Front matter

BY

FELIX GRENDON

Author of "Will He Come Back?", "Nixola of Wall Street," etc.

BOSTON SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY PUBLISHERS

COPYRIGHT, 1922

BY SMALL, MAYNARD & COMPANY (INCORPORATED)

Printed in the United States of America

THE MURRAY PRINTING COMPANY CAMBRIDGE, MASS.

CONTENTS

PART I. Rebellion!

PART II. Love Among the Outlaws

PART III. Janet on her Own

PART IV. Nemesis!

PART V. Hearts and Treasures

THE LOVE CHASE

"But who, alas! can love and still be wise?"

LORD BYRON

"The right to rebellion is the right to seek a higher rule

and not to wander in mere lawlessness."

GEORGE ELIOT

PART I

REBELLION

CHAPTER ONE

I

A young man of twenty-seven, a dashing Count d'Orsay type, was sitting astride a chair in flat number fifteen, one of the three-room flats in the Lorillard model tenement houses. He was alone in the room but evidently not in the flat, for he was directing animated remarks at one of two closed doors that flanked a projecting china cupboard.

"It's to be a masked ball, Cornelia," he was saying, "and I'm going as the head of John the Baptist."

Two feminine voices, one from behind the door, laughed merrily. Much pleased, the young man continued:

"Or I might go as a Spanish cavalier. The costume in Whistler's painting of 'Henry Irving as Philip II' would suit me to a T."

"Claude, I know what you're thinking of," returned a well-pitched voice behind the right door. "You're not thinking of the part of Philip II, but of the part of Don Juan, in which you expect to be irresistible."

"Gee," added kittenish tones behind the door. "It'd be a good sight better if he went as a penitent friar."

"Leading you attired as Salome, I dare say."

"Oh, no, I mean to go as St. Cecilia."

Claude burst into mocking laughter.

"You'd need seven and seventy veils for that part, Mazie," he said.

When he subsided, the same languid, purring tones replied from the left.

"Say, Claude, you have got a head. But so has a pin."

"Naughty kitten, showing its claws in company!"

"Lothario!" cried Cornelia, from the right. "No quarreling before supper."

"Oh, I need a little excitement to give me an appetite," said Claude.

He got up, walked around the room several times and then stopped in front of the left door.

"I wish you'd hurry up, Mazie."

"Mary, I'm on my fourth step," purred her voice in reply.

"I can fairly see you dressing."

Through Mazie's door came a coloratura shriek.

"In my mind's eye, that is," added Claude, after a pause.

Resuming his seat he addressed the right door again.

"Cornelia, shall we go to the Turk's or to the Spaniard's?"

"I'm sorry, Lothario, but I've got a date with 'Big Burley' for tonight."

"Hutchins Burley? Then have a good time!"

As his skeptical inflection belied his words, Cornelia asked for an explanation.

"Hutch is in a devil of a temper," declared Claude grimly, "because Rob covered him with ridicule at the Outlaw Club."

"Leave it to Robert Lloyd!"

This exclamation from the right door was followed by a peremptory command from the left.

"Say, wait a moment—I can't hear you, Claude—and I can't find my garter."

Ignoring Mazie's cries of distress, Claude proceeded to explain to the right door that Burley's temper had been ruffled that afternoon at a meeting of the Outlaws, a club for young radical and artistic people which they all belonged to, and which, since the recent signing of the armistice, had more than trebled its membership. Friction had arisen from the contact of two facts: the need of money to provide the club with larger quarters, and the proposal to hold a public masked ball as an easy means of raising the money.

Hutchins Burley, who had organized the Outlaws, sponsored this proposal, but some of the members opposed it on the ground that, in the existing state of public opinion, a radical club might get a black eye from the improprieties or the hooliganism that outsiders could practice under cover of the masks. "Big Burley" had flattened out most of the opposition with his usual steam-rollering bluster, the Outlaws, like more timid gentry, being victims of a popular superstition that a noisy debater is always in the right.

Leading the minority, Claude had moved the substitution of a restricted costume ball for the free and easy masquerade. He was ably seconded by his friend Robert Lloyd, whose short satiric speech won over many supporters, so many that "Big Burley" fairly swelled with the venom of frustration. Claude assured Cornelia that, if a narrow majority had not finally declared itself in favor of the masked ball, Burley would certainly have exploded. As it was—

II

Further explanations were cut short by the opening of the door on the left.

"Mary, I'm on my last step," announced the occupant, standing on the threshold.

Mazie Ross was taller and slenderer than her purring tones foreshadowed. Her intimates knew that, in addition to being extremely pretty, she was extremely bad. Young as she was, her looks were already enameled with cruelty. A long procession of lovers had left her wholly incapable of tenderness or shame.

With the cadenced poses of a Ziegfield "Follies" girl, she walked to Claude's chair and stood beside him invitingly. He opened his arms and drew her on his lap. She struggled just enough to put zest into the embraces he immediately engaged her in.

"You haven't invited me yet," she said, pouting. "Do you think I don't eat or drink?"

"Goddesses and sylphs live on nectar and ambrosia, you know."

"Now you're talking, old dear. But let me give you a tip. Those dishes don't figure on the menu of a cheap Turkish restaurant in the gas house district. I do believe you can get them at the Plaza or the Ritz, though."

Claude's reply to this hint was to launch into caresses so daring that Mazie took alarm. She was in the habit of giving much less than she received, and she had not as yet received very much from Claude. Therefore she wriggled, with some difficulty, out of his grasp. Perhaps she also desired to anticipate the entrance of her chum. At any rate, Cornelia just then opened the door on the right.

III

"Time I came in," she remarked; glancing significantly from one to the other.

"Yes," replied Mazie, looking the picture of wounded innocence. "Since Claude came back from the firing line in France—or was it gay Paree?—liberty and license look alike to him. All the same, my beamish boy, there's a boundary between the two."

"Boundaries exist only to be extended," chanted Claude, delighted with his own audacity.

"I don't know which of you is the more incorrigible flirt," said Cornelia, half in reproach.

"Listen to the pot calling the kettle black," cried the "Follies" girl. "Somebody pass me a whiff of brandy to uplift me."

"Don't be vulgar, Mazie."

Mazie's answer was to tango to Cornelia's cupboard, singing provocatively:

"I learnt more from Billy,

On the day I stayed from school,

Than teacher could have taught me in a week."

She would have said and done much more than this to annoy Cornelia. But she remembered in time that her sayings or doings might offend Claude Fontaine who, in the words of a fellow Outlaw, was "rich, but refined." She never knowingly gave offence to any form of wealth whilst there was hope of exploiting its owner even on the smallest scale. Besides, she was more than a little afraid of Cornelia.

After helping herself to an undiluted drink, she pranced back to the studio couch and flung herself upon it, face downwards, with the abandon of a Russian ballet dancer.

"Thank the Lord it's to be a masked affair," she called out to the others. "What'd be the good of a regular look-and-see ball? Nowadays men are that timid, you can't have a lark with them unless they don't see what they're doing, nor who they're doing it with."

"Are you throwing stones at me?" asked Claude.

"No, at Robert Lloyd. What's he doing in these diggings, anyhow? Why, he's a regular pale-face. If he's the new man—you know the kind—the kind that won't kiss a girl in the dark without first asking her permission—then give me the old Nick."

"Don't blame it all on poor Cato," Cornelia intervened.

Cornelia Covert was about thirty, blonde, loose-framed and of medium height. Her rich golden hair sounded a dominant note of which her pupils and her eyebrows were overtones. A firm, square chin heightened an illusion of strength with which her form invested her, but which her pale coloring and listless eye did not support.

"Claude sided with the strait-laced party, too," she reminded Mazie.

"Oh, well," said Claude, flushing slightly, "I'm really quite glad that the minority lost. To tell the truth, what I chiefly objected to was Hutchins Hurley's cockiness. Personally I prefer a masked ball. I haven't got Robert's interest in backing the radicals or keeping their reputation spotless. Let's risk it, I say. It's a case of nothing venture, nothing have, isn't it?"

"So Robert was the real leader of the rumpus all the time," said Cornelia, sweetly. "I thought so. Still, I'm free to say that I admire his courage in defying 'Big Burley.' Especially when I think how afraid of Hutch all the Outlaws are."

Claude rose to his full stature and walked to the head of the couch where he stood, handsome and commanding.

"Am I afraid of him?" he asked, amused.

"Well, you generally agree with him, Lothario."

He received this jab with a smile. He supposed Cornelia to be speaking only of bodily fear, and as his physical courage and strength were unusual, the shaft glanced off.

"I mean," said Cornelia, "that, like Big Burley, you are an anarchist at heart, only not such a wicked one. You work within the law, he works without."

Claude was preparing a vigorous assault on any theory that placed Burley and himself in the same class, when a ring at the outer door took the opportunity away.

CHAPTER TWO

I

That part of the city of New York which the older charts describe as Kips Bay, now encompasses the East Thirties, Forties, and Fifties. It is a section of Manhattan famous in song and story. Here in 1635 came Jacobus Kip, the learned Dutch patroon and, with bricks brought from Holland, built a farmhouse on land where St. Gabriel's Park and an astonishingly well-stocked library now flourish. Here Washington had another site for his movable headquarters while, on the heights of Murray Hill hard by, he rallied his troops against the redcoats. Here in Artillery Park (at First Avenue and Forty-fifth Street), Nathan Hale was executed. And here at Turtle Bay (where the East Forties now end) the "Quality" had a fashionable bathing beach in the early eighteen-hundreds.

Of these historic memories the average Kipsian is ignorant, quite contemptuously ignorant. Far livelier realities occupy his thoughts. In the heart of modern Kips Bay there are slums, stables, hospitals, asylums, and model tenement houses, five features ranged in an ascending order of precedence from the neighborhood's point of view. Kips Bay is keen on this order of precedence. No lady of the White House giving her first State Ball could well be keener.

