IVJanet hastened after her in a complete change of mood."Come back, Cornelia," she called out, remorsefully. "I had no right to be sarcastic. Forgive me, and I'll eat all the humble pie you like."Cornelia sat down again."This is a new tack for you to take," she said, making the most of an advantage Janet seldom gave her."The fact is, Cornelia, I'm—my feelings were ploughed up today, ploughed up from top to bottom. The postman brought me an offer of marriage this morning.""An offer of marriage!""From Monsieur St. Hilaire."Cornelia had of course heard the facts of the whole St. Hilaire episode. She also knew that Janet still corresponded with Henriette, and that all the recent letters of the girl's father had been sent back unopened."I thought you never read his letters?""This one was folded up in Henriette's note. I'm sure the child wasn't a party to the trick. Here it is. Will you read it?"Cornelia did so."Well, I must say I'm surprised," she said, returning the letter. "He writes in a very decent, manly strain. Altogether different from what I expected. The devil doesn't seem to be nearly as black as he's painted.""Oh, he's not a professional satyr, if that's what you mean. I never implied that he was."Cornelia pondered the matter for a minute. She recalled forgotten particulars about M. St. Hilaire, amongst others, the account of his generous income."So he's in Paris with Henriette," she mused. "I notice that he says he's coming here tomorrow to get his answer in person. What will you do about it, dear?""I wish I knew. I want to see Henriette again, tremendously. But I don't want to see her father. Do give me your advice, Cornelia. What do you think I ought to do?""Well, why not give him another chance? He's made you a perfectly straight and honorable offer this time. As I recall the whole story, he wasn't really repugnant to you, except at that one time.""No. But am I lightly to forget that he—that he touched me without my consent, presuming to think that, because I had loved one man, my body was at the free disposal of all men?""It was a wretched mistake to make—""A mistake! It was a monstrous piece of stupidity and impudence.""Quite so, my dear. I'm not standing up for him. Still, don't let us forget that men are not built like women.""That's a truth that cuts both ways, isn't it?" said Janet.She had given up being astonished at Cornelia's peculiar mixture of the old and the new in the matter of theories about men and women. She merely wondered to what weird angle Cornelia meant to shift her outlook now."The point is," continued Cornelia serenely, "that a woman's sex emotion is generally excited by something that takes her fancy; a man's, by something that stirs his blood. The mind plays the bigger part in the one case, the body in the other. That's why, in the duel of sex, the psychological moment is so important to the woman, the physiological moment to the man."These acute distinctions are quite beyond me. A man has as much gray matter as a woman, or even more. Then why should he let his mental processes suffer paralysis whenever a nice woman looks at him?""Well, that's one of the mysteries that marriage helps us to understand, Araminta. In the life of a man there come these physiological moments, these sex storms, different from anything in the experience of a woman. I don't mean to say that men have more physical passion than women. But there are occasions when their physical passion takes a more violently concentrated form. Mazie, in her vulgar little way, isn't so far wrong when she says: 'Scratch a fine gentleman, and you'll find a cave man.'""Do you mean to tell me that there are absolutely no men who feel about love as we do?""I've never met one. Have you?"Janet was thinking: "Surely Robert isn't like that!" Aloud she said nothing. There was a dangerous glint in her friend's eyes. Cornelia had an uncanny way of penetrating one's thoughts when Robert was the object of them. Had she accomplished this feat of divination again? At all events, an acrid note entered her voice as she continued:"Is it really only Monsieur St. Hilaire that you can't make up your mind about? If so, take my advice. Come down off your high horse and make the most of your good fortune.""My good fortune!""Let's be perfectly frank with each other, my dear. Here's a man who wants to marry you. He's well-born, cultivated, rich. His one child is a girl who adores you and whom you adore. The only thing against him is that he once committed a serious breach of decorum—""And that I don't love him—" interpolated Janet.Cornelia blandly ignored the interruption."His letter shows," she went on, "that he is willing to make the most handsome amends, the only amends a man can make in a matter of this sort. What more do you ask?""I'm not asking him for amends. I simply want to be let alone.""Araminta, let me beg you not to deceive yourself about the changing moral values we hear so much of nowadays. Has the price of virginity really gone down? Judged by the conversation of radicals and Outlaws, yes. Judged by the ticker of the matrimonial exchange, it is still pretty high. Bear that in mind, and remember that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.""Do you mean to say," exclaimed Janet, in great astonishment, "that you, of all people, advise me toacceptthis offer?"Her tone irritated Cornelia."Beggars can't be choosers," she began."They can remain beggars," replied Janet tersely."If that's the way you feel about it, you needn't ask my advice again. We're wasting each other's time."Saying which, Cornelia rose and left the office.CHAPTER TWENTY-SIXIThe Paulette manikins, famed throughout the world of fashion for their grace in attitude and correctness in position and movement, owed their prestige to a system of hygienic training conceived and carried out by Harry Kelly himself. Yet these young ladies took their distinction so seriously that they held it beneath them to assist their chief in straightening out the classroom disorder when the period of instruction was over."Here's a mess!" called out Mazie Ross, walking into the Paulette gymnasium, immediately after the dismissal of a small class of manikins. "You might think they'd been on a grand jamboree.""Anything up?" said Harry, shortly."Janet asked me to help you this morning.""What for?""She went out for a horseback ride with the St. Hilaires.""This morning. Why, as it is, she goes almost every afternoon. She went yesterday afternoon. A fine way to do business, I'll say."Mazie sulkily began to pick up stray articles."You needn't pitch into me, Harry," she said. "You're not half so sorry as I am that your gentle Janet isn't here to do this rotten job. Is it my fault?""Does Cornelia know she's away?" said Kelly, fuming."Can a cat miaow within a mile of these precincts without Corny being on to it?""Why don't they keep me posted then? I never hear of a blessed thing that goes on in my own home until it's all over.""Say, do you want to start a row? Then take a tip from me and land into a certain party in the main office. If you'd knock her down and then jump on her with both feet, you'd be doing something. What's the use of picking on a dead bird like me?""Don't talk that way about Cornelia," said Harry, fumbling amongst the papers on the desk, and trying vainly to be stern. "I've told you before I won't have it. Where's your gratitude?"She made a face at him behind his back."Gratitude!" she said. "What's the good of me wasting gratitude on Cornelia when she reminds herself and everybody in Paulette's daily that she picked me up out of the gutter that Hutch left me in?""Lock up the wardrobe and clear out, will you?" said Kelly, frigidly. "I can do the rest myself.""Here's your hat, what's your hurry," she muttered to herself. But she stayed and continued to put things to rights.Mazie had changed greatly since the palmy days of the Lorillard tenements. She looked ill and haggard, a mere shadow of the jaunty "Follies" girl of old. Her willowy posture had degenerated into an undisguised slouch, her hair was frowsy, and her dress was slung together.But her tongue had not lost its stab.She closed the wardrobe