarity of Christian charity!" etc. Well, women would show them that the time to be loyal was not when the pack curried favor with your friend but when it turned to rend him.

"What do you mean to do now?" asked Pryor.

"I shall stick it out. After all, I'm not looking for social or official favors. All I ask is to be allowed to do the best work of which I'm capable. Surely, I have that right."

"So you think," said Pryor drily. "But bear in mind that for every bona fide worker in New York, there are nine idlers or time wasters, nine breeders of noise, disorder and disease. And don't forget that the chief objection to the idler is not that he neglects his own work, but that he insists on interrupting or damaging yours. The doer is the waster's sworn enemy to all eternity. And the waster knows it! Therefore, he spies out your vulnerable spot: social, economic, psychic, whatever it be; and the first moment he catches you off guard, he sends his poisoned arrow straight to your Achilles' heel."

"I suppose I must take my chance of that. What else can I do?"

"You might imitate me."

"Imitate you! What do you mean?"

"Why, get married! I'm going to marry Charlotte Beecher."

"But I thought that Charlotte—"

"Yes, she's very fond of Robert Lloyd. And I'm only her second string. But bless your wayward curls, we're all second strings on somebody's violin! What's the odds—especially after the first string has snapped? I've been madly in love myself, twice before. Once, down south in Colon, with a dusky Isthmian beauty. The second time, with you."

"Don't be silly, Mark, or I shall stop envying Charlotte her extraordinary good luck."

"Hers and mine! Charlotte was looking for a husband with enough brains to manage a fortune, and yet with heart enough not to love her for her fortune alone. I was looking for a wife with heart enough to lay her fortune at my feet, and yet with enough brains to permit me to enjoy her society. Are we well matched or not?"

"'Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment,'" quoted Janet, laughing.

"Now you're talking sense as well as poetry, dear girl."

"I didn't say I'd follow your example, though."

"All in good time! It's human nature for young blood to rebel against wedlock—and to come around to it in the long run. Marriage, as Lydia Dyson says, is the easiest way!"

"Yes, for Lydia, who changes her lover once a season, while her husband stays at home and keeps the household in smooth running order. But my needs don't run in Lydia's line."

Pryor admitted this. But he pointed out that marriage was a human institution. There it was, for every one of us to reckon with. Either you made use of it, or it made use of you. Sensible people adopted the former alternative.

"Why, look at me!" he said, waxing strangely eloquent. "I've knocked about the world a good bit in the last twenty years. A born adventurer if ever there was one. Do you see me settling down to matrimony like any spirit-broken married man in the pinchbeck salaried class? No, by Jupiter! I've waited for the right conditions to come to pass so that I could take up marriage as one more great adventure."

"Your last one, Mark!" said Janet, bantering him.

More seriously, she asked him whether all his other adventures had been in the Secret Service.

"Lord no! I've taken a shot at all sorts of jobs and been all sorts of things from a West Point cadet to a buccaneer in the South Seas."

This quiet, self-contained man, spare of frame but tough as a hickory stick, had he really been a gorgeous sea-rover? Looking into his humorously inquisitive gray eyes, Janet could not doubt his words. And, like Desdemona entranced by Othello, she listened whilst he dipped into a store of reminiscences and, in his own inimitably laconic style, gave her an outline of his picturesque career.

Pryor as a West Point cadet, as a lieutenant in the Engineer Corps, in service against the Moros in the Philippines, on the sanitary staff in the thick of the Panama Canal construction, again as a civilian on a dare-devil voyage to Tahiti—these pictures took the romantic side of Janet by storm. She made him tell the Tahitian story most minutely, and hung on his lips with bated breath as he recounted the capture of his tiny steamer by real pirates who gave him a Hobson's choice of joining them in their marauding trips near the Society Islands, or of walking the plank.

"But I never gave full satisfaction anywhere," he concluded ruefully. "Secrets that I had better not have known were incessantly coming my way and causing me no end of trouble. Once, when we unexpectedly sighted a Dutch merchantman laden with coffee and spices, I ran up the red flag instead of the black! My shipmates swore that I did it on purpose and assured me that, as a pirate, I was a failure. It was true. I was a failure! Almost a dead failure, in fact, for they left me on what they thought was a desert island."