Slums rank lowest in the neighborhood's appraisal because they are the natural or routine habitat of the human species there. Stables go a peg higher, not because they are dirtier, or because artists frequently turn them into studios but because they serve as club houses for professional gangsters, and because a crack gunman is at once the pride and the terror of his district. Hospitals outclass the stables by the same law of human nature that makes an extra holiday outclass a Sunday. For the hospital is a sort of haven in which the true-born Kipsian expects, now and then, to spend a furlough from the ravages of alcohol, from undernourishment, or merely from the wear and tear of the industrial machine.

In their turn, the hospitals yield the palm to the several asylums which, adjoining the hovels of the destitute, provide the infirm, the defective, or the insane with all the comforts and luxuries of the rich. Easily the handsomest buildings in the neighborhood, the asylums stand unrivalled in aristocratic prestige. And this is not due to a Kipsian gratitude for charity, nor to the growing artistic cultivation of the masses. It is due to an inborn respect for plutocracy, a respect that persists in the heart of every Kipsian, no matter how loudly he may applaud the labor agitator who assures him that an asylum is at once a monument to the uneasy consciences of donors and a sepulchre for those soldiers of industry who do not perish in active service.

It would be as difficult for the Kipsian to explain to the outside world why his model tenements outrank asylums as for the outside world to explain to the Kipsian why a civilian Secretary of the Navy can give orders to the uniformed Admiral of the Fleet. In either case, the simplest course the perplexed brain can pursue is to accept the facts on faith.

This is precisely what the Kipsian has done—he has accepted both the civilian Secretary and the model tenements on faith. Nevertheless, the facts quite pass his understanding. The model tenement, he has heard, was built in his midst for the likes of himself, for toilers at the border line of pauperism. It was built, moreover, to accustom him to habits of cleanliness and thrift. Unfortunately, the rooms are too small to hold his furniture, or the furniture is too bulky to leave room for cleanliness. In any case, the rents are so high that only the "aristocrats of labor" can afford to pay them, and the "aristocrats of labor" are not so low as to merge their fortunes with the denizens of Kips Bay.

Because their habits, their pocketbooks, and their pride are thus offended, native-born Kipsians have unanimously fought shy of the model tenements. And these evidences of concern for the welfare of the masses might have proven a poor investment for public benefactors, had not the situation been saved by sundry artists, writers, actors, singers, promoters, efficiency engineers, socialists, anarchists and dynamitards who promptly rented every available apartment besides filling up a long waiting list of impatient applicants.

To the simple-minded natives of Kips Bay, the model tenementers stand clean beyond the bounds of everyday belief. Here are people who plainly hail from comfortable homes, and yet voluntarily set up housekeeping in the slums; who neither work by day nor sleep by night; who flirt with riches and coquet with poverty; and who go to and from their abodes, one day in rags, the next in motor cars. By such contradictions respectable Kipsians are completely mystified. But having grown accustomed to their mystery, they have ceased to hate it. They have even begun to pay it the compliment which idolatrous man usually pays the unfathomable: they worship it above all the things that they can fathom.

And thus it has come to pass that, within the confines of Kips Bay, the model tenement lords it over the asylum for the insane.

The model tenementers affect a lofty indifference to this high rank; also to the slum-dwellers who confer it. They affect an even loftier indifference to the existence of the newer model tenements in the East End Avenue and John Jay Park neighborhoods. When comparisons are instituted between these more modern, more luxurious structures and their own, the Lorillarders smile superiorly and say: "Let Kips Bay renegades with a sneaking preference for uptown respectability migrate to John Jay Park, or better still, to Hell Gate! We want no truck with them. The one and only Lorillard speaks for itself."

If you probe further they will ask you to lift up your eyes at night to their electrically lighted pagoda roof and then tell them why they should not be content to be "a twinkling model set in a sea of slums." No. Impossible to get them excited by sly disparagements or open comparisons.

Impossible, that is, unless your comparison brings in Greenwich Village. Dare to assert that the model tenement district reminds you of Greenwich Village or the Latin Quarter of Paris, and you will encounter an explosion. You will learn to your sorrow that the cold model tenementer is not cold at all, that he is a volcano covered with a very little snow.

He will bombard you with: "Greenwich Village me eye! Liken us to a fake Bohemia, to a near-beer substitute for the Parisian Latin Quarter! Say, where did you get that stuff? We don't imitate the Latin Quarter or any other foreign quarter. We are an American quarter. We are the Kips Bay model tenement quarter—and that is all there is to it."

He will swear that the differences between Greenwich Village and Kips Bay are too numerous to record. He will challenge you to scour the Village for a parallel to the Kips Bay Outlaw Club with its professional news-faker for president, its one-legged gunman for sergeant-at-arms, and its purser-of-a-pirate-ship for treasurer.

True, he may admit a superficial resemblance in the matter of devotion to art. But he will point out that the artistic set in Greenwich Village is almost the whole village, whereas the artistic set in the model tenements is but a small part of Kips Bay. He will assure you that: "The Village takes up Love for Love's Sake and Art for Art's Sake. We have no use for that kind of bunk. We take up Art and Love for the sake of anything and everything but Love and Art; for the sake of politics or money, or just for the sake of excitement."

The way the purser-of-the-pirate-ship expresses the difference is: "We go in more for powder than for paint."

By powder he means gunpowder.

II

It was in these Lorillard tenements (named after Westing Lorillard, the well-known brewer and philanthrophist who endowed them) that Cornelia Covert and Mazie Ross occupied apartment number fifteen, (two bedrooms, kitchen and bath). And it was by a ring of number fifteen's bell that Claude Fontaine was cut short.

While Cornelia went to the door, Mazie transformed the kitchen as if by magic. She wafted a heap of soiled dishes into a basin in the cupboard, deftly concealed the stove behind a Japanese screen, and then converted the washtubs into a table by covering them with a pretty denim cloth. Tubs, in a sitting-room, offended her sense of propriety, even when they were porcelain tubs, as these were, with fine zinc tops. But the denim cover blotted out iniquity, on the principle that what the eye can't see, the heart don't grieve! Fortunately. For the limitations of a three-room apartment left no choice but to employ the one fair-sized room in the triple capacity of kitchen, dining-room and sitting-room.

Tapping her dainty hands against each other to brush away the dust, Mazie faced the newcomer, a young man about Claude's age.

"Why, it's only Rob!" she exclaimed.

"By which Mazie means to say, Cato, that we trembled for fear you were Hutchins Burley."

"Do you expect him?" asked Robert, turning to Cornelia.

"Burley's going to take me to supper."

"That man foils me at every turn," said Robert with mock gravity. "I wanted to take you to supper myself. Cornelia, you have no intuition whatever."

"Well, how do you do!"

Cornelia had a whimsical way of using this salutation as a mild rebuke.

Mazie, who was perched on the quondam tubs so that Claude could get the full benefit of a very shapely pair of legs, made a grimace at Robert Lloyd.

"If that isn't the third invite this evening! Cornelia, you're a perfect pig. Rob, pale face never won fair lady."

"Mazie, your ignorance of human nature is appalling," said Robert. "What you really ought to say is that pale faces never count their chickens till they're hatched."

"Is that so, Mr. Cleverdick? Well, listen to me. Cornelia likes her men in three dimensions, not in two. That's why she's going out with Hutch."

"Well, if Rob is two dimensions," said Claude, "Hutch is eight or ten."

Robert joined in the general laughter; Mazie's manner was really very friendly to him, although the banter sounded spiteful. Cornelia now insisted that they were all to join her and Burley at supper; and Robert, under pressure, consented to make a fifth.

Robert was by no means as unprepossessing as Mazie's brusque remarks might have led one to infer. True, he was not handsome, dashing, and meteoric like Claude Fontaine. He was of medium height and slender, with a figure touched by poetry and grace. Women described him as "so nice" until, scorched by his flaming spirit, they learnt that ideas, and ideas alone, could make him incandescent.

"Lucky you left after Hutchins bowled us over," he said to Claude. "The rest of the meeting was dry as dust."

"I thought as much," said Claude. "What happened?"

"It was voted to supplement the main affair of the ball with a few side features."

"Like what?"

"Like a raffle, a fish pond, and—several other things that I fear I paid no attention to. All I remember is that I was deputed to get some one to act as a fortune-teller."

"Cornelia's the girl for that," cried Mazie. "She's a regular clip at reading palms, men's palms especially. Oh, she can do it slick. Why, she can give you a worse character than Chiro."

"What luck. The fact is, Cornelia, the committee had you in mind. May I count on you? You shall be mistress of a gypsy tent."

"No, Robert le Diable, a thousand times, no! Don't you know my habits better than to invite me to a ball?"

It had pleased Cornelia to "live in seclusion" as she called it, for some time past.

"I know you don't go to dances, Cornelia. Neither do I. But think of the opportunity we'll have of talking undisturbed and finding out what other dislikes we have in common. While the rest go on with the dance, our joy will be unconfined."

"Indeed! And in return for your improving conversation, I'm to make up characters for silly people who never had any? No, thank you. I don't propose to spend half an evening letting tiresome people bore me, and the other half watching the fine art of dancing degraded into an orgy of fox-trots and jazz steps."

Mazie stuck her tongue out when Cornelia wasn't looking, and Claude responded with a sympathetic wink.

"Don't be a spoil-sport, Cornelia!" said Mazie, hitting the nail on the head. "What is Rob to do?"

"Yes, what is poor Robin to do, poor thing?" echoed Claude.

Cornelia plainly enjoyed the sensation her blank refusal created. But her elation subsided when she caught a glimpse of Mazie and Claude in a stealthy interchange of grimaces.

"Do nothing," she replied tartly. "Or ask Mazie. She'd make a capital gypsy with her dark hair and velvet paws. And she could eke out her fortune-telling with her monkeyshines."

"Thanks, old girl. But I'll take Claude's tip and go as Salome, and I'll dance my feet off just to tantalize you. If the boys want me to, I'll do the dance of the seven veils for them."