door with an unintentional slam that caused Harry Kelly to jump up in his seat."Damn!" he said, in that mild voice of his.It was as if Vesuvius had emitted a puff of tobacco smoke.The metamorphosis of the "Harlem Gorilla" into the husband of Madame Paulette was astoundingly complete. Harry Kelly's Van Dyke beard and fashionably tailored clothes alone would have effected a radical change in his appearance. Kelly was transformed not only physically but psychically. His muscles were still the muscles of a Titan, but his nerves had become the nerves of a fanciful man or a delicate woman.Mazie, who was no student of spiritual transformations, went up to the desk at which Kelly sat and began to tidy it. She whisked away stray papers and envelopes that lay near his hands with much the same air that a waiter lashes the crumbs off a table to speed the lingering guest.He grew more and more fidgety, but she showed him no mercy."Janet didn't know those St. Hilaires were coming this morning," she finally volunteered. "But you can gamble on it that Cornelia knew. When my fine gentleman got off his prancing horse and marched into the reception room clanking spurs and all, Corny was right there on the job in her softest, sweetest tone. My! butter wouldn't melt in her mouth. And all the time Janet hangs in the background, saying she's too busy to go out, and looking as stubborn as a mule. When gentle Janet gets that stubborn expression, it means: You can move the Woolworth Building, but you can't move me!""Then why in thunder did she go?""Because that St. Hilaire kid got busy with her. A pretty little kid, a regular father's darling, the kind that coos away like a turtledove till she gets everything she wants and a tidy slice of the moon extra. Well, she draped herself pathetically around Janet—all that heartstring stuff—and Janet, like any fool of a man, fell for the pathos.""You can't persuade me that Janet didn't want to go," said Kelly, gloomily."I won't try to, then. Just the same, she didn't. That's the weird part of it.""What's weird about it?""Why, she doesn't want to marry that millionaire and he's crazy to get her. Gee, some people have all the luck.""If she doesn't want him, where's the luck?" said Kelly, with the logic of simplicity."Harry, don't be a nut. Here's the ABC of it. All my love affairs were on the q.t., though I say it that shouldn't. Everything respectable and under cover. Nobody rattled my adventures in the ears of the public, did they? Yet, from the way everybody points the finger of scorn at me, you'd think I produced the whole Venusburg show and ran it single-handed. Now look at Janet. She hops off with young Claude Fontaine right under the eyes of the moving-picture brigade. The front pages of all the leading papers give her a full week's publicity. She boards with Claude for a month or two, carefully omitting even the formality of a fake wedding ring. She lives in sin! But everybody shies at using 'them crooel woids.' And what are the wages of sin? A couple of millionaires pining away on her doorstep and Sousa's band a-playing at her feet. And she's no great beauty at that.""Quit it, Mazie. What's the good of fooling yourself with the idea that Janet hasn't had her troubles. My guess is that Claude threw her overboard.""Well, you can guess again, my simple Samson.""Anyhow, they wouldn't have separated in a few weeks unless there had been a fierce blow-out, would they? That's the kind of thing that can hurt a whole lot, a whole lot more than shows on the surface. A sensitive girl like Janet! By thunder, we don't know what she went through, do we? She's not the sort that wears her feelings on her sleeve.""In other words: 'Gentle Janet meek and mild,'" said Mazie witheringly. "What that girl can't get away with! I'd like to go through a few of her sufferings, I would. I'd like to see yours truly riding horseback every day in the Bois de Boulogne with a plutocrat by my side and a couple of grooms toddling along in back. There's a terrible penance for you! And to think I can't even get a second-hand man to take me to a third-rate cabaret in Montmartre. Me, Mazie Ross, the wickedest girl in the wickedest city in the world. Gee, life is tough!""You've seen enough cabarets to be sick of them—and you are sick of them," said Kelly, with unwonted harshness."Yes, I suppose my cabaret days are over. But listen to me. There'll be no more skylarking for gentle Janet as soon as Cornelia engineers her marriage with the Alsatian.""Janet's marriage is none of your business, and none of Cornelia's either.""You don't say so? Well, you just tell the Empress that yourself."Mazie, with her hand over her mouth, flung these words at him just as Cornelia entered the gymnasium.IIWith the expression of a tragedy queen Cornelia came in and handed Kelly a telegram."From Robert!" she said, in a voice choked with emotion. He took it and read:Am leaving Geneva International Labor Conference tonight. Hope to see you and Janet in Paris tomorrow.Robert Lloyd."That's one on us!" remarked Kelly, awkwardly, and a little afraid of the storm signals in Cornelia's eyes.His fatuous slang irritated her enormously."Isn't it like Robert to turn up at the most inconvenient time imaginable? Just as Janet is on the point of being engaged! It spoils everything.""How did he locate us, I wonder?" said Kelly lamely. "I thought you had lost all track of him."When they had taken over Paulette's, Cornelia had insisted on ruthlessly dropping former friends in impoverished circumstances on the plea that every connection that was not an asset was a liability. It had been a sore point between the two at first."Pryor—the meddling fool—probably put him onto us," replied Cornelia. "Now everything's sure to go to pot unless we can keep Robert from interfering. As long as he's around, Janet will never marry Monsieur St. Hilaire.""She's just crazy enough to throw away the chance of a lifetime," said Mazie, judging it expedient to chime in with Cornelia."I don't believe she'll marry St. Hilaire, anyway," said Kelly, with the obstinacy of a mild nature. "She doesn't love him, to begin with. And she isn't the sort that'll do a thing simply because other people say that it's good for her. She's the sort of girl that shapes her own future.""You're as big a fool as Pryor," said Cornelia, flinging tempestuously out of the gymnasium.Poor Kelly was crestfallen. He walked sadly to a window, opened it, and took several deep breaths, his infallible remedy for depression of spirits. Mazie, relieved at Cornelia's exit, lighted a cigarette and waited for him to finish."Why is she so blamed anxious to have Janet marry this St. Hilaire?" he asked, turning slowly from the window."Why? Ha, ha, the poor fish asks me why?"She punctuated the question with a hollow laugh."Only because Janet doesn'twantto marry him," she went on, perching herself jauntily on the desk. "Why, Simple Simon, the old girl would have nothing left to live for, if she couldn't make people do what theydon'twant to do. Or, at least, if she couldn'tpreventthem from doing what theydowant to do—"The door flew open."So that's the way you talk about me behind my back?" cried Cornelia, the picture of outraged majesty.Mazie rapidly came down from her perch and slunk out of the room.The intruder turned her guns upon her husband."And you encouraging the little snake. I wonder you don't summon the whole staff in here to plot against me."Kelly, dismayed and crushed, received the broadside with head bowed.Cornelia expressed her passionate resentment at the universal treachery and ingratitude. This was her reward for helping girls in the plight that Mazie and Janet were in! She had put all the social and material resources of Paulette's at the disposal of Janet in order that, by a most fortunate marriage, a well-nigh irretrievable blunder might be retrieved. She had herself strained every nerve to help the girl to obliterate her past. And what were her thanks? The unfeeling ingrate acted as if she hardly realized that there was a past to obliterate. She now washed her hands of the whole business. Never again—.And so on.Had Harry Kelly been of an inquiring