When he got back to the United States, the Great War had begun, but the officials in Washington were extremely slow to utilize his services. His record was against him. He was one of those men with whom two and two didn't inevitably make four, but sometimes footed up to a sum that included human as well as mathematical factors. For an army man, this was a fatal defect.

Impatient to be of use, he eventually joined the Secret Service.

"Why?" asked Janet.

"Nothing else was open to me," he replied, with a twinkle in his roving eyes. "When a man is a pronounced failure, there are only three professions that will take him into their ranks: those of detective, writer and teacher. I chose the first as the least degrading of the three. Also because it gave me a chance to use my gift as a telepath, an elemental telepath."

"You can't pretend that you haven't made good at that!"

"Oh, I've done so-so."

"So-so!" cried Janet indignantly. "Look how you caught Hutchins Burley red-handed!"

"True enough. I'm bound to confess, however, that I went to the pier to arrest him for treason. When his boxes of Oriental books were opened, it was the smuggled diamonds that we found and not (as I had predicted) the evidence of his sale of United States military secrets to the Japanese. Later on, we got that evidence too; but that was Smilo's doing more than mine. Ah, wait till you hear Robert's opinion of my sleuthing skill."

"Oh, Robert!" she said, with the faintest quiver of her lip. "He hasn't been near me. I'm not even sure that he's in America."

"Well, he is! And I happen to know that urgent business is keeping him out of New York."

"What can it be?"

"It's a peculiar business. In a sense, it's the reverse of what I was engaged upon. I was in pursuit of rogues; but rogues are in pursuit of him."

"I must say, you're as enigmatic as ever."

"Only till tomorrow, Janet. I pledge my word to have everything explained to your satisfaction if you'll come tomorrow to Charlotte's studio in Washington Mews. The party begins at four."

"The party!"

"Precisely. An engagement party for Charlotte; a surprise party for you."

Saying which, and protesting that he had talked her deaf, dumb and blind, and affirming that he had never felt so horribly out of character in his life, Mark Pryor gravely took his leave.

IV

In fulfillment of her promise, Janet went the following afternoon to the converted stable in Washington Mews where Charlotte Beecher cultivated sculpture in an atmosphere of aristocratic Bohemianism. It was the same studio in which, of old, Cornelia Covert had luxuriated whenever the routine of Outlawry in Kips Bay got on her nerves.

Spring and hope in a young woman's breast usually add love to their number. In Janet's case they added thoughts of Robert. All morning she had been plagued with a feeling, amounting to a conviction, that he would be at Charlotte's party. But when she reached the Mews, she found that Pryor and Lydia Dyson were the only other guests at a gathering which bade fair to be intimate and exclusive.

For a minute or two her spirits were considerably dashed. She waited for Pryor's advertised surprise to eventuate; but she waited in the dark, nobody offering so much as a ray of enlightenment.

While Lydia Dyson stretched herself supine upon the magnificent tiger rug before the blazing fire, Pryor fetched wineglasses and poured out champagne.

"Here's to those about to wed!" cried Lydia, raising her glass, and then quoting:

"'Farewell, happy fields where Joy forever dwells,

Hail Horrors!'"

"You might give us a more cheerful toast, old girl," protested Charlotte.

"An occasion like this conduces to high philosophy rather than to vulgar good cheer," retorted Lydia, whose Egyptian beauty—ebony hair against a pale olive skin—had never been more stunning. "However, since you wish it, I'll take another shot: 'Here's to continued failure for all of us!'"

"Lydia, you are a merry soul today," exclaimed Janet, amidst the general laughter.

"And why not?" inquired Lydia, with a provoking drawl. "Why not? When I see my last blood curdler running well into the two hundred thousands!"

"Lydia is right," said Pryor. "In the present state of civilization, all the best people are failures, glorious failures."

He contrasted the fortunes of Lydia's pornographic romances with the fate of her one serious experiment in fiction. The romances sold like hot cakes. But the serious work, a short novel in which, with pitiless Hogarthian realism, she had developed an episode between a brother and a sister, had been refused by her publisher on the ground that "it was too terrible!" Then there was his own case! Had he not failed as a detective because too much secret information was always breezing his way?