"All seven?" asked Claude, affecting an air of seasoned rakishness.

"All but the seventh will be one too many if Big Burley is present," said Cornelia.

"Just so, Cornelia," said Claude. "A good reason for you to come and see that Mazie behaves herself. And that Big Burley does likewise. As the Gypsy Queen you may be able to keep him in order by predicting dire disasters for him. For he's a regular old screen villain: he fears nothing but the fictitious."

"Lothario, in the present state of my own fortunes, I'm not keen to tell other people their fortunes."

"Oh, but come anyhow. If not as a gypsy, then as a ballet dancer or a columbine. Or anything else that takes your fancy. We won't let you stay at home, so get that out of your head."

"Silly boy," said Cornelia, with a prolonged, musical laugh. "A ballet dancer's dress calls for the most cast iron of corsets. Do you see me putting on those abominations? No. Not even for love of you, dear."

She was fond of drawing to the attention of her men friends the fact that a corset was an article she rigorously abjured.

"Oh, the boys know you never wear the iron maiden," said Mazie tartly. "All the Outlaws know it by heart. But they won't treat you any the worse for it, Corny. Men like a girl to be squashy—"

"Provided there's not too much to squash," Claude thrust in.

"Your remarks are all highly illuminating," said Robert Lloyd addressing the company. "But they don't help me out of my box. Remember, I promised the committee to get Cornelia for the gypsy act."

"What, my frisky youth," exclaimed Mazie. "Expect Cornelia to hide her golden coiffure under a shopworn wig! Guess again."

"Mazie's shot is a good one," said Robert. "Cornelia, you can't refuse on no better ground than that helping us would put you out of countenance."

"Out of hair," corrected Claude.

"Out of spite," added Mazie.

"Well," replied Cornelia, reluctantly yielding to this concentrated fire, "I won't go myself. But I'll get you some one else. I have a dear little girl in mind who is as charming as she is original."

"Who is this paragon?" interrupted Claude.

"She's a Brooklyn girl. Her name is Janet Barr."

"Janet Barr!" exclaimed Robert. "Why, you can't get her to come to an affair like this."

"Indeed!"

"Yes. I know her family well. She lives in an atmosphere of Puritan blue laws perfumed with brimstone and sulphur. Her mother—"

"She'll come," interrupted Cornelia, with supreme confidence. "But Claude is bored, Mazie is making sheep's eyes, and I'm hungry—let's go to supper."

"What about Big Burley," protested Mazie. "Aren't you going to wait for him?"

"No. But you may if you like. I'm too hungry."

When Cornelia saw a chance of tormenting some one, she could move with celerity. Her coat and hat were on in a twinkling, and she was ready to go while Robert and Claude were still fumbling for their hats and coats, and Mazie sat irresolute on the washtubs.

"But really, Cornelia, if somebody doesn't wait for Burley—"

"Bother Burley! He should have been here a quarter of an hour ago. If it'll quiet you, however, I'll tack a note outside the door, telling him to follow us to the Asia Minor Cafeteria."

Secretly gloating over the prospect of Burley's chagrin, she suited the action to the word. While she was writing the note, Claude said to Robert:

"I fear Big Burley will chalk up another black mark against you. He's your boss on the Evening Chronicle, isn't he?"

"Yes. His word is law there since he wrote up the Montana dynamite trial."

"Nonsense," said Cornelia. "He won't take it out on Robert. I'll see to that. He has vicious bursts of temper, but he's not bad to the core."

"Cornelia, every tiger-tamer thinks his pets are full of the milk of human kindness. You must excuse a layman for taking a more cautious view. Rob's bread and butter depend on the Evening Chronicle."

Robert cut him short.

"Don't worry, Claude," he said. "I've nothing to lose but my chains, and I've you and the girls and a merry evening to gain."

"Good, Cato, good!" cried Cornelia. "I like your spirit. You shall go with me. You, Claude, for being saucy, may stay behind and tarry till your bonnie Mazie's ready. Or you may wait for Hutchins Burley and, if possible, avert the wrath to come. Meet us at the restaurant, Mazie."

With these words, Cornelia took Robert by the sleeve and marched out, leaving Claude staring blankly after her.

"Upon my word!" said the young man, as much amused as he was vexed. "Look sharp, Mazie, will you?" he added, after a moment's pause. "We may yet catch up to them, if you don't put too fine a point—on your complexion."

III

But despatch was not Mazie's forte. And so, while she was still prinking in the bedroom, and Claude was cooling his heels in the kitchen, Hutchins Burley arrived. When Claude opened the door, the hulking Falstaffian form entered, puffing and panting, overheated with liquor as well as with climbing the stairs.

"Haven't kept the old girl waiting, have I?" he gasped, between breaths.

"Oh, no," said Claude, evasively. "She has gone ahead."

Burley, who had evidently not seen the note Cornelia had tacked on the door, acted as if he had not heard Claude's remarks either. He tramped to the door of the first bedroom, opened it unceremoniously and, when he found it empty, stalked noisily to the second.

"Where the devil is Cornelia?" he demanded, turning to Mazie.

"She was hungry and went on to the Asia Minor."

"Alone?"

"Well, Robert Lloyd happened to be here. He went too."

A sulphurous explosion of oaths testified to "Big Burley's" feelings.

Hutchins Burley was a sinister personage both in newspaper and in radical circles. Among artists who eked out their scanty talents with alcoholic inspiration and took a serious view of the Bohemianism of the Lorillard tenements, he cut a considerable figure. Others dreaded or avoided him.

Curious conclusions might have been drawn from the fact that, though he hung out with parlor anarchists of the Outlaw type and was reputed to be a close friend of real anarchists like Emma Goldman, he was an all-important member of the staff of the sham-liberal Evening Chronicle.

But no one bothered to draw these conclusions.

In truth, few people cared to think long or deeply about Hutchins Burley. A great hulk of a man, with a pitted face and shifty eyes, he was a dreadful and repellant figure, yet one that chained the attention. Some said offhand that he knew more about Charles Edward Strong, the editor and owner of the Evening Chronicle, than was good for either of them. Others believed that his influence had been won by the sensational hits he had made in "covering" the Lawrence strike and other big labor outbreaks.

One thing was certain. Newspaper Row hated and yet feared him; the Kips Bay model tenementers eyed him askance and yet elected him to high office in the Outlaw Club. A few shrewd observers troubled the placid waters in both camps by enquiring from time to time: "Can Hutchins Burley serve both Park Row and the Radicals?"

Wine was not one of Burley's weak points: he could stand any quantity of it. But women touched his Achilles' heel. On this point he was like Falstaff, "corrupt, corrupt, and tainted in desire."

Hence his explosion at Claude's news. The picture of Cornelia gallivanting off with Robert made his great frame shake with rage.

"What does she mean by going off with that puppy?" he snarled, ejecting the words from the left side of his mouth. "Don't she know better than to break an engagement without so much as a by-your-leave?"

Mazie tried to coax him into a good humor. But the sweeter her advances, the blacker grew his passion.

"Oh, get over it, Hutch," said Claude at last. "After all, if you make an appointment for seven, you can't expect Cornelia to wait until eight."

"She'd have waited but for that thundering young cad," shouted Burley.

"Don't go on like that, Hutch," begged Mazie in a panic. "You know he's Claude's friend."

"Oh, that's nothing," said Claude urbanely. "Names won't hurt Rob. If it relieves your feelings, Hutch, swear at me, too, from the bottom of your heart."

Claude had a temper of his own. But the chief instinct of his social existence was to stave off the disagreeable—except where his own desires were thwarted.

"Ready, Mazie?" he continued. "Well, then, we might as well go. Calm down, Hutch, and come along with us."

"I'll be damned if I do. I won't eat with a girl that breaks an engagement, or prefers a snorting, bouncing, snapping little cur to me. Just wait till he comes snivelling along for the next assignment. I'll show him what's what!"

"Oh, cool off!" exclaimed Claude, whose patience was thoroughly exhausted.

For a second it looked as if Burley would hurl himself upon the younger man. But as Claude's athletic frame seemed fully prepared for the contingency, he picked up his hat, glared himself past Mazie, and fumed his way to the door. He stopped at the threshold.

"Just let the beggar sneak in tomorrow!" he shouted, his left jaw moving with a grotesque, machine-like rhythm. "I'll kick him into kingdom come!"

Claude smiled disdainfully, turned his back on Burley, and went to comfort Mazie, who was making the most of the pose of Dulcinea in distress.

CHAPTER THREE

I

One morning a letter addressed to Miss Janet Barr was delivered at a house in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn. The writing was legible enough, but a new and somewhat flustered servant placed the letter next to Miss Emily Barr's plate. This young lady, Janet's older sister, was the first member of the family to reach the breakfast table. She was one of those well-filled-out single women who abound in the better districts of Brooklyn, and who look more matronly than a great many married women, perhaps because their figures have not been pared down by wedlock in middle-class circumstances.

Casually she picked up the envelope and opened it. She laid the enclosure down before she had read very far, took it up again, laid it down a second time, and then surveyed it with painful indecision. Finally she rang for the maid.

"Laura, have you called Miss Janet?"

"Not yet, Miss Emily. She told me not to call her before half past eight this morning. She said—"

"Never mind. Don't call her until I tell you to."

"Very well, ma'am."

After the girl had gone, Emily took the letter and went upstairs to the back sitting room. She did not allow the turmoil within her to disturb her dignity or quicken her pace. She found her mother seated in a rocking chair and musing over a passage from the Bible that lay open on her lap.

"Good morning, my child," said Mrs. Barr, as her daughter entered. "You must have made short work of breakfast. Are you late?"

"No, mother, I've brought you a letter I opened by mistake. It is directed to Janet."

"Oh, well, just lick it together again," she said, with arid humor, "and lay it beside Janet's plate. She'll never know the difference. You know Janet."

Mrs. Barr's levity appeared to distress Emily.