turn of mind he might have ascertained whether or no Cornelia's fury was in part due to being frustrated in the desire to get Janet off her conscience, and in part to being thwarted herself in that game of thwarting others at which Mazie had pronounced her an expert.As it was, he listened like a Mohammedan prostrated before the muezzin. His silent prayer was that when Cornelia's rage had spent itself, she would not refuse to bestow upon him a little of that affection for which he passionately and hopelessly craved.IIIA few hours later, Janet and Mazie were alone in the gymnasium, the former greatly excited about the news from Robert."It's a pity he didn't think of looking you up a little sooner," said Mazie who was in a mood for throwing cold water on enthusiasms that strayed her way.Janet was a little dashed by this reminder of Robert's indifference to her fate."All the same," she said, "I shall enjoy introducing him to Paris, as he once introduced me to Manhattan.""What, the Eiffel Tower, The Champs Elysees, the Boul. Mich., the American Quarter, and all the other rubberneck sights?""No, I'll show him the places he'll like: the office inL'Humanitewhere Jaures worked, the central hall of theConfederation Generate de Travail, and the Seine by moonlight.""The Seine by moonlight! Now we're coming to it. Janet, you're getting sentimental. Do you think Robert is coming particularly for you?""Oh, no, I hope I know him better than that.""Then what is he coming for? To see me? I don't think. And if ever he was stuck on Cornelia, he took the cure complete, as soon as you breezed along.""Nonsense, Mazie. Perhaps he has made a fortune and, in passing, means to drop in on his poor relations.""Robert rich?" Mazie laughed the idea to scorn. "A man who likes work for its own sake will never have a stiver to his name."She ventured to surmise that all his expenses were being paid by some labor organization. That was the way with these professional radicals. They traveled around the world on their own wits and on somebody else's money. They never succeeded in making even a bowing acquaintance with a check account. Never. She trusted Janet would not be such a fool as to forget this fact. Now, M. St. Hilaire was a very different story."Marry a rich man, Janet, and the memory of that Claude affair will die a natural death. Marry a poor one, and it will keep on bobbing up.""I shouldn't care if it did.""No,youwouldn't, but your husband would.""So my friends are at some pains to remind me," said Janet, rather bitterly. "You and Cornelia keep on telling me so, and Robert once expressed the same opinion.""Well, he was right. I don't say it from spite, like Cornelia does. I say it because I'm—because I'm damned fond of you—"She repressed the tears in her eyes."You're the only one here," she went on, choking down a sob, "that doesn't treat me as though I was an escaped inmate of Sodom and Gomorrah, and ought to be sent back there."Janet went to her side and comforted her. But Mazie would not be comforted. She burst out with:"The trouble with us girls is that we're too soft about love, as soft as putty. What good does all this talk and fuss about the equality of women do us? Where does it get us? Just exactly nowhere. And women won't be worth as much as men, until they're as hard about love as men are; and that means as hard as nails."Divining Janet's silent comment, Mazie added defiantly that it was because she herself hadn't been hard enough that she had come to grief at the hands of "that swine Hutchins."After a marked pause, Mazie reverted to the subject of M. St. Hilaire. Had he proposed as usual during the morning's ride?"Yes," said Janet."No other news?""He assured me that I could have everything I wanted. Even my soul should be my own.""I don't like that sob stuff about souls," said Mazie whimsically. "What did you answer?""I told him that women would never be able to call their souls their own until they could call their bodies their own.""My God, Janet! You have to give the poor mansomethingfor his money.""Exactly. And as I can't give him a fair return for it, it's clear that I oughtn't to marry him, isn't it?""Fair return! Did you ever see anybody give a fair return in this sex business? I can gamble on it you didn't. Fair return! Look here, Janet, who started putting a price on love? Did women start it or did men? Was it men or women that threw love on the curb to be bought and sold with other junk? Say, did you ever see a man who'd take love for a free gift? Let me give you a tip, dearie. If a woman don't sell her love for all she can squeeze out of a man, and give him underweight into the bargain, the man don't think he's getting his money's worth."She went on to say that every relation between the sexes was a case of the shearer and the sheep. Somebody was certain to be shorn. The man would fleece the woman unless the woman fleeced the man."And here's another tip, my gentle Janet. When Cornelia sees you prancing off to the Bois de Boulogne with Monsieur St. Hilaire, she don't believe you're putting up with him because you dote on Henriette. Not for a moment. Well then, there'll be a rude awakening for somebody. If you don't fleece St. Hilaire, she'llskinyou. She'll have you in her power at last.""No, she won't. Mazie, I'd like to tell you something. But I don't want Cornelia to know. Will you promise not to tell her?""Will I promise not to feed cakes to a crocodile?""Mrs. Jerome has offered me a job.""Well, I'll hand it to gentle Janet. You'll be going to heaven on a feather bed next. What's the job?""I don't know yet. She doesn't either. She has some scheme in mind for helping professional women to make their way in the world. My work is to come out of that. Just the sort of work I have most at heart. Do you remember the plan I had when we lived in Kips Bay, the plan of creating a new profession for women? What a magnificent castle in the air it was! Robert helped me carry the first brick or two down to earth where we could build on solid ground. By the way, I told Mrs. Jerome all about Barr and Lloyd.""Did you tell all about Barr and Fontaine, too?""No," said Janet, swallowing this bitter pill with some resentment. "But I will, before I accept her offer.""And you think it won't make any difference to her?""No. She's a woman with a great deal of good sense. She sizes you up by your future, not by your past.""Janet, you are a clip," said Mazie, with immense admiration. "Aren't you afraid of the future? Adventures can break a girl as well as make her. Look how they've broken me.""Mazie, don't be a fool," said Janet, putting her arm around the sick girl. "You're not half broken yet. You're only a bit cracked. And for your comfort I'll tell you what Robert once said. He said nowadays everybody was a bit cracked—especially in the head.""Where's the comfort in that?""Why, it's the cracked pitcher that goes longest to the well, goose. That's what I tell myself when I get the blues.""Do you, too, get in a blue funk, sometimes? I don't believe it. I always think of you as being the twin sister of the man in the fairy tale, the man who couldn't be taught to shiver or shake. You're a wonderful girl, Janet. Still, I'd like to see a man come along some day and make you shiver and shake just a teeny-weeny bit. Perhaps Robert will.""Ah, Mazie, do you think he'll try?"CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVENIShe was present, with the other principals of the Maison Paulette, the night that Robert arrived. Her heart beat faster when she set eyes on him again. He seemed perfectly collected (too perfectly collected!) though very cordial. How was she to tell, amidst so much handshaking and greeting that his heart was beating time with hers?The thing she was most conscious of was that one look of his mobile brown eyes had given a strangely different twist to her adventure with Claude Fontaine. For the first time in her experience she felt uncomfortably on the defensive.She resented this novel sensation. She regarded it with hostility, as though it were some treacherous thread that crossed her homespun integrity. To think that Robert should be its agent! Or