"Don't forget our young feminist over there," cried Lydia, indicating Janet. "Don't forget her, or her heroic gesture against wedlock!"

"A bark is not as good as a bite," retorted Janet. "But isn't it better than a tame crawl into the yoke?"

By way of reply, Lydia half raised herself from the tiger skin and, in measured tones, recited:

"O Dewdrop, thou hast fought the better fight—in vain! Some women are born to be wedlocked, some achieve wedlock, and some have wedlock thrust upon them. Janet belongs to the first group, Charlotte belongs to the second, I belong to the third."

"You to the third!" cried Charlotte. "How do you make that out? From all I see, though Charley Morrow is a perfect dragon of jealousy, you cling to him pretty tightly."

"I have to, Charlotte! I have to keep him in countenance (and in pocket money, too!), because I'm afflicted with what the doctors call 'a floating stomach.' Now, Charley is not only the best housekeeper in New York, he's the best cook, too. There's simply nobody else whom I can depend on not to sneak lard instead of butter into my bread—"

"Or to mix cottonseed oil instead of olive oil with your salads?" thrust in Pryor.

"Precisely. Sometimes, when I eat at home I say: How can I stand Charley another twenty-four hours? Next day I eat at a restaurant, and say: I can stand Charley forever!"

They all laughed, and Lydia buried herself in the rug again.

"All the same," she went on meditatively, "I've never really got used to marriage. It's a well of never-ending surprises."

"What about my surprise?" asked Janet, for the fourth time.

The bell rang and Charlotte went to the door a few feet away.

"Here it comes!" announced Pryor, as a man entered.

"Janet!"

"Robert!"

Greetings all round cut their glances short.

V

Janet was struck with the fact that he had never looked better. Robert, as dynamic as a battery giving out blue sparks, was familiar enough to her. But Robert, with a deepening pink spreading over his pale cheeks, and with a suit that showed the craftsmanship of a fashionable Fifth Avenue tailor, was a sight to make one gasp and stare. Nor was this all. In times past, she had often conjured up a picture of him poised as on a springboard, preparing to leap upward to join the spirits of the air. But there was nothing aerial about the way in which his feet now gripped the solid ground.

She couldn't get over the change!

When he alluded briefly to a trip to California from which he had just returned and on which he appeared to have done some work for the Confederated Press, she had the sensation of not being in a secret that all the rest shared. This was the sort of discourtesy that had hitherto been taboo in Charlotte's crowd, and she resented being made a victim of it.

"Then the Confederated Press knew better than to give you your walking papers?" drawled Lydia.

"They knew nothing," replied Robert. "I simply paid them to keep me on and to let me say exactly what I pleased."

This was more mystifying to Janet than ever.

Presently, Mark Pryor proposed a walk to the Lorillard model tenements to inspect Number Fifteen, Cornelia's old flat. It turned out that Robert had rented it and that Donald Kyrion, perhaps the youngest and certainly the most talented interior designer in New York, had decorated it for him as a labor of love. Pryor pronounced the result: "Art that congealed art!"

"Donald Kyrion?" said Lydia. "If Robert got him to do anything for nothing he ought to get the Nobel prize for wonder-working."

"Ahem!" said Pryor, and again he and Robert exchanged knowing glances.

Charlotte protested with all her soul against being dragged to Kips Bay. Now that Robert could earn an honest living, why didn't he rent a lodging in a decent locality instead of consorting with the Outlaws who—what with their talk of wrongs, their love of dirt, and their smell of tobacco—were tiresome enough to bore Mephistopheles himself.

"The Outlaws parted company with me long ago," replied Robert, putting up a vigorous defence. "It is not they who lure me back."