"That's not what's troubling me, mother. I—"

She hesitated and held out the envelope with a good imitation of helplessness. Her mother stopped rocking and looked in some astonishment from Emily to the letter.

Mrs. Barr was a tall, well-set woman, whose rigid bearing was but little softened by her refined surroundings. She was neither thin nor fleshy; there was something solid and conservative about her that suggested the Chinese wall. Solidity was her pronounced characteristic, solidity of soul no less than solidity of body. Her face was hard; it was full of lines that looked like razor edges drawn in gall.

Mrs. Barr had been beautiful in her youth and might still have been so had she not sacrificed everything—everything but her love of comfort—to a greed for power. Experience had taught her that a fit of sickness was a right royal prop to domestic tyranny. Thus she had cultivated ill-health until nothing saved her from being a professional invalid but her naturally strong constitution and an inherited playfulness which still occasionally emerged between long fits of bad temper.

She was the president of the King's Daughters' Society in a local Presbyterian church, and, as she was preparing for a meeting that day, she cut Emily short.

"Well, Emily, what do you want me to do?" she said, less amiably than before. "I'll explain it to Janet if you like."

"You don't understand, mother. I not only opened the letter, I read part of it before I realized my mistake."

"That's not a crime, dear."

"No—But what I read amazed me. It seemed all of a piece with Janet's strange behavior of late."

"Indeed? Who is the letter from?"

Emily flushed slightly.

"Mother, I told you I didn't read as far as that. I couldn't help seeing the first line, however. And that confirmed the suspicion we have both had, that Janet has been falling under bad influences."

"Emily, is some man corrupting her?"

"It looks like a woman's hand to me. What do you think?"

Emily gave the letter to her mother, who scrutinized the handwriting for a moment.

"Well," she said at length, "there can be no harm in your repeating to me what you inadvertently saw."

"I don't like to say anything that may turn out to Janet's disadvantage," said Emily, with an effect of reluctance that deceived even herself. "It will seem almost like betraying a confidence."

"Nonsense, Emily. If evil threatens Janet, it is your duty as a sister to warn me, and my duty as a mother to protect her. Our consciences would reproach us if we failed in this."

"But Janet and I were such good friends—would be still, if she had never met those Lorillard tenement people."

Emily said this with the bitterness of outraged feelings.

It was in a studio in one of the model tenements in Kips Bay, three weeks before, that Janet had met Cornelia and other people of radical tendencies. Emily had once enjoyed a monopoly of Janet's heroine worship. The friendship between the sisters had cooled some time ago, but Emily had chosen, rather arbitrarily, to look upon the Lorillard incident as the turning point.

"I can understand your feelings, my dear," said Mrs. Barr. "Their delicacy does you credit. But if these people you mention—anarchists and Bohemians, I think you called them—are trying to lure my Janet into wicked ways, it is time for a mother to interfere."

In spite of these words, she hesitated to read Janet's letter, open though the envelope was. Her domestic tyranny had its humanly illogical side, and there were certain rules of good breeding which she observed as scrupulously as she imposed them. Not once since her two girls entered High School had she opened their letters or so much as read them by stealth.

"You are sure that it comes from one of those tenement persons?" she asked, picking up the letter again.

"Oh, yes. I'm sure I recognize the handwriting. But, mother, do you think we ought to read it?"

This was the very point Mrs. Barr had been mentally debating. Emily's feeble protest had the effect of stimulating her to a quick decision.

"Nothing could be further from my mind than any wish to pry into Janet's legitimate private affairs," she said magisterially. "But here is a letter opened by mistake. From what you read by accident we may infer that it throws a light on those recent actions of your sister's that have caused us all great pain. I shall never let considerations of delicacy or etiquette deter me from an action that my conscience tells me is right."

A look of sanctified resignation passed over Emily's face as her mother took out the enclosure and read the following:

Friday morning.

Dear Araminta:

Have you heard me speak of the Outlaws? They are artists and writers who live beyond the pale of convention, and in an atmosphere painful to the wealthy, purse-proud darlings of our nation. In order to enjoy their outlawry unmolested, they wish to produce club quarters from which artistic elegance is by no means to be banished. Such quarters cost money. To raise the necessary funds a masked ball will take place two weeks from today, and those who come to dance to the tunes must help to pay the piper.

This means that it has been proposed to add one or two tributary features to the main function. Remembering your wizardry at palm reading, I concluded that your raven locks and appealing eyes would be a perfect match for a gypsy costume, and that a dear little gypsy who could tell wise people their virtues and foolish people their fortunes would be a priceless asset. I know you don't believe in palmistry any more than I do, but isn't it your very scepticism that enables you to practice the art with a dash of diablerie that carries conviction?

If you won't accept, I may be obliged to play the gypsy myself. Can you picture my straw-colored plaits in such an Oriental role? But I know your artistic sense will not permit me to do with amateurish bungling what you can do with professional skill. Besides, two peerless young gentlemen, whom I could name if I chose, will pine away with melancholy if you refuse.

Before you answer "yes" or "no," come and spend Wednesday afternoon with

Yours devotedly,

Cornelia.

Mrs. Barr turned the letter over to Emily, who read it while her mother grimly closed the Bible and waited.

"I thought as much!" cried the young lady, as she reached the signature. "It's from Cornelia Covert."

"Who is she, pray?"

"Don't you remember the girl who created a scandal by running away with Percival Houghton, the English artist?"

"Who already had a wife and children in England?"

"Yes, that was Cornelia Covert. You may recall that she was one of my school friends, when we lived in McDonough Street."

"Don't remind me of her past," said Mrs. Barr curtly. "Her present is bad enough. Ring for Laura, please. How did Janet come to know her? Through Robert Lloyd, perhaps. Has she been meeting him again, too?"

"No. It came about in this way. Cornelia left Mr. Houghton not long after their elopement. Or, more likely, he left her. At all events she returned to New York. She was brazen enough to celebrate the occasion. She invited Janet—Janet, though I was her classmate—to a big party in the Lorillard tenements."

"If I remember aright, Janet asked you to go with her?"

"Yes. But I declined as soon as I heard that tenement artists, movie actors and other queer people like Robert Lloyd were to be present at the affair."

"The party was given, so Janet assured me at the time, by some society woman."

"It was held in Miss Lucy Chandler Duke's studio. I did not know then that the Chandler Dukes were radicals as well as millionaires. And, as Janet begged me very hard not to tell you the particulars, I kept the matter a secret."

Mrs. Barr tingled with irritation at what she chose to view as Janet's deceit.

"She said a great deal about the Chandler Dukes!" she exclaimed bitterly, "and nothing at all about Cornelia Covert or Robert Lloyd."

"I did not think Janet would misuse the occasion to form a fast and furious friendship with a person like Cornelia Covert," said Emily, insidiously fanning the flame.

"If she gave less thought to the pomps and vanities of the world, Emily, she could have declined, as you did. But you should not have promoted her deceit. See what comes from walking in the ways of ungodly people. Janet hobnobs with unbelievers, you are deprived of a sister's companionship, and I must give up an important meeting at the church. That is how the flesh and the devil waste the Lord's time. I pray God to help me bear with the weaknesses of your father and the sinfulness of his daughters."

Laura, the maid, came in just then and was despatched with an urgent summons for Miss Janet.

Mrs. Barr's resources of anger were so considerable that when one member of the family displeased her, everyone else received a share of the overflow of her wrath. The weaker the member the more generous the share. Mr. Barr, by all odds the weakest member of the family of which he was the Biblical head, usually bore the brunt of every domestic storm.

But he was in the fairly safe haven of his own room on the top floor. In his absence Emily almost regretted the part she had just played. Being the only available victim for the moment, she had to act as lightning conductor, much against her will.

The maid had not gone very far in her quest of Janet before that young lady herself burst somewhat incontinently into the sitting room. Her slender mobile body with the lustrous black hair and the gray eyes full of life and intelligence, made her a striking contrast to her two inflexible relations.

"Good morning, children," she cried, without paying the atmosphere any special attention. "How's this for the role of the early bird? Spare your praises, Emily. It's papa's doing. He's getting up now. And I suppose he's anxious to advertise the unearthly hour."

The two petrified figures quite chilled her prattling.

"Is anything the matter? You haven't swallowed a sour plum, Emily, have you?" she asked, facing them both.

"Janet," said Mrs. Barr, in a tone that would have frozen quicksilver, "I wish to speak to you for a minute."

"What have I done now?" asked Janet, sitting down and looking speculatively from her mother to her sister.

"By mistake Emily opened a letter addressed to you. Laura had put it beside her plate."

"Is that why you're so glum, Emily? How silly. Don't give, the matter another thought, please."

Emily looked very uncomfortable.

"It's from Cornelia Covert," she said, averting her eyes from Janet's, and the mother added with asperity:

"It invites you to mingle with certain persons who call themselves Outlaws."

"Really? You and Emily have the advantage of me. I haven't read the letter yet. May I?"

Emily silently relinquished the missive and Janet calmly read it, while the others looked on, keeping their vexation warm. Mrs. Barr spoke as soon as Janet had finished.

"Yes, I have read the letter," she declared with emphasis.

"Really, mother, you may read all my letters if you wish to. But I think I might be allowed to see them first. I am twenty-four, old enough, therefore, to get my correspondence uncensored."

"You are my daughter, Janet, and if you were forty-four instead of twenty-four, it would still be my duty to guard you against evil influences, and to look after your spiritual welfare."

"I don't see how your spiritual guardianship affects my legal right to my own letters." She added scornfully: "Am I to consider Emily as one of my moral guardians, too?"

Janet was not easily aroused. When she was, she spoke in low cold tones that irritated her listeners more than the sharpest abuse.

"I read the first sentence accidentally—" began Emily indignantly. Mrs. Barr interrupted her.

"You know quite well that I have made it a rule not to interfere with your correspondence," she said, acridly. "But I consider that what Emily saw by chance justified me in making this case an exception, especially as you have been so diligent lately in wasting the Lord's time."