could she be mistaken? No. It appeared that even the most charitable of human beings liked to see you in sackcloth and ashes, and looking remorseful, conscience stricken, punished. Well, she had not given Cornelia the satisfaction of looking so, nor Harry Kelly, nor Mazie Ross, nor anybody. And Robert should be no exception.With defiant vigor she resolved that, as she had no cause to acknowledge remorse, fifty Roberts should not make her acknowledge it.There was little time that night for an interchange of news. Next morning, the machinery of the Paulette establishment, too big to be suspended for a mere visitor, automatically began its daily grind.In the course of the day Janet caught fleeting glimpses of Robert, little more. Cornelia kept him under her wing and guarded him as carefully as though he were a crown jewel. She went so far as to relieve Harry Kelly of the half-hour's treat he had promised himself, the treat of showing Robert the sights of the great Maison.Cornelia not only undertook the ceremony herself; she protracted the ritual far beyond her husband's intentions. Cato's complete mentor, that was what she blandly constituted herself. All that poor Hercules could do was to leave his work once in a while, dash hastily to whatever quarter of the building his wife had conducted Robert, slap the visitor gently on the back, and fling a gloomy monosyllable at him by way of showing his good will. He insisted that Robert was too thin, and trotted out his famous formula."You don't breathe deep and down enough, old boy. Fill your lungs and your belly with good fresh wind, or you'll never travel on asphalt."Cornelia had ceased to shudder at the inelegant word. But Mazie, happening to pop in at the moment, promptly caught it up and used the occasion to favor the two men with a fusillade of flippant, slangy phrases, not forgetting to add several thinly veiled impudences directed at the mistress of the house before the latter had time to expel her.Cornelia herself suffered so many interruptions that even she had to postpone the confidential talk she had planned to hold with Robert before noon. After lunch, she allowed Robert to take his first stroll through Paris alone, reminding him to come back for an early dinner at half past six. According to her plan, the evening was to be spent in a general confab and merrymaking.Unluckily, she forgot to announce this plan in so many words, but took it for granted that no move involving Robert would be made that day without first consulting her. Her overconfidence defeated her. In one of the few moments when she was off guard, Janet contrived to get Robert by himself and secured his joyful acceptance of an invitation to a concert in the evening, for which she chanced to have two tickets.When Cornelia heard of it, she was in turn astounded and furious. Privately, to Harry and Mazie, she described Janet concisely as a selfish beast. In public, she kept herself commendably in hand.The dinner passed off without much hilarity and with no incidents other than one or two casual allusions, on Cornelia's part, to M. St. Hilaire.As Janet went out with Robert, Kelly, full of mournful resignation, hoped that their purses would survive the brigandage, and their lives the epileptic locomotion, of the Paris taxi-cab drivers. Mazie called out:"Janet, my gentle pet, don't let Rob land by mistake into theMiroir de Venus." (This was a cafe notorious for its high jinks.)"Why not?""He might reform the joint, before the joint reforms him."IIThey got into an Odéon bus.On their way via the Boulevard des Italiennes to the Seine, she named a few of the sights they passed, such as the Théâtre Français and the Tuileries. Crossing the Pont du Carrousel, the bus jounced him against her and, as she thrilled to the touch, she felt his magnetic response.Yet, outwardly, a year and a half had not changed him greatly, she thought. There was the same fire in his eyes (but wasn't there perhaps a shade less of friendliness?). He listened as politely as ever to routine chit-chat, and exhibited the same impetuous candor when the conversation flung up a new idea."Youhaven't changed much, either," he said, rather suddenly, as though he had divined her reflections. "Your contours are a little rounder, that's all, and I think your chin is much firmer.""And my big nose?"He pretended to appraise it judicially."It's a size smaller. Perhaps a size and a half."She laughed delightedly. It was a new thing for Robert to pay attention to such physical details."Well, as long as you say it's a change for the better—""I don't," he said, affecting a stern tone. "Not in the least. Do you know what? I'm afraid you're fast turning yourself into one of these popular Paul Helleu beauties, a Parisian version of the Penrhyn Stanlaws girl.""I wish I could. But I'm not a magician, Robert.""Oh, there's no magic about it. Any girl can do it, if—""If, of course. Let's hear the giganticif.""If she has a very moderate allotment of brains and looks, and a single-minded passion for beautifying herself.""If this is praise, give me dispraise," she said, with a mischievous gleam in her eyes.His senses were assailed by the tone and timbre of her voice. In self-protection he somewhat rudely remarked:"The fact is I didn't come to Europe to tell you how beautiful you are.""No, you came over on business," she said, drily. "You always do come on business. We all assumed that. You needn't fear that we're any of us flattering ourselves that you came specially to see him or her. You were sent as a delegate to some labor conference or other, weren't you?""Not as a delegate, but as a staff correspondent of the Confederated Press."She learned that the Confederated Press was a new venture backed by several radical newspapers and designed to supply its clients with the news of the world, the straightforward news, before it was cooked or adulterated by the old established press services. Robert's assignment gave him an enormously valuable experience, although his position was not a lucrative one."That's what brought me to Geneva," he concluded. "But I came to Paris to see you."Just before he left New York, he had seen Pryor, he told her. Of course Pryor had let out one or two startling bits of news gathered from the four quarters of the earth. About Hutchins Burley and Lydia Dyson—things he would tell her later. Pryor had all the town talk (Kips Bay talk) at his fingers' ends. The man was a regular human wireless station. Did Janet recall how he always spoke of information drifting his way? Well, it was from Pryor that he first had heard that Cornelia and the famous Madame Paulette were one and the same person."You see I'd lost complete track of Cornelia after she left the model tenements," he said. "I'm pretty sure that she wanted to sponge the Kips Bay connection clean off the slate. Naturally, my turning up now isn't in the least to her liking. I can feel that, in spite of her tremendous surface cordiality. But I had to come. Finding her was finding you."