He said that the Outlaws were, after all, not the whole of Kips Bay. They were the most picturesque element in the population, but they were only a tiny fraction of the total. True, they behaved in every respect as though no other element besides their own existed. Wasn't this, however, merely a proof that they were New Yorkers to the manner born? It was, in fact, undeniable that there were plenty of simple, self-respecting toilers in Kips Bay, plenty of them right in the very citadel of Outlawry, the Lorillard model tenements themselves. Nay, candor compelled the admission that there were even "rich but honest" toilers in the Kipsian district—to be specific, in the new "art colonies" planted around Sutton Terrace and Turtle Bay Gardens.

He had found this out after the dispersal of Cornelia's set. Force of circumstances having obliged him to look out into the Kips Bay that extended beyond the model flats, he had learned how parochial, in their assumptions about the district, the Outlaws had been.

"The fact is," he added, "I often think it's a hankering after the paths of rectitude and respectability that makes me enjoy a Lorillard flat—for short stretches only, needless to say. Anyhow, the older I get and the more I study the flibbertigibbet Bohemian in his lair and the heavy-footed Bourgeois in his, the more I'm struck with the bond between them."

"The bond, Robert!" exclaimed Charlotte. "Call it a touching point, common ground, but don't call it a bond."

"Well, it's a hidden bond. For the irregular doings of the strait-laced people and the comparatively regular doings of the gypsies show me how Bohemian the Bourgeois is, and how Bourgeois the Bohemian."

"What Robert says reminds me forcibly of a passage in Gulliver's Travels," interposed Mark Pryor. "I mean the passage in which the horses, the noble highborn creatures that govern, move about stark naked, whilst the Yahoos, the loathsome human creatures that live like beasts, yearn to cover their shame with rags and strings of beads."

"For the matter of that," continued Robert, "look at our little group here. We've all lived and worked quite contentedly in the thick of Kips Bay. Yet there's nothing in our daily behavior at which a Philistine of the deepest dye would turn a hair. Where, in fact, could one find a more incurably respectable lot of people—always counting out Lydia who, I believe, is still a member in good standing among the Outlaws?"

"Look here, old boy!" Lydia called out. "Are you attacking or defending me?"

"As the supreme ornament of Charlotte's studio, you can always count on my homage, Lydia. But as an Outlaw, you must expect no quarter. I've lived among the Outlaws and weighed them in the balance."

"Meaning what?" said Lydia, groaning for effect. "That their honor rooted in dishonor stands?"

"Not a bad way of putting it, Lydia," replied Robert, smiling. "Shall I give you the gist of Outlawry? Well, it is an excrescence of Radicalism, often a decorative, sometimes a merely indecorous excrescence. The purpose of Radicalism is to remove the obstacles that lie athwart the course of life, of life aspiring to an estate infinitely higher than that of man. What part in this mighty purpose is played by the mummers of Greenwich Village, the camp-stool triflers of Washington Square, the picarescos of Kips Bay, and the other Outlaw aggregations?"

"They stand for insurgency, don't they?" drawled Lydia.

"For insurgency, yes. But what sort of insurgency? Your typical Outlaw 'insurges' against perfectly harmless laws and conventions: obstacles of no importance. And at the very same time, he conforms to ruthlessly strangling laws and conventions: obstacles that really matter."

"Kips Bay or bust!" announced Lydia, reluctantly abandoning her tiger skin as the only alternative to a pursuit of Robert's theme.

VI

On the walk uptown, Lydia attached herself to Pryor and Charlotte, while Robert with Janet soon fell far behind.

What a first aid to free speech an independent income is! Dozens of questions which, in Paris, had stuck on the tip of Robert's tongue now rolled off as freely as down a buttered slide. He was the first to break boldly into the vicious circle of topics of the day.

"You'd better return my pearls and diamonds!" he began with a grave smile. "As for me, I'll send back all your letters and also the lock of your hair that I've worn next my heart."

He said that there was only one conclusion to be drawn from the unbroken silence she had maintained ever since the end of the partnership of Barr and Lloyd; an end, he reminded her, not of his making.

Well, she liked that! She had written long letters, addressed to Cornelia, but expressly intended for the whole Lorillard circle; and, seeing that several people had replied, it would seem that her intention had been respected. In these letters she had more than once fished for a crumb of sympathy from him. She might say that, on reaching the very bottom of the ladder of luck, she had signalled to him almost as abjectly as Dives had to Lazarus. But no Lazarus had responded.