This was a pet phrase of Mrs. Barr's.

"I don't understand the charge," said Janet, like a prisoner in the dock.

"I refer to your recent godless behavior."

"Godless!"

"You know quite well what I mean: your flagrant absence from services, your irreverent remarks when a religious topic is discussed, your readiness to put frivolous pleasures before church duties, and your studied avoidance of all the friends of the family."

"Except Robert Lloyd," interjected Emily, pointedly.

"Why drag in Robert?" said Janet, flashing a look at her sister. "You got mamma to forbid him the house a whole month ago."

"I had every reason to believe Mr. Lloyd to be an atheist," said Mrs. Barr, who thus concisely classified all disbelievers in revealed creeds. "That is why I requested you not to invite him here again."

"Leaving me to the edifying companionship of Emily's stuffy pedagogue friends," said Janet, in a white heat.

"We needn't pursue that matter now, Janet. What I wish to say at present is merely that a masked ball is out of the question. A masked ball! What are you thinking of, my child? Not to say that the invitation comes from people who are perfectly impossible."

"Impossible!" cried Janet, bursting out under terrible pressure. "They're quite possible for me. Do you expect me to chum up with Emily's high school cats, or the old maids from the King's daughters, or the decrepit old ladies from your missionary club?"

Her mother fairly reeled at the impudence of the attack.

This from Janet, of all people! The girl had always been a mild-tempered and tractable child. That is, she had been entirely tractable except for half a dozen fits of rebellion so scattered in point of time and so completely suppressed in point of fact that they could conveniently be overlooked. But a face-to-face defiance of a maternal decree was a new and startling departure. It was an unheard of act, such as Mrs. Barr could ascribe only to the promptings of the Evil One, inducted into Janet's acquaintance by her Kips Bay friends.

Mrs. Barr came of an old New England family with Puritan traditions reaching back beyond Cotton Mather and the witch huntings. It was inconceivable to her that a daughter should be allowed to address a mother as Janet had just addressed her. It was inconceivable to her even in the spring of 1919, when the civil war between parents and children (or rather, the uncivil war between the young and the old), though raging furiously in the dynamic centers of New York, London, Paris and Berlin, had not produced so much as a ripple amongst the Barrs of Brooklyn or the Barrs anywhere in the wide world.

"That will do, Janet," she said, rising to her full stature and assuming an expression that gave every line of her face its crudest edge. "Your language confirms my worst fears. I shall say no more."

Janet wished that this were true, but she knew it was a mere euphemism. And, indeed, her mother continued with icy piety:

"I shall pray that understanding may be given you to realize that happiness comes from the spirit, not from the flesh, from an exaltation of the heart, not from the pleasures of dances and parties. As for this Cornelia Covert, her reputation is such that you should shrink from linking your name with hers. A woman who has lived in an unholy alliance with a man is no friend for an innocent girl."

"Innocent! Am I more innocent than she is, or simply more ignorant?"

"Janet!" remonstrated Emily, "how can you speak in this way—when our sole object is to help you—"

"Help me! Please don't make me laugh, Emily," Janet cut in, bitterly. "A little more of this help of yours and mother will have no difficulty whatever in arguing me down to the ground."

"I don't propose to argue with you, my dear," said Mrs. Barr, motioning to Emily, who flounced angrily upstairs. "I simply say that I don't approve of this masked ball. One thing more. I wish you to promise not to go."

Janet was really terrified at her mother's icy tone, but as her convictions were deeply involved, she replied with obstinate defiance:

"I'm sorry, but I see no reason for giving such a promise."

"Very well," said her mother, adding, with a veiled menace in the harmless words: "Remember, you don't go with my approval."

"Then I'll go without," muttered Janet under her breath, as her mother majestically left the room.

III

Janet stood alone, her hands clenched in nervous tension. How passionately she resented her mother's domestic tyranny! In the narrow, intolerant religious atmosphere of Brooklyn, she had endured it long enough, endured it since childhood as one of the mysterious dispensations of Providence.

Her mind was flooded with hatred of the Barrs and all that they stood for.

The Barrs were a characteristic product of the American environment. Mrs. Barr belonged to a decadent branch of an old Mayflower stock connected with the Bradleys, the Saltonstalls, and other well-known New England names. She had married the American born son of a Scotch immigrant; but, as she ruled him with a rod of iron, few traces of his gentler European parentage had slipped into the household or stayed there long if they had. For Mrs. Barr charged the family atmosphere to its full capacity with all the narrowness, harshness, and spitefulness of her own Puritan inheritance.

Robert Lloyd had assured Janet that her family was as typical an American family as could be found east of the Alleghanies. Its Puritan (or rather, Impuritan) tradition was depressed still further (if that were possible) by contact with the low standard of living introduced during a century of reckless and promiscuous immigration. Its leading tradition was the enforcement of an absolute veto upon all social experiments, a veto springing not from love of life or regard for the community but from hatred of life and contempt for the individual.

It was Robert, too, (in their brief acquaintance) who had pointed out that families like the Barrs were to be found everywhere in the wide world. But it was in backwater places like Brooklyn that they congregated densely enough to work mischief. It was from such points of concentration, all too numerous in America, that their outstanding traits spread like an infectious miasma upon all surrounding efforts at progress.

Janet did not need to be told that one of these outstanding traits was a devotion to the cult of doing nothing. Doing nothing with a restless intermittency and an extravagant expenditure of undirected force.

Doing nothing! Janet had learned that this was not the same as having nothing to do. It was a religion of serried "thou shalt nots" applied with passionate rigor to all adventurous departures from the routine of everyday life. Doing nothing meant the avoidance of actions contrary to custom, law, or the supposed requirements of comfort. As regards herself, it meant a studied observance of restrictions, which your own interpretation of law, or custom, or abstinent appetite (with a light accent on the appetite) prescribed for you. As regards your fellow man, it meant his rigid observance of restrictions which not his, but your, interpretation of law, or custom, or abstinent appetite (with a heavy accent on the abstinent) prescribed for him.

It meant an aggressive policy of wholesale and indiscriminate prohibition.

Janet had often listened, at first unwillingly, later receptively, to Robert's elaboration of the idea. His views had shaped themselves in some such way as this.

The tradition in which Janet's childhood was moulded was that baser, narrower, lower class American tradition which has always been at grips with the heroic patrician spirit of the Declaration of Independence. It was a tradition of negation, restriction, deprivation; of deprivation for yourself within reasonable limits, and of deprivation for your neighbor within no reasonable limits at all. It was a tradition that rallied opposition to Sunday newspapers, Sunday novels, Sunday theatres, and Sunday sports, besides minutely networking itself through a thousand insidious channels into all sorts of social behavior every day of the week. It was a tradition, not of the magnificent no of self-control but of the demoralizing no of compulsory rectitude.

In short, it was the tradition from which the successive prohibition movements—beer, sex, manners, and what not—have drawn their ethical backing.

Families like the Barrs were the moral backbone of a strong section of American public opinion. Their prejudices, jealousies and pruderies pitched the tone of national manners, fixed the standard of public taste, curbed the flight of the country's artistic genius, and gave an American the same cultural standing as against a European that a citizen of Boonville held as against a full-fledged New Yorker.

The same causes erected an Anthony Comstock into a national figure better known than the President's cabinet, gave rise to episodes like that of Maxim Gorky, and made a raid on the women bathers at Atlantic City a topic of serious discussion throughout the country.

In Robert's view, the Barrs of America prided themselves on the cast-iron taboos they had laid on all decent and civilized manifestations of sex. They had eliminated every natural, healthy and spontaneous expression of the sex instinct from American books, music, pictures and daily intercourse. This was their first contribution to Western culture.

Their second contribution—and they frankly gloried in it, too—was that they had morally sandbagged all dissenters and almost completely crushed the spirit of dissent.

For they believed—these Barrs of America did—that force is the only effective form of moral propaganda in the world. They believed this with all the fanaticism of intolerance and stupidity. Force and repression were the only two things they did sincerely believe in, though they would have died sooner than acknowledge this. Not theirs the aim of replacing lower forms of enjoyment by higher ones, baser religions by nobler ones. Theirs was the modest if unavowed mission of improving on the example of Jesus Christ. In a moment of divine (and regrettable) weakness, Christ had suffered torture for his enemies. The Barrs undertook the pious duty of counteracting this weakness by making their enemies suffer torture for Christ.

In this atmosphere of moral taboos and sex repression, Janet had grown up like an alien spirit in a foreign land. From the very first stirrings of intelligence, some independent strain in her had set her in antagonism to her environment. She had not been fully conscious of this antagonism, much less of the issues involved, and she had seldom given battle directly to her mother's despotism. But even when she had bowed her head to the force of argument or to the argument of force, her heart had remained untouched. She had knuckled under time and again, but her service had been lip service and her homage the homage only of the knee.

It was a situation she had but dimly realized when she first met Robert Lloyd. His sensible views and galvanic realism had startled her out of her half-hearted acceptance of a decrepit tradition and carried her at one bound from the shadowy Brooklyn existence of the age of Praise-God-Barebones to the vivid actuality of the age of the airplane. The first novelty of contemporary life had been overwhelming. She felt as though she had lost consciousness in the seventeenth century and, like the fabled princess, had lain in a twilight sleep until Robert Lloyd had awakened her to the throb and stir of the twentieth century.

Her friendship with Robert had begun shortly after the end of the war, the great World War from which the Barrs had learnt as much as a blind man learns from a mirror.

Chance had next thrown her into the arms of Emily's classmate, Cornelia Covert. Cornelia had taken her in hand and brought her into the free and easy atmosphere of the Lorillard model tenements in Kips Bay. Her furtive visits to Cornelia's flat had led her by gradual stages into the stress and clash of the metropolis until, what with one new experience and another, she began to distinguish the trumpet-tongued voices of her own generation and to feel in her soul the resurgent willfulness of the modern age.