("A pity you didn't look me up a little sooner," said Janet, to herself, not stopping to enlighten him as to the subtle cause of Cornelia's displeasure.)"Look, here's the Ecole des Beaux Arts," she said aloud. "We'll be in the Boulevard St. Germain in a minute."IIIWhilst he obediently turned his gaze from the sparkle of the arc lights and the glitter of the shops and streets, his thoughts were preoccupied by her puzzling manner. She was friendly, of course. Janet was always that. An equable, agreeable temper was the very essence of her. But what was this disconcerting aloofness of hers which was cleaving the air between them! Her generous eyes and her low clear voice were sending out vibrations that penetrated to his very soul; yet her mind was stubbornly withholding the confidence which in the old Lorillard days she had given him without reserve. What did the paradox of her behavior mean? Was this a new Janet at the opposite pole to the candid, unaffected Janet of Barr and Lloyd? He supposed that the Claude episode might furnish the answer. Had it changed her spiritually for the worse as it had changed her physically for the better?Well, that episode had certainly changed him, though not precisely in any way that he could have predicted. Changed him! For one thing it had opened his eyes to the fact that he had been a good deal of a prig, as his Outlaw acquaintances were so fond of intimating. He blushed to recall hisex cathedrapronouncements on the subject of free love. With what assurance he had asserted that he did not object to free love as a matter of prejudice but only as a point of expediency. Hypocrite! The very reverse had been the case. When Janet ran away with Claude, the Old Adam had risen within him and almost smothered him with possessive emotion.Like any common jealous man! To be sure, he had stoutly told himself that the Claude adventure made no difference in his estimate of Janet's worth. Absolutely none. She was, as always, a prize for any man. For any man? Well, he himself, on the sole ground that his life's work might suffer, would not consider himself eligible for the prize. That was how he had put it. That was where the prig had shown the cloven hoof.Still, he could say this for himself. When he had met Janet face to face again, all these piffling considerations of expediency had instantly, along with his vulgar prejudices, gone by the board. The moment he set eyes on her in Paris, he felt himself at one with her as he had never felt at one with any other human being (save perhaps a certain long-lost friend of his own sex).The cause was not far to seek. Janet could pull the trigger that released and expanded his faculties as no one else had ever been able to do. In her presence, not merely his better self, but his more adventurous self, his more aspiring self, his more poetic self, and his more heroic self—the several Roberts that other people were too dull to perceive, or too futile, ignorant, or base to cultivate—all these craving selves came into their own and grew in stature. What was a previous love affair, what were a dozen previous love affairs, in the teeth of this miracle? Claude Fontaine! One look into the depth of Janet's eyes, and all theories, prejudices, principles, expediencies, and conflicting emotions went up in smoke.Meanwhile, Janet's thoughts had been taking a very different shape.She did not know that Robert had never seen the long letter to Cornelia in which she had described her journey with Claude and had given her European address. Cornelia had withheld this letter from Robert for reasons scarcely admitted to herself; and what Cornelia did not admit to herself she was little likely to admit to an interested friend. In fact, in her letter to Janet and in casual conversations since their recent reunion, Cornelia had so often allowed it to be inferred that Robert had had access to the letter, that she ended by making this convenient inference herself.Not unnaturally then, Janet reasoned that Robert's failure to communicate with her had been deliberate. What dovetailed with this conclusion was the memory of his dictum on free love. How well she remembered the relentless words: "I can never have anything to do with free love or with a woman who has had a free lover. It would defeat my purpose in life."His purpose in life! He was the sort of man who took more joy in finding and workingthatout than in loving any woman. True, she no longer concurred in Cornelia's view that Robert was a fanatic. No. He just escaped fanaticism by the skin of his teeth. This view explained both his long silence and his sudden reappearance. That is, she knew quite well that he had borne her no grudge on account of the past, had indulged in no theatrical repudiation of her friendship because of her liaison with Claude. He had simply found it profitless to pursue a friendship with a woman in her situation. That would be enough to commit him to silence.Nor did she take too seriously his assertion that he had made a special trip to Paris to see her. Why shouldn't he pay her or Madame Paulette a visit if the ordinary course of his business brought him almost to their doorstep? After all, a representative of labor interests could hardly come to Europe without visiting Paris. Paris, where a lurid, underground drama of industrial insurrection, half smothered by gold dust, was going on!Was there any sensible reason why Robert shouldn't pick up the thread of an old friendship, if it was all in the day's work? It might even be useful to a labor man to get in touch with people who knew the ropes of the French capital. Anyhow, Robert would be the last person in the world to abstain from such a course if it promised to advance his principles.His hateful principles! The worst of it was, she was beginning to have sympathy for his conviction that the drudgery which served a purpose you believed in might be a real pleasure, compared with which the pleasure that served no purpose worth believing in would be an intolerable pain.Well, all these speculations were as nothing against the fact of the moment. The fact of the moment was that the swaying of the bus crushed Robert's arm against hers in an impact that was poignantly delightful. Nor was this all. Robert, his imperious principles notwithstanding, acted in every respect as if he liked having his arm against her; no as if he would like to have his armaroundher. Robert Lloyd amorous? She gave him a sidelong glance. Her senses provided her with abundant evidence that her surmise was correct. But this was a world of sensory illusions as she had learned to her cost; and she reminded herself sharply that she had more than one decisive reason for trusting neither to his feelings nor to her own.
IV
Janet hastened after her in a complete change of mood.
"Come back, Cornelia," she called out, remorsefully. "I had no right to be sarcastic. Forgive me, and I'll eat all the humble pie you like."
Cornelia sat down again.
"This is a new tack for you to take," she said, making the most of an advantage Janet seldom gave her.
"The fact is, Cornelia, I'm—my feelings were ploughed up today, ploughed up from top to bottom. The postman brought me an offer of marriage this morning."
"An offer of marriage!"
"From Monsieur St. Hilaire."
Cornelia had of course heard the facts of the whole St. Hilaire episode. She also knew that Janet still corresponded with Henriette, and that all the recent letters of the girl's father had been sent back unopened.
"I thought you never read his letters?"
"This one was folded up in Henriette's note. I'm sure the child wasn't a party to the trick. Here it is. Will you read it?"
Cornelia did so.
"Well, I must say I'm surprised," she said, returning the letter. "He writes in a very decent, manly strain. Altogether different from what I expected. The devil doesn't seem to be nearly as black as he's painted."
"Oh, he's not a professional satyr, if that's what you mean. I never implied that he was."
Cornelia pondered the matter for a minute. She recalled forgotten particulars about M. St. Hilaire, amongst others, the account of his generous income.
"So he's in Paris with Henriette," she mused. "I notice that he says he's coming here tomorrow to get his answer in person. What will you do about it, dear?"
"I wish I knew. I want to see Henriette again, tremendously. But I don't want to see her father. Do give me your advice, Cornelia. What do you think I ought to do?"
"Well, why not give him another chance? He's made you a perfectly straight and honorable offer this time. As I recall the whole story, he wasn't really repugnant to you, except at that one time."
"No. But am I lightly to forget that he—that he touched me without my consent, presuming to think that, because I had loved one man, my body was at the free disposal of all men?"
"It was a wretched mistake to make—"
"A mistake! It was a monstrous piece of stupidity and impudence."
"Quite so, my dear. I'm not standing up for him. Still, don't let us forget that men are not built like women."
"That's a truth that cuts both ways, isn't it?" said Janet.
She had given up being astonished at Cornelia's peculiar mixture of the old and the new in the matter of theories about men and women. She merely wondered to what weird angle Cornelia meant to shift her outlook now.