This reproach led, on both sides, to a rapid fire of questions and answers in the course of which one of their chief misunderstandings was cleared up. Janet learned that Cornelia had never shown her letters to Robert. What she had done was to give him subtly to understand that Janet, in the hope of inducing Claude to legitimate their love affair, was prudently burning her Kips Bay connections behind her.

"It was only one of a score of things that Cornelia did to queer the pitch between us," was Robert's comment.

They were silent for a space, whilst they adjusted their thoughts to a much clearer interpretation of the curious way that Cornelia had acted out her part in the triangle of their relations.

Robert's mind reverted to a bit of news which Pryor had passed on to him the night before, after the arrival of the San Francisco Limited at the Pennsylvania Station. Pryor had picked up the information in the course of an interview with Hutchins Burley in the Tombs, where the fallen editor, garbed as a Federal convict (he had begun to serve his sentence for smuggling), was being detained to testify against a former confederate in the Japanese espionage case. Burley, raging like the bull of Bashan, had lashed out against all the people who had ever given him offence, and against some who hadn't. As a by-product of sheer, overflowing hatred, he had let slip the item that it was to Cornelia that he was really indebted for having been able to get on Janet's track in Brussels. Cornelia had not known Janet's precise whereabouts, yet she had shown Burley the letters, the very letters she had withheld from Robert! This was a piquant bit of gossip, but Robert decided to suppress it for the time being. Until he had finished with the delicate job he had in hand!

Crossing Astor Place, they proceeded along Bookworm Lane to Union Square. Janet stopped halfway and pointed out a quaint old shop where she had bought at secondhand many of the text-books used in her Evening Law School. "You are on the primrose path of dalliance!" exclaimed Robert, who heard of these studies for the first time. "Do you keep your mother posted regarding your wicked ways or has she closed the front door to you forever, as she threatened?"

"No, the front door has been left on a crack," said Janet. And she recounted a visit she had lately paid her home. The family atmosphere was exactly as she had left it, the only change being that her father, having retired from business as the result of a serious accident, had ceased to be even the titular head of the house.

"The poor old man, a mere ghost of his former handsome self, was in a state of coma, Robert. And I fear that, as his salary days are over, his approaching dissolution is being firmly and not too gently accelerated. He sat huddled up in an invalid's chair, from time to time mumbling that he hoped I'd be a sensible girl, and stay with them in Brooklyn now, and learn to appreciate my mother for the brave and unselfish woman she has always been! He'll lick the whip to the very last breath. The sight of him was heartrending!"

Otherwise, the atmosphere of the Barr household had not changed one whit. The same musty, fusty ideas prevailed, and the same hollow, stagnant, make-believe existence went on. Here, at least, was one spot in America where pre-war conditions prevailed unchallenged!

"How could I ever have stood it as long as I did! Mother pecked at my cheek and, without turning a hair, asked me was I coming home at last (to be a young lady of the house I suppose!) or did I mean to go on wasting the Lord's time? Wasting the Lord's time! I replied that if she was alluding to my work and to my legal studies—which together occupied me from ten to sixteen hours a day—wasting the Lord's time wasn't the picnic it sounded like. She muttered something about the wages of sin being death! 'Oh, no,' I said, 'I get a very fat salary from Mrs. R. H. L. Jerome.' I mentioned the exact figure—the amount quite made Emily sit up!—and I added that Mrs. Jerome, my friend as well as my employer, had undertaken to advance my career.

"Well, it seemed to me that this piece of news stumped mother a bit, although she closed her eyes in that trance-like, oblivious way of hers and affected never to have heard of a Mrs. Jerome. Perhaps she really hadn't. Nobody has ever fathomed the bottomless ignorance of the Barr mind."

"Nobody could—not even God!" said Robert.