IV

And now, here she stood, the fire of life stirring her blood, the long arm of her mother's power fettering her movements. If only she were in Emily's shoes! Emily had been sent to college and had later achieved economic independence in the profession of high school teacher. But Emily had always had an instinct for taking care of herself. Janet wished she had half her sister's practical sense, and bitterly reproached herself for having been fool enough to yield to her mother's hankering after gentility. It was Mrs. Barr's belief that the family prestige would fall irrecoverably below the rarified heights where the Cabots or the Saltonstalls were presumed to move, unless one daughter, at least, was kept free from the lower class stigma of earning her own living.

Thus, under pressure, Janet had stayed home to become a fine lady, although the limited circumstances of the Barrs obliged her, in effect, to become a domestic servant. For a year past, however, she had been laying desperate plans for going out on her own.

"Hello, little girl, good morning!" interrupted a cheery voice at her side.

"Good morning, father," replied Janet, to a tall, well-preserved, stately man who kissed her very affectionately.

"Your mother sent for me, Janet," said Mr. Barr anxiously. "What's the matter?"

"I'm the matter. She has been pitching into me for receiving an invitation to a masked ball. I've been wasting the Lord's time!"

"Did she blow you up?"

"Down, father, down. I feel very small, I can tell you."

Janet was of too cheerful a temperament to be sad very long. She and her father habitually exchanged death-cell jests, and even her present gloom was not too thick to be dispelled with a quip. Her father burst into a loud and hearty laugh which he moderated considerably on remembering that he still had his wife to face. His camel-like virtues, which had carried him tolerably far in business—he was manager of a small branch of the Wheat Exchange Bank—had not saved him from being a thorough nincompoop at home.

Mr. Barr had the form of a patrician but the spirit of an obedient slave. Janet despised him for his complete submission to his wife, yet she had one bond of sympathy with him. Though he dared not raise hand or voice against the system of vetoes and taboos under which the Barr family lived, he disliked the system and understood her hatred of it. Janet often wondered whether he was not the passive carrier of some rebellious British strain which, in herself, took the shape of active insurgency against Mrs. Barr's American passion for denying the body and mortifying the soul.

"Mother is waiting for you upstairs," she said, trying to feel sorry for him. "She means to give you a scathing address on the moral failings of your youngest daughter."

"I suppose I'll get a piece of her mind, too."

"Depend upon it. The same old piece that passeth understanding."

"Well, it's all in the day's work—it's family life," said the old gentleman, trying to keep up a brave front.

He shuffled off with a rueful smile.

Janet almost felt ashamed of her malice as she watched his reluctant steps and pictured his terror of her mother. His kindliness and good nature had once endeared him to her. But she could not check a growing contempt for his weakness of character. It was clearer to her every day that her mother's cruel bigotry had not been half so fraught with tragic consequences as her father's spinelessness and moral cowardice.

"Family life—all in the day's work!" she repeated to herself with a trembling lip. "Well, I don't mean to have a lifetime of days like this."

Then she went upstairs to her own room and wrote Cornelia Covert a note of acceptance.

CHAPTER FOUR

I

"There, isn't she sweet?" said Cornelia to Robert, as she put the last touch to a pomegranate sash.

She was referring to Janet, whom she had costumed with all her artistic cunning as a sort of gypsy Carmen. The night of the Outlaws' ball was at hand; and Cornelia's flat, number fifteen of the Lorillard model tenements, was the rendezvous for several of the maskers.

"Isn't she beautiful?" insisted Cornelia, pitching her languid voice high. She pointed proudly to her handiwork (rather than to its wearer), for she was determined to have it admired by all who stood near.

"She is charming, and her voice is beautiful," said Robert, in cool dispassionate appraisal.

"No one ever called my voice beautiful before!" said Janet, with unfeigned delight, in spite of the scientific detachment of Robert's tone.

"I shall make you conscious of all your attractions, if you'll give me time," added Robert, with much more fervor than before.

"Ought we to be conscious of our attractions?" asked Janet dubiously, for in the Barr environment it was bad form to call attention to anything but detractions.

The immemorial Barr practice bound members of the same family to make the worst of one another's good qualities.

"Decidedly," answered Robert. "A wise man should take care to know his good points no less than his bad points, precisely as he takes care to know his assets as well as his liabilities."

"Yes, leave it to Cato," cried Cornelia mockingly. She had a nickname for each of her friends. "He'll tell you all about yourself, until your soul will cease to seem your own. He'll beautify you—"

"Oh, if he only will!" cut in Janet, with one of her fluent graceful gestures which it was a rare delight merely to see. "I can stand no end of that."

"He'll beautify you—morally, my dear," concluded Cornelia. "His conversation is so improving. He re-creates people in his own image. It's his specialty."

Janet's fine gray eyes narrowed to a hostile glance.

"It's my mother's specialty, too," she said, coldly.

"Now, look here—" cried Robert, springing up from his chair in impetuous protest.

He had good reason to know how unflattering the comparison was. Before he had a chance to say more, Cornelia hurriedly interposed.

"There's one important difference, Araminta," she said. "Your mother believes that beauty is simply goodness; Cato believes that goodness is simply wisdom. He'll turn you into a likeness of Minerva, with your wonderful raven locks metamorphosed into hissing feminist serpents."

The outer door opened and Mazie Ross burst in attired as Salome and looking as wicked and tempting as if she were a bacchante straight from the Venusberg.

"Hello, hasn't Carmen got her war paint on yet?" she called out, frowning on the group.

It was a pretty tableau she beheld. Robert, with folded arms, stood before the two young women, posed for a tremendous vindication. Cornelia, kneeling at her charge's feet, was absorbed in a final adjustment of the skirt; Janet, with outstretched arms, had just wheeled a full circle in response to her friend's touch. The two women were a picturesque pair, Cornelia's golden hair and alabaster skin, vitalized by the excitement, forming a vivid contrast to Janet's darker coloring.

"Please page the olive complexion and the Castilian nose," continued Mazie, in a merciless illumination of the favorite's two weak points.

Janet certainly lacked the challenging physical beauty that makes men forget the mental limitations of an Emma Hamilton or a Mme. de Recamier. Not that she was poor in physical charm. Far from it. She was straight and slender, with waving black hair, an exquisite complexion, and expressive gray eyes. Hers was a face that sobered naturally into thoughtful sympathy and softened readily into merriment or gentleness. True, her features lacked a chiseled perfection, (if that is perfection). But it was not for her body but for her spirit that she both craved and inspired love.

"Well, what's the big delay?" asked Mazie, flouncing somewhat impatiently to the covered washtubs on which she perched herself in such a way as to advertise extensively her new and pretty underthings.

"Cato is about to exalt us to rare moral heights," said Cornelia, resuming her scrutiny of the costume of Carmen.

"She thinks I'm a hard-shelled Puritan," said Robert, appealing to Mazie for support. "Do you agree with her?"

"Oh, give us a cigarette and stop your spoofing," said Mazie, who had a dread of high-flown talk. "I'm surprised that Rob's parson poses take you in, Cornelia. Believe me, he's just like other men when you get him alone on a starry night."

Robert blushed, Janet's two rows of long lashes parted wider, and Cornelia gave a queer coloratura laugh. But Mazie's satisfaction at securing the spotlight was short lived; somehow or other, Janet speedily became the center of attention again.

II

Other Lorillarders bound for the Outlaws' ball now began to pass in and out of Cornelia's flat. They were mostly young men and women who represented the various social strata found in the Kips Bay tenements. They brought with them gayety, laughter and high spirits, and spent their time circulating boisterously through the apartment, gossiping on the coming event, and comparing notes on the glamor and glitter of costumes modeled upon every conceivable suggestion of history, legend or myth.

Janet was thrilled with the excitement, the infectious spirits and the easy camaraderie. She noticed that there was no chaperonage or standing on ceremony whatever, and she was struck with the entire absence of self-consciousness between the sexes. Young men and women went in and out as they pleased, helped themselves to Cornelia's ice box and piano as fancy dictated, and bantered, flirted, kissed, or exchanged partners without stint or scruple. On the face of it, all concerned seemed in full accord with the scheme of "what's mine is yours, and what's yours is everybody's."

Nor could she help contrasting these cheerful faces, this genial abandon, this entire lifting of social constraint, with the gloomy looks, circumscribed permissions, and moral strait-jacketings of her Brooklyn home. With all their faults, Cornelia Covert and Mazie Ross appeared to suggest happiness and freedom as much as Mrs. Barr and Emily suggested gloom and repression. And the model tenements lost nothing in the comparison by having all the attraction of novelty. If at that minute, Janet had had to choose between a Paradise of Barrs on the one hand, and the flesh, the devil and the model tenements on the other, it is not to the Paradise of Barrs that she would have given the palm.

While Janet met Cornelia's friends in turn, and gave the men amongst them a new sensation on account of her artless candor, Mazie coquetted freely with the successive males that fluttered around her and displayed unlimited skill in extricating herself from sundry intemperate advances. Growing tired of this sport, she pushed her last admirer brutally off the tubs and said:

"Cornelia, what's the matter with Claude? He should have shown up ages ago."

"Oh, Lothario rang me up about half past eight," said Cornelia sweetly. "He isn't coming."

"Isn't coming! Why, he promised to be my escort," Mazie cried out in a harsh strident voice.

Mazie's voice was not her strong point. Whenever she opened her pretty mouth, she shattered many illusions.

"Oh, he's going to the ball. But he has changed his mind about coming here first. I suppose he doesn't want any of you to know him by his costume."

Mazie's irritation was unbounded.

"None of our crowd are keeping each other in the dark," she said. "What's struck him? There'll be plenty of strangers to play the devil with. If Claude has backed out, who's to take us, old girl?"

"Well, Robert's here."

"Robert! He can't keep Hutchins Burley from persecuting me."

"Or you from persecuting Hutchins Burley."