"The point is," continued Cornelia serenely, "that a woman's sex emotion is generally excited by something that takes her fancy; a man's, by something that stirs his blood. The mind plays the bigger part in the one case, the body in the other. That's why, in the duel of sex, the psychological moment is so important to the woman, the physiological moment to the man.
"These acute distinctions are quite beyond me. A man has as much gray matter as a woman, or even more. Then why should he let his mental processes suffer paralysis whenever a nice woman looks at him?"
"Well, that's one of the mysteries that marriage helps us to understand, Araminta. In the life of a man there come these physiological moments, these sex storms, different from anything in the experience of a woman. I don't mean to say that men have more physical passion than women. But there are occasions when their physical passion takes a more violently concentrated form. Mazie, in her vulgar little way, isn't so far wrong when she says: 'Scratch a fine gentleman, and you'll find a cave man.'"
"Do you mean to tell me that there are absolutely no men who feel about love as we do?"
"I've never met one. Have you?"
Janet was thinking: "Surely Robert isn't like that!" Aloud she said nothing. There was a dangerous glint in her friend's eyes. Cornelia had an uncanny way of penetrating one's thoughts when Robert was the object of them. Had she accomplished this feat of divination again? At all events, an acrid note entered her voice as she continued:
"Is it really only Monsieur St. Hilaire that you can't make up your mind about? If so, take my advice. Come down off your high horse and make the most of your good fortune."
"My good fortune!"
"Let's be perfectly frank with each other, my dear. Here's a man who wants to marry you. He's well-born, cultivated, rich. His one child is a girl who adores you and whom you adore. The only thing against him is that he once committed a serious breach of decorum—"
"And that I don't love him—" interpolated Janet.
Cornelia blandly ignored the interruption.
"His letter shows," she went on, "that he is willing to make the most handsome amends, the only amends a man can make in a matter of this sort. What more do you ask?"
"I'm not asking him for amends. I simply want to be let alone."
"Araminta, let me beg you not to deceive yourself about the changing moral values we hear so much of nowadays. Has the price of virginity really gone down? Judged by the conversation of radicals and Outlaws, yes. Judged by the ticker of the matrimonial exchange, it is still pretty high. Bear that in mind, and remember that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush."
"Do you mean to say," exclaimed Janet, in great astonishment, "that you, of all people, advise me toacceptthis offer?"
Her tone irritated Cornelia.
"Beggars can't be choosers," she began.
"They can remain beggars," replied Janet tersely.
"If that's the way you feel about it, you needn't ask my advice again. We're wasting each other's time."
Saying which, Cornelia rose and left the office.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
I
The Paulette manikins, famed throughout the world of fashion for their grace in attitude and correctness in position and movement, owed their prestige to a system of hygienic training conceived and carried out by Harry Kelly himself. Yet these young ladies took their distinction so seriously that they held it beneath them to assist their chief in straightening out the classroom disorder when the period of instruction was over.
"Here's a mess!" called out Mazie Ross, walking into the Paulette gymnasium, immediately after the dismissal of a small class of manikins. "You might think they'd been on a grand jamboree."
"Anything up?" said Harry, shortly.
"Janet asked me to help you this morning."
"What for?"
"She went out for a horseback ride with the St. Hilaires."
"This morning. Why, as it is, she goes almost every afternoon. She went yesterday afternoon. A fine way to do business, I'll say."
Mazie sulkily began to pick up stray articles.
"You needn't pitch into me, Harry," she said. "You're not half so sorry as I am that your gentle Janet isn't here to do this rotten job. Is it my fault?"
"Does Cornelia know she's away?" said Kelly, fuming.
"Can a cat miaow within a mile of these precincts without Corny being on to it?"
"Why don't they keep me posted then? I never hear of a blessed thing that goes on in my own home until it's all over."
"Say, do you want to start a row? Then take a tip from me and land into a certain party in the main office. If you'd knock her down and then jump on her with both feet, you'd be doing something. What's the use of picking on a dead bird like me?"
"Don't talk that way about Cornelia," said Harry, fumbling amongst the papers on the desk, and trying vainly to be stern. "I've told you before I won't have it. Where's your gratitude?"
She made a face at him behind his back.
"Gratitude!" she said. "What's the good of me wasting gratitude on Cornelia when she reminds herself and everybody in Paulette's daily that she picked me up out of the gutter that Hutch left me in?"
"Lock up the wardrobe and clear out, will you?" said Kelly, frigidly. "I can do the rest myself."
"Here's your hat, what's your hurry," she muttered to herself. But she stayed and continued to put things to rights.
Mazie had changed greatly since the palmy days of the Lorillard tenements. She looked ill and haggard, a mere shadow of the jaunty "Follies" girl of old. Her willowy posture had degenerated into an undisguised slouch, her hair was frowsy, and her dress was slung together.
But her tongue had not lost its stab.
She closed the wardrobe door with an unintentional slam that caused Harry Kelly to jump up in his seat.
"Damn!" he said, in that mild voice of his.
It was as if Vesuvius had emitted a puff of tobacco smoke.
The metamorphosis of the "Harlem Gorilla" into the husband of Madame Paulette was astoundingly complete. Harry Kelly's Van Dyke beard and fashionably tailored clothes alone would have effected a radical change in his appearance. Kelly was transformed not only physically but psychically. His muscles were still the muscles of a Titan, but his nerves had become the nerves of a fanciful man or a delicate woman.
Mazie, who was no student of spiritual transformations, went up to the desk at which Kelly sat and began to tidy it. She whisked away stray papers and envelopes that lay near his hands with much the same air that a waiter lashes the crumbs off a table to speed the lingering guest.
He grew more and more fidgety, but she showed him no mercy.
"Janet didn't know those St. Hilaires were coming this morning," she finally volunteered. "But you can gamble on it that Cornelia knew. When my fine gentleman got off his prancing horse and marched into the reception room clanking spurs and all, Corny was right there on the job in her softest, sweetest tone. My! butter wouldn't melt in her mouth. And all the time Janet hangs in the background, saying she's too busy to go out, and looking as stubborn as a mule. When gentle Janet gets that stubborn expression, it means: You can move the Woolworth Building, but you can't move me!"
"Then why in thunder did she go?"
"Because that St. Hilaire kid got busy with her. A pretty little kid, a regular father's darling, the kind that coos away like a turtledove till she gets everything she wants and a tidy slice of the moon extra. Well, she draped herself pathetically around Janet—all that heartstring stuff—and Janet, like any fool of a man, fell for the pathos."
"You can't persuade me that Janet didn't want to go," said Kelly, gloomily.
"I won't try to, then. Just the same, she didn't. That's the weird part of it."
"What's weird about it?"
"Why, she doesn't want to marry that millionaire and he's crazy to get her. Gee, some people have all the luck."