Janet nodded and went on:

"Don't forget that the Barrs are inordinately vain and aggressively jealous of the things they don't know. This is the fact that makes their ignorance sublime! Take Emily. I got her to talk about herself for a while. She is now one of the head teachers in a public high school. Her devotion to her business is pathetic. She teaches, eats, sleeps—and teaches! Once in a while she shops or sews. These acts complete the cycle of her life from day to day, from year to year. No books, no concerts, no theatres, no travel, no meditation, no self-training, no real companionship with equals or superiors—never one piercing or shattering experience of novelty—nothing that might make the pulse go fast or the heart beat high. 'But how can you teach them anything real, anything about life?' I maliciously asked her."

"'Anything real!' she sneered. 'I suppose you mean romantic adventures! Well, teaching is real enough for me. I study the science of pedagogy every night of the week. And when I want to learn anything more about life, I read the Saturday Evening Post!'

"Yes, Robert; it sounds like a line from The Old Homestead. But that's exactly what she said."

"I don't doubt it," said Robert. "I know the Barrs of Brooklyn. I've met them in every part of the United States, and one runs across them even in Europe. Age cannot wither nor custom stale their infinite monotony. As on creation's day, so they'll remain till the trump of doom."

"Of course, Mother isn't as stupid as Emily, not by half," said Janet. "Her behavior at parting convinces me that she really does have an inkling of who Mrs. Jerome is and of how my position near this influential lady sends my stock up in the world of cash realities. When I left, she didn't peck at my cheek as at first. No, she kissed me almost affectionately and said, in a tone so relenting that I'm sure Emily was greatly shocked: 'Now that you've found the way back, my child, come and see us again soon.' And I had always believed that Mother's moral and religious prejudices were incorruptible—absolutely money-proof, if nothing else in this age was! It was quite a blow to me."

"Never mind," rejoined Robert. "We're all easily taken in by other people's moral counterfeit. Haven't you observed that it's usually a Barr who circulates the Biblical saying that a man cannot serve both God and Mammon? Yet, though too modest to acknowledge it, the Barrs themselves accomplish this miracle daily. It's precisely the Barrs who, in their heart of hearts, worship these two deities as one."

They had now reached the Lorillard tenements. In the dimly lit foyer of the middle house they rested on the settee, quite as in the chummiest days of Barr and Lloyd.

"Speaking of Mammon," he resumed, in the most offhand way imaginable, "don't you think you ought to marry a rich man? Of course I mean your own sort of rich man, not the St. Hilaire sort."

Janet gave him a puzzled look.

"I should hate a welter of trivial responsibilities," she said decisively. "A great big house and a lot of servants to manage—to say nothing of a husband!—the mere prospect terrifies me."

"Now I'm doubly sure that we're birds of a feather, Janet! Still, aren't you rather difficult to please? In Paris you said you wouldn't marry a man if he was poor? Here you say you won't marry a man if he's rich."

"Does it matter, Robert? What rich man is likely to ask me?"

"You're quite wrong. One is asking you now."

"You!" Had he suddenly lost his senses?

"I've inherited a couple of millions, Janet!"

He briefly put her in possession of the facts. Then he made her a formal offer of marriage, in tones so restrained that she could hardly guess the immortal longing beneath them.

"I need a partner to share the rich man's burden!" he said, with a quizzical smile. "And I know from experience that you are the one partner in the world for me."

"No!" she said, her eyes half closed, her cheeks rather pale. "I—I'm not sure that I'm ready for marriage."

"Oh, don't let that stop you! Nobody is ever ready for birth, marriage, or death. We're just plunged in—doubts, hesitations, and all. You don't suppose any sane man or woman wants to take the plunge, do you? I know I don't. But since I've got to marry somebody, I've made up my mind to marry no one but you."

"At least you're quite frank," she said, with a rather trembling lip.

"Are you angry? Heaven knows it would be easier for me to use the stock phrases on which we were brought up and fed up. But you're a woman of the new age! And I'm proposing partnership to an equal, to a fellow worker—not to a goddess-drudge!"

They both rose from the settee.

"Surely," he said, wondering at her silence, "it isn't the Free Love philosophy that's in the way?"

"No, no!" she said, emphatically. "I thought I'd told you that in Paris."