"Don't be nasty, Cornelia," said Mazie, jumping angrily down. "You take the cinnamon bun, anyway. Why didn't you pipe up sooner with the news that Claude had rung up?"

"I quite forgot to," said her friend, calmly.

"Forgot to!" said Mazie, not concealing either her incredulity or her vexation. "A fat lot you did. It's your spite. Your refusing to come to the ball is spite, too. Just spite. I suppose you think that since you can't have Claude, nobody else shall have him, either."

"I don't think about Lothario at all," said Cornelia, demurely placid, as she could afford to be in view of the infuriated state in which Mazie burst from the room.

The silence which had fallen on the scene during this conflict was soon broken, and gayety was gradually restored.

"Who is Lothario?" asked Janet, recovering her spirits more slowly than the others.

"That's Claude Fontaine, the son of Fontaine the jeweler. You know Fontaine's, the big jewelry and art establishment on Fifth Avenue?"

"Oh, yes."

"Well, he's that Fontaine. Very good looking as well as very rich. All the Lorillard girls are dippy about him. So am I. And so will you be."

"Do you think so?" asked Janet, hopefully, for she was thirsting for any new experience.

"I'm sure of it. But I hope you won't dream of marrying Lothario. Chiefly for the reason that it would be useless. He comes here too well armed and well seasoned against matrimonial schemes."

She added that, in spite of this obvious fact, nearly all the Lorillard girls of the Outlaw brand had their caps set at the young millionaire.

"On principle, they're all opposed to marriage," she proceeded. "But they're all ready to sacrifice this principle in such a very profitable cause."

This bitter remark was the first hint Janet received of a cleavage between Cornelia's theories and the theories or practices of the other model tenementers.

"And Mazie wants to marry him, too?" she asked.

"Marry him?—Well, get him," answered Cornelia languidly. "Mazie has the mating instincts of a pussy cat and the brains of a pigeon. Hello, where's Robert?" she added, missing him. "He slips away the moment one's eyes are taken off him."

As if in answer to her call, Robert came back, bringing Mazie in tow. Shortly after her wrathful exit, he had unobtrusively gone out to smooth down her ruffled feelings. An explosion of Mazie's temper was like the backfire of a motor car; there was a loud report and much smoke, but no damage done or permanent hard feeling caused—at least, not to herself. Thus, a good dose of flattery, which Robert skillfully administered, had set her going equably again; for, besides being dependent on Cornelia, Mazie was too much occupied with the satisfaction of her desires to prolong a quarrel in support of her rights.

A symphony of cooings re-established peace and good will amongst the three young ladies; and these dulcet sounds blended easily with the mirth of the other masqueraders in the flat. In an access of joy, Mazie took Janet romping through the rooms. Robert used this occasion to whisper in Cornelia's ear:

"I satisfied Mazie that you weren't staying home to meet Claude, by convincing her that you had an engagement with me," he said.

"Have I?" She tried to hide her pleasure, immense as it was.

"I hope so," he replied, using far less tact with her than he had with Mazie. "These entertainments don't interest me at all. And, as I'm pledged to bring the girls home, it will be much more fun to spend the interval chatting with you than being bored at the ball."

Cornelia's face fell. With admirable self-control she said she meant to stay up for the girls, and would be glad of his company, though he might feel free to change his mind if he chose.

Janet now detached herself from Mazie, put her arm through Robert's, and begged him to hasten and join the merry-makers who were already filing out. This was her first ball, anticipation had cast a glamor over everything that was or was to be, and excitement had set all her nerves a tingle.

There was a last concerted effort to dissuade Cornelia from remaining alone. It was unsuccessful.

Then Janet drew Robert through the doorway and, as she joined the procession of celebrants, her heightened senses quite transfigured her. This fact was not lost on Cornelia or Mazie.

"What a pretty pair!" said the latter mockingly. "Just watch them doing that snappy stuff with the eyes."

Mazie had stayed behind for a moment to give Cornelia a parting shot.

"You'd better change your mind, Corny. A swell chance there is of Robert coming back here now that Janet's got him hooked. Come along, dearie, do. See here, I'll give you a tip. You can rile a good many more people by going to the ball than you can by staying here."

Cornelia shook her head disdainfully at this satire on her motives. Yet disdain was not her strongest emotion, Mazie's shaft having struck too deep for an answer.

III

Towards midnight, the Outlaws' Ball in the old Murray Hill Lyceum on 34th Street had almost hit its stride. Two bands, an Hawaiian Jazz and the Kips Bay Roughnecks, furnished the music, and what with the crash and blare of instruments, the dazzle of costumes, the clouds of confetti, and the swirl of dancers, masked and unmasked, the dense motley crowd appeared to be squeezing the last ounce of pleasure out of its mad adventure in search of "a good time."

Janet's appearance in her Spanish robes with the genuine Castilian mantilla, the high tortoise shell comb, and the silk Andalusian shawl flaming brilliantly against her dark hair, was one of the sensations of the evening. Robert's somber monk's cowl at her side subtracted nothing from this sensation. He conducted her through the mazes of the upper dancing floor and then brought her back to the gorgeous gypsy tent that had been set up on the floor below.

There she began to play the gypsy fortune teller with as much subtlety as the professional exertions of the musical Roughnecks permitted.

Robert stood near the tent as a sort of self-constituted watchman and bodyguard extraordinary. As John Barleycorn was being liberally dispensed in the refreshment room, a number of tipsy masqueraders soon turned up, and some of these roistered into Janet's tent despite Robert's efforts to fend them off.

Hutchins Burley was among those who presently appeared on the scene. It was after Mazie Ross had repeatedly toyed with his erotic instincts and incited his hot pursuit only to defeat him at a point just short of possession. In a fury of frustration, he had descended to the first floor to inflame his passions further at the public bar. Thus inspirited, he propelled his Falstaffian proportions into the gypsy tent and requested Janet to read his palm.

His breath alone would have decided Janet to refuse. But when he interrupted her first sentence by tearing off her mask and importuning a closer acquaintance with the face behind it, she pushed abruptly past him and, running outside the tent, waited for him to leave it.

With surprising alacrity Hutchins Burley bundled after her.

"You're a lively little kipper," he shouted, filled with liquor and desire. And he wildly reached out one arm to clasp her around the waist. But Janet, uttering a low cry, dodged and slipped past him, while Burley's flopping arms were caught firmly by two men who had sprung forward for this purpose.

One of these was Robert. The other was a tall, unobtrusive man who had quietly but deftly detached himself from the throng.

The attention of several people had been arrested by Janet's cry and flight, and these now pressed forward to learn what the trouble was. A confusion of queries, blusterings and exclamations followed, during which the Roughnecks struck up the "Nobody Home" rag.

Hutchins Burley had recovered some of his wits under the compulsion of several menacing faces around him. Seeing him become tractable, Robert contemptuously flung off the arm he held and walked away towards Janet. Burley followed his receding steps with a malevolent glare, and then turned savagely on the tall quiet stranger who was still holding his other arm in a grip of steel.

"Leggo my arm," he bellowed.

"A word in your ear, Mr. Burley," said the quiet one, relaxing his grip. "Plain clothes men are in the crowd. If you kick up a shindy, you'll be giving them what they're looking for."

"And who the devil are you?" sputtered Burley, with the air of a man who is not to be easily frightened.

"Oh, nobody in particular," said the quiet man in a low voice. And, before he could be questioned further, he had melted unobtrusively into the crowd.

IV

A little later, Robert led three jovial young maskers into the gypsy tent. The foremost was dressed as Charles Surface and had quite enough gay confidence to do justice to the part.

"So here's the Outlaws' piece of resistance," he called out merrily. "We'll see whether she can do half as much justice to my palm as to her lovely gypsy shawl."

He sat down at Janet's little table and held out his hand. She took it, examined it gravely for some seconds, and then, in her fine clarinet tones she reported swiftly, without a pause, and getting almost breathless towards the end:

"You are handsome, graceful, false and cruel. You've been a good soldier, but you'll become a poor poet. I see you divided into three parts: part one—Charles Surface; part two—Joseph Surface; part three—Sir Peter Teazle. What a pity your name isn't Henry! For you are as dashing as Henry the Fifth, as amorous as Henry of Navarre, and as kind to women as Henry the Eighth. You will be married twice, but how many hearts you will break I dare not reveal. Your own heart is a safe deposit vault, fireproof and loveproof both. Hapless and witless damsels without number will try to blow it up or melt it—without success. One girl alone will refrain from the attempt, realizing the utter uselessness of piercing this too, too solid flesh—"

"Here," cried the young man, drawing away his hand, the laughter and jibing endorsements with which his comrades greeted the several revelations, proving too much for him. "I don't call this a fortune: I call it a raw deal."

"No use abusing the cards," said Janet, still affecting the utmost gravity. "The cards never lie."

"Oh, don't they, Miss Gypsy? That's where your professional prejudice blinds you. Take your discovery that I'm a poor poet, for instance. Well, the fact is, I'm no poet at all. I never so much as wrote a couplet to a girl in all my life."

"I said: you will become a poet," remarked Janet, gently correcting him.

"And when will that be, pray?"

Janet hastily cut the cards anew, dealt out five cards, and held out the Queen of Spades to the onlookers.

"When a dark lady enters your life," she said.

"A dark lady has entered my life," he said, his voice vibrating seductively. "Entered it with a very poor opinion of me, it seems. But I shouldn't call her the Queen of Spades. I should call her Janet, the Queen of Clubs."

"Clubs, because I scored so many good hits?"

"No, because a Queen of Spades must have lustrous black eyes, and yours are heavenly gray. Come, let's unmask, and see who's the better fortune teller of the two."

Claude pulled off his mask and stood, handsome and challenging, waiting for her to follow suit.