"If she doesn't want him, where's the luck?" said Kelly, with the logic of simplicity.
"Harry, don't be a nut. Here's the ABC of it. All my love affairs were on the q.t., though I say it that shouldn't. Everything respectable and under cover. Nobody rattled my adventures in the ears of the public, did they? Yet, from the way everybody points the finger of scorn at me, you'd think I produced the whole Venusburg show and ran it single-handed. Now look at Janet. She hops off with young Claude Fontaine right under the eyes of the moving-picture brigade. The front pages of all the leading papers give her a full week's publicity. She boards with Claude for a month or two, carefully omitting even the formality of a fake wedding ring. She lives in sin! But everybody shies at using 'them crooel woids.' And what are the wages of sin? A couple of millionaires pining away on her doorstep and Sousa's band a-playing at her feet. And she's no great beauty at that."
"Quit it, Mazie. What's the good of fooling yourself with the idea that Janet hasn't had her troubles. My guess is that Claude threw her overboard."
"Well, you can guess again, my simple Samson."
"Anyhow, they wouldn't have separated in a few weeks unless there had been a fierce blow-out, would they? That's the kind of thing that can hurt a whole lot, a whole lot more than shows on the surface. A sensitive girl like Janet! By thunder, we don't know what she went through, do we? She's not the sort that wears her feelings on her sleeve."
"In other words: 'Gentle Janet meek and mild,'" said Mazie witheringly. "What that girl can't get away with! I'd like to go through a few of her sufferings, I would. I'd like to see yours truly riding horseback every day in the Bois de Boulogne with a plutocrat by my side and a couple of grooms toddling along in back. There's a terrible penance for you! And to think I can't even get a second-hand man to take me to a third-rate cabaret in Montmartre. Me, Mazie Ross, the wickedest girl in the wickedest city in the world. Gee, life is tough!"
"You've seen enough cabarets to be sick of them—and you are sick of them," said Kelly, with unwonted harshness.
"Yes, I suppose my cabaret days are over. But listen to me. There'll be no more skylarking for gentle Janet as soon as Cornelia engineers her marriage with the Alsatian."
"Janet's marriage is none of your business, and none of Cornelia's either."
"You don't say so? Well, you just tell the Empress that yourself."
Mazie, with her hand over her mouth, flung these words at him just as Cornelia entered the gymnasium.
II
With the expression of a tragedy queen Cornelia came in and handed Kelly a telegram.
"From Robert!" she said, in a voice choked with emotion. He took it and read:
Am leaving Geneva International Labor Conference tonight. Hope to see you and Janet in Paris tomorrow.
Robert Lloyd.
"That's one on us!" remarked Kelly, awkwardly, and a little afraid of the storm signals in Cornelia's eyes.
His fatuous slang irritated her enormously.
"Isn't it like Robert to turn up at the most inconvenient time imaginable? Just as Janet is on the point of being engaged! It spoils everything."
"How did he locate us, I wonder?" said Kelly lamely. "I thought you had lost all track of him."
When they had taken over Paulette's, Cornelia had insisted on ruthlessly dropping former friends in impoverished circumstances on the plea that every connection that was not an asset was a liability. It had been a sore point between the two at first.
"Pryor—the meddling fool—probably put him onto us," replied Cornelia. "Now everything's sure to go to pot unless we can keep Robert from interfering. As long as he's around, Janet will never marry Monsieur St. Hilaire."
"She's just crazy enough to throw away the chance of a lifetime," said Mazie, judging it expedient to chime in with Cornelia.
"I don't believe she'll marry St. Hilaire, anyway," said Kelly, with the obstinacy of a mild nature. "She doesn't love him, to begin with. And she isn't the sort that'll do a thing simply because other people say that it's good for her. She's the sort of girl that shapes her own future."
"You're as big a fool as Pryor," said Cornelia, flinging tempestuously out of the gymnasium.
Poor Kelly was crestfallen. He walked sadly to a window, opened it, and took several deep breaths, his infallible remedy for depression of spirits. Mazie, relieved at Cornelia's exit, lighted a cigarette and waited for him to finish.
"Why is she so blamed anxious to have Janet marry this St. Hilaire?" he asked, turning slowly from the window.
"Why? Ha, ha, the poor fish asks me why?"
She punctuated the question with a hollow laugh.
"Only because Janet doesn'twantto marry him," she went on, perching herself jauntily on the desk. "Why, Simple Simon, the old girl would have nothing left to live for, if she couldn't make people do what theydon'twant to do. Or, at least, if she couldn'tpreventthem from doing what theydowant to do—"
The door flew open.
"So that's the way you talk about me behind my back?" cried Cornelia, the picture of outraged majesty.
Mazie rapidly came down from her perch and slunk out of the room.
The intruder turned her guns upon her husband.
"And you encouraging the little snake. I wonder you don't summon the whole staff in here to plot against me."
Kelly, dismayed and crushed, received the broadside with head bowed.
Cornelia expressed her passionate resentment at the universal treachery and ingratitude. This was her reward for helping girls in the plight that Mazie and Janet were in! She had put all the social and material resources of Paulette's at the disposal of Janet in order that, by a most fortunate marriage, a well-nigh irretrievable blunder might be retrieved. She had herself strained every nerve to help the girl to obliterate her past. And what were her thanks? The unfeeling ingrate acted as if she hardly realized that there was a past to obliterate. She now washed her hands of the whole business. Never again—.
And so on.
Had Harry Kelly been of an inquiring turn of mind he might have ascertained whether or no Cornelia's fury was in part due to being frustrated in the desire to get Janet off her conscience, and in part to being thwarted herself in that game of thwarting others at which Mazie had pronounced her an expert.
As it was, he listened like a Mohammedan prostrated before the muezzin. His silent prayer was that when Cornelia's rage had spent itself, she would not refuse to bestow upon him a little of that affection for which he passionately and hopelessly craved.
III
A few hours later, Janet and Mazie were alone in the gymnasium, the former greatly excited about the news from Robert.
"It's a pity he didn't think of looking you up a little sooner," said Mazie who was in a mood for throwing cold water on enthusiasms that strayed her way.
Janet was a little dashed by this reminder of Robert's indifference to her fate.
"All the same," she said, "I shall enjoy introducing him to Paris, as he once introduced me to Manhattan."
"What, the Eiffel Tower, The Champs Elysees, the Boul. Mich., the American Quarter, and all the other rubberneck sights?"
"No, I'll show him the places he'll like: the office inL'Humanitewhere Jaures worked, the central hall of theConfederation Generate de Travail, and the Seine by moonlight."
"The Seine by moonlight! Now we're coming to it. Janet, you're getting sentimental. Do you think Robert is coming particularly for you?"
"Oh, no, I hope I know him better than that."
"Then what is he coming for? To see me? I don't think. And if ever he was stuck on Cornelia, he took the cure complete, as soon as you breezed along."
"Nonsense, Mazie. Perhaps he has made a fortune and, in passing, means to drop in on his poor relations."
"Robert rich?" Mazie laughed the idea to scorn. "A man who likes work for its own sake will never have a stiver to his name."
She ventured to surmise that all his expenses were being paid by some labor organization. That was the way with these professional radicals. They traveled around the world on their own wits and on somebody else's money. They never succeeded in making even a bowing acquaintance with a check account. Never. She trusted Janet would not be such a fool as to forget this fact. Now, M. St. Hilaire was a very different story.
"Marry a rich man, Janet, and the memory of that Claude affair will die a natural death. Marry a poor one, and it will keep on bobbing up."
"I shouldn't care if it did."
"No,youwouldn't, but your husband would."
"So my friends are at some pains to remind me," said Janet, rather bitterly. "You and Cornelia keep on telling me so, and Robert once expressed the same opinion."
"Well, he was right. I don't say it from spite, like Cornelia does. I say it because I'm—because I'm damned fond of you—"
She repressed the tears in her eyes.
"You're the only one here," she went on, choking down a sob, "that doesn't treat me as though I was an escaped inmate of Sodom and Gomorrah, and ought to be sent back there."
Janet went to her side and comforted her. But Mazie would not be comforted. She burst out with:
"The trouble with us girls is that we're too soft about love, as soft as putty. What good does all this talk and fuss about the equality of women do us? Where does it get us? Just exactly nowhere. And women won't be worth as much as men, until they're as hard about love as men are; and that means as hard as nails."
Divining Janet's silent comment, Mazie added defiantly that it was because she herself hadn't been hard enough that she had come to grief at the hands of "that swine Hutchins."
After a marked pause, Mazie reverted to the subject of M. St. Hilaire. Had he proposed as usual during the morning's ride?
"Yes," said Janet.
"No other news?"
"He assured me that I could have everything I wanted. Even my soul should be my own."
"I don't like that sob stuff about souls," said Mazie whimsically. "What did you answer?"
"I told him that women would never be able to call their souls their own until they could call their bodies their own."
"My God, Janet! You have to give the poor mansomethingfor his money."
"Exactly. And as I can't give him a fair return for it, it's clear that I oughtn't to marry him, isn't it?"
"Fair return! Did you ever see anybody give a fair return in this sex business? I can gamble on it you didn't. Fair return! Look here, Janet, who started putting a price on love? Did women start it or did men? Was it men or women that threw love on the curb to be bought and sold with other junk? Say, did you ever see a man who'd take love for a free gift? Let me give you a tip, dearie. If a woman don't sell her love for all she can squeeze out of a man, and give him underweight into the bargain, the man don't think he's getting his money's worth."
She went on to say that every relation between the sexes was a case of the shearer and the sheep. Somebody was certain to be shorn. The man would fleece the woman unless the woman fleeced the man.
"And here's another tip, my gentle Janet. When Cornelia sees you prancing off to the Bois de Boulogne with Monsieur St. Hilaire, she don't believe you're putting up with him because you dote on Henriette. Not for a moment. Well then, there'll be a rude awakening for somebody. If you don't fleece St. Hilaire, she'llskinyou. She'll have you in her power at last."
"No, she won't. Mazie, I'd like to tell you something. But I don't want Cornelia to know. Will you promise not to tell her?"
"Will I promise not to feed cakes to a crocodile?"
"Mrs. Jerome has offered me a job."
"Well, I'll hand it to gentle Janet. You'll be going to heaven on a feather bed next. What's the job?"
"I don't know yet. She doesn't either. She has some scheme in mind for helping professional women to make their way in the world. My work is to come out of that. Just the sort of work I have most at heart. Do you remember the plan I had when we lived in Kips Bay, the plan of creating a new profession for women? What a magnificent castle in the air it was! Robert helped me carry the first brick or two down to earth where we could build on solid ground. By the way, I told Mrs. Jerome all about Barr and Lloyd."
"Did you tell all about Barr and Fontaine, too?"
"No," said Janet, swallowing this bitter pill with some resentment. "But I will, before I accept her offer."
"And you think it won't make any difference to her?"
"No. She's a woman with a great deal of good sense. She sizes you up by your future, not by your past."
"Janet, you are a clip," said Mazie, with immense admiration. "Aren't you afraid of the future? Adventures can break a girl as well as make her. Look how they've broken me."
"Mazie, don't be a fool," said Janet, putting her arm around the sick girl. "You're not half broken yet. You're only a bit cracked. And for your comfort I'll tell you what Robert once said. He said nowadays everybody was a bit cracked—especially in the head."
"Where's the comfort in that?"
"Why, it's the cracked pitcher that goes longest to the well, goose. That's what I tell myself when I get the blues."
"Do you, too, get in a blue funk, sometimes? I don't believe it. I always think of you as being the twin sister of the man in the fairy tale, the man who couldn't be taught to shiver or shake. You're a wonderful girl, Janet. Still, I'd like to see a man come along some day and make you shiver and shake just a teeny-weeny bit. Perhaps Robert will."
"Ah, Mazie, do you think he'll try?"
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
I
She was present, with the other principals of the Maison Paulette, the night that Robert arrived. Her heart beat faster when she set eyes on him again. He seemed perfectly collected (too perfectly collected!) though very cordial. How was she to tell, amidst so much handshaking and greeting that his heart was beating time with hers?
The thing she was most conscious of was that one look of his mobile brown eyes had given a strangely different twist to her adventure with Claude Fontaine. For the first time in her experience she felt uncomfortably on the defensive.
She resented this novel sensation. She regarded it with hostility, as though it were some treacherous thread that crossed her homespun integrity. To think that Robert should be its agent! Or could she be mistaken? No. It appeared that even the most charitable of human beings liked to see you in sackcloth and ashes, and looking remorseful, conscience stricken, punished. Well, she had not given Cornelia the satisfaction of looking so, nor Harry Kelly, nor Mazie Ross, nor anybody. And Robert should be no exception.
With defiant vigor she resolved that, as she had no cause to acknowledge remorse, fifty Roberts should not make her acknowledge it.
There was little time that night for an interchange of news. Next morning, the machinery of the Paulette establishment, too big to be suspended for a mere visitor, automatically began its daily grind.
In the course of the day Janet caught fleeting glimpses of Robert, little more. Cornelia kept him under her wing and guarded him as carefully as though he were a crown jewel. She went so far as to relieve Harry Kelly of the half-hour's treat he had promised himself, the treat of showing Robert the sights of the great Maison.
Cornelia not only undertook the ceremony herself; she protracted the ritual far beyond her husband's intentions. Cato's complete mentor, that was what she blandly constituted herself. All that poor Hercules could do was to leave his work once in a while, dash hastily to whatever quarter of the building his wife had conducted Robert, slap the visitor gently on the back, and fling a gloomy monosyllable at him by way of showing his good will. He insisted that Robert was too thin, and trotted out his