She repeated that she was done with all that! She admitted that, for a time, Cornelia had won her over to what Bernard Shaw called the Love-Is-All school of fanatics. And, so she feared, she had actually believed in her own readiness to give up All for Love! But the hard knocks of the last two years had opened her eyes to the inadequacy as well as to the inexpediency of this philosophy. When the Hutchins Burleys, the Cornelia Coverts, the women with horn-rimmed spectacles, and their like—when these successively popped up to interfere with her purposes, she had realized that love, far from being all to her, was simply one of her heart's desires. She still held to the view that the love relation between two people should be subject to no other law than that of their own consciences. And she still hoped that society would be converted to this view, although she no longer had a mind to risk her soul's welfare in its behalf.

"You see, Robert, how fully I've come round to your opinion! If I'm to risk my salvation for anything, it must be for something bigger than the love chase."

After a pause, she added, with a faintly ironical smile:

"For something bigger, too, than a mere husband, don't you think?"

"But you won't risk your salvation with me, Janet," said Robert, coming close to her side. "You're in a position to make your own terms, absolutely—for have you I must! Stick to your practical terms but not to your abstract ideas. And be generous! Remember, a man who's obliged to take care of a fortune, needs a wife to take care of him."

"Indeed! But why expect one able-bodied human being to 'take care of' another human being, equally able-bodied? Or why ask a woman to become what men gallantly call a ministering angel, but what ought bluntly to be called a domestic drudge?"

"I admit it's a very stupid arrangement. Yet at present it's the only tolerable arrangement I know of. Unquestionably, it's haphazard, wasteful, anarchic! And no doubt a later generation of men and women, fired with a collective purpose, will regulate domestic affairs much better. But what am I to do? Wasn't I born and bred on the understanding that some ministering angel would drudge my home to rights? Well, I'm extremely uncomfortable without one!"

"Selfish wretch. Do you know what Mrs. Jerome says?"

"No."

"She says that women have been men's cat's-paws long enough. It's time for them to abdicate the job. If we are to make any headway, the unmarried girls will have to be strong enough and self-respecting enough to refuse the empty honors offered as bribes for their servitude. They must put a high price on their freedom!"

"Good! I offer you a million dollars, cash down, for yours. It's half my fortune."

Janet turned away, chilled to the soul.

"You're mocking me," she said.

"Not a bit of it," he retorted, following her. "I don't propose to live with an economic inferior. Such a course would wreck us at the start. That there can be no genuine comradeship between people of unequal means is a truth which every philosopher from Plato to William James has pointed out."

"Did they point it out, in the midst of a proposal?"

He held both her hands in a firm grip.

"Darling, don't pretend to misunderstand me. Do you want me to sink to my knees in this public place and overwhelm you with ardors and protestations? It's easy enough, and I'm quite mad enough now. Mad with the enchantment of your touch, that turns my heart to fire; with the music of your voice, in which I hear all Elfland calling; with your haunting mystery and lilac fragrance, at which my senses reel and swim! I'm ninety-nine parts drenched with ecstasy! If you reproach me because one thin gleam of sanity still remains at the helm I shall be—"

"Arithmetical!"

At the word, he seized her and kissed her and—Time being Love's fool—they were imparadised in each other's arms.

VII

After a while, between endearments, she managed to say:

"So you do want me to make a marriage of convenience?"

"No, I want you to make a convenience of marriage. That's what all sensible people do."

"Splendid! Then you won't expect me to give up the Susan B. Anthony House? I couldn't leave Mrs. Jerome in the lurch now, you know."

"Of course not!" he said.

She was to go on with her work, he with his. They should have living places to be alone in, and living places to be together in, like the Havelock Ellises. They'd have a house together in the mountains or the seashore, remote from other people—a biggish house, this would perhaps have to be. But she need manage it no better (or no worse, he trusted) than she now managed the Susan B. Anthony House.

Janet laughed at his incorrigible, man-made outlook on the future. Indulgent and happy, she rested her head on his shoulder.

"Why didn't you take your own advice," she asked, "and marry some independently rich woman—Charlotte, for instance?"

"Because there are a good many women that I could work with, yet never love. And some few that I could love, yet never work with. But there's only one that I could work with and love as well. At least, I've never met another."