He was very good to look upon. Handsome, graceful and proud, there was just enough disdain in his perfect manner to make every woman adore him and long to enslave his flawless form. He had wonderful blue eyes, a delicate mouth, a fine nose and a penetrating sympathetic voice. Great ease, great daring and great energy of animal passion gave him a hundred opportunities to show his fine points to excellent advantage. To qualities that almost made riches superfluous, riches were added. No wonder he seemed to be a darling of the gods.

Janet's pulse was distinctly quickened by the telling exterior of this dazzling young man. And when she unfastened her domino and met his glance with her fearless gray eyes, his thrilling moment came. He was not greatly impressed with her looks, his social training having biased him towards more fashionable types of beauty. Yet a magnetic ecstacy set him on fire and sent rapturous messages throbbing along his nerves.

It was an enthralling moment, one that seemed mysteriously to link up his being with other blissful moments in previous existences. Strange! Each time that he experienced this emotion anew, he was sure it was unique, sure it was not in this life that he had experienced it before. Stranger still, though it was as deep as the full flooded river of life itself, it was as transitory as an electric spark or a flash of lightning. The moment was poignant, intoxicating, miraculous; yet by no fraction of an instant could it be prolonged.

Indeed, within a second or two, Claude and Janet were chatting about a good many matters which did not bear in the remotest way upon this magnetizing spark. Still, they chatted with an excited recklessness, and as if their essences were held together by a subtle force, a force whose irresistible urgency they would neither have dared to acknowledge nor wished to dispute.

V

Steeped in the enjoyment of the moment, Janet hardly noticed that Robert had tacitly resigned his watchful care of her to Claude Fontaine. She began to neglect her fortune telling duties as one result of this displacement, for Claude's appropriation of her time grew as his visits became more frequent. Nor did he share her compunction on this score. Far from doing so, he cajoled her into dancing with him again and again. In the intervals, he escorted her from one end of the reception floor to the other, introducing her to the groups he considered worth while. Thus she shared (much more fully than she desired to) the curiosity which his brilliant presence excited and the gossip which it was everywhere a signal for.

"Here's an interesting stunt," said Claude to his partner.

He indicated a group of young people amongst whom she instantly recognized Robert and Mazie. Two others claimed her attention. In the center of the group was a young woman with a high color and a very energetic manner, who had adopted an unusual plan for swelling the box office receipts. She was making impromptu busts in putty of all who could afford a contribution, no reasonable sum being refused.

When Claude and Janet came up, the sculptress had just finished modelling a head of Robert; and a remarkably spirited likeness it was. Robert was greatly taken with it, but his satisfaction was mild beside that of the artist, who handled the fragile image as though it were the apple of her eye.

Two thoughts struck Janet. One was that Charlotte Beecher's fuss over the statuette of Robert Lloyd was excessive. The other was that she now, for the first time, missed the living model. But this discovery, as well as her criticism of the sculptress, was promptly swallowed up in the kaleidoscopic whirl of meeting still other characters belonging to the strange new society into which she had been flung.

Nevertheless, she contrived to recall Robert to her side.

"What a wonderful head Robert has!" Miss Beecher was rhapsodizing, while she glanced sentimentally from the statue to the living model. "I declare, it's all brain."

"It sure is!" echoed Mazie, mockingly. "But it's not a patch on his wonderful heart."

She laid her hand on the spot where she supposed this organ to be, and added, without crediting the epigram to Cornelia who had originated it:

"That's all brain, too!"

Everybody laughed, Robert no less heartily than his neighbors. Everybody, that is, save Charlotte Beecher, whose sharp glance at Mazie softened to tenderness as it swept on towards Robert.

The second person to fascinate Janet was a youngish woman in a Syrian dress of many boldly brilliant color clashes. Contrasts as startling were achieved by her coal black hair, her pale olive skin, and the gorgeous green pendants attached to her ears. She had the barbaric picturesqueness of a White African Queen straight out of Rider Haggard, and about as much credibility. But she posed with unlimited self-confidence.

So speculated Janet. The next moment she reminded herself of the necessity of keeping an eye (and perhaps a string) on Robert Lloyd.

But he was nowhere to be seen. In his usual insidious fashion, he had taken French leave while the circle of spectators was absorbed in the ritual of weaving gossip amongst themselves or blessing Miss Beecher's next putty statuette with lavish adjectives and exclamations.

His disappearance piqued Janet. But the exhilaration caused by all the enchantments of the ball and all the thrills of Claude's gallantry and charm, did not permit her to allow any one emotion more than a fleeting hospitality.

Claude watched his chance of enticing her to another novelty. On the way, she begged him to enlighten her about the people she had just met.

"Tell me all about the sculptress and about the Rider Haggard lady with the earrings," she said.

Claude explained that these ladies were both considered freaks even among the Outlaws: Charlotte Beecher, because she was an heiress who wore a working girl's clothes and toiled harder with the sculptor's chisel than a day laborer with a pickaxe; Lydia Morrow, not so much because she had a flair for spectacular dresses, Leon Bakst colors and startling jewelry, as because her authorship of half a dozen best sellers had given her almost unlimited means to gratify these vagaries.

"Lydia Morrow? I don't seem to know the name," said Janet.

"Lydia Dyson, her maiden name, is the name she writes under."

This name Janet knew well enough. It was a familiar name wherever American magazines flourished; even among the Barrs of Brooklyn it was a household fixture. The stupendous fact was that Lydia Dyson's novels of approximated naughtiness, sensual slush and disembowelled passion, appeared serially and simultaneously in magazines with as different a clientele as the Saturday Morning Post, the Purple Book, Anybody's and the Women's Bazaar.

Claude added that he had his own reasons for calling the two young women freaks.

"All these people are loony on the subject of love," he said, with a wave of the hand that appeared to include the whole membership of the ball. "Some because they've had too much of it, but more because they've had too little. Mazie is one of a small group that is suffering from surfeit. But Charlotte and Lydia belong to the other class. Charlotte wants a husband without a whole lot of love, and Lydia wants a whole lot of love without a husband. As for Mazie, there's nothing left for her to want but a rich protector, with as little love in the bargain as possible."

This offhand analysis set Janet to wondering what Claude's own conception of love might be. He went blithely on:

"The difficulty with Charlotte is that she's too particular; with Lydia, that she's not particular enough. Not one-tenth particular enough for Gordon Morrow, her husband, who lives on her money but won't be kept in his place. He actually presumes to be furiously jealous. But, however comic a figure he may cut, who can blame him for drawing the line at a blackguard like Hutchins Burley? Here's Hutch staggering this way, now. After you, the impudent beggar!"

Naturally, in this quarter, Burley had little luck. Janet shrank away from him, and Claude froze him off as he had already done two or three times that night. Envenomed, but nothing daunted, Hutchins Burley careered, none too steadily, over to the circle around the sculptress. Claude watched him disgustedly.

"If Morrow catches him pawing all over his wife, there'll be trouble. And Lydia Dyson's not the woman to lift her little finger to avert it. She has a theory that 'Big Burley' is a sort of twentieth century edition of the Cave Man, a theory she is not above putting to the proof. Husband or no husband, a big scene is nectar and ambrosia to her."

He looked anxiously back at Charlotte Beecher's group. "Let's go away from here," he said, taking her arm with protective tenderness.

"Shall we go back to the tent?"

"I'd like to take you much further than that. You are too wonderful and genuine to fit into this hothouse crowd."

Janet liked his pretty speeches, but she had not yet had her fill of the carnival of pleasure.

Claude's fears were only too speedily realized. Hardly had he returned Janet to her gypsy tent, than shouts and screams ascended from the sculptress' quarter. Claude hastened to the spot and found two knots of men pulling Burley away from Lydia's husband and heightening the disorder in the act.

The commotion now took a new turn. Burley had not forgotten the man who had cold-shouldered him out of Janet's way several times. As soon as he laid eyes on Claude and observed him assisting Charlotte Beecher in a feverish effort to save her putty models, his rage reached its climax. Every ounce of his bulky weight was put into a titanic pull that jerked him loose from those who restrained him. Using his momentary freedom to snatch up the little bust of Robert, he flung it at Claude's head.

"No diamond shark can come butting in here," he shouted, in a purple fury.

The bust went far wide of its mark. But not the taunt. It stung Claude into sudden violence, so that he sprang towards Burley with the object of thrashing him. Thirty or forty people having now been drawn into the melee, however, he was saved the ignominy of a public brawl.

At the height of the turmoil Claude's arm was clasped by an iron hand. It was the hand of a tall immaculate man who spoke to him in a low calm voice.

"A word of warning, Mr. Fontaine," he said, urging him away from the fracas. "Get your friends out of here at once! Detectives are about to raid the place."

"Detectives! Are you one?" asked Claude, more or less bewildered.

"No, not particularly," was the whimsical reply of the stranger, who then moved decisively away and evaporated as suddenly as he had turned up.

As soon as Claude rallied his wits, he acted swiftly. He persuaded Charlotte Beecher, who happened to be near, to follow him; and then took the shortest cut to the gypsy tent, where Janet greeted his return with a happy cry of relief. Excitedly he warned her of the raid, and urged her to lose no time in preparing to leave with him.

She obeyed, not without a pang of regret.

Regret? It was not parting with the musical Roughnecks, though they were better than their names; it was not turning her back on the dancing, though this had intoxicated her; and it was not saying farewell to the riot of color, costume and confetti, though these had put her in an ecstacy of delight. At least, it was not an extravagant hunger for these pleasures. And she certainly had nothing but measureless disgust for a crowd of brawling, shouting, turbulent men.

Why regret then?

It was merely because of the obvious difference between her joyless home and this night's experience. Beside the deathlike stagnation of the Barrs of Brooklyn, the movement, intensity and go of the Outlaws had what she cheerfully accepted as the quality and flavor of reality. "This is life," a still, small voice cried within her, meaning that this was at least a fairly good imitation of life on its gayer side. And she revelled unblushingly in the enchantment that her ignorance of pleasure and her natural high spirits had cast around Kips Bay, the model tenements, Cornelia, Robert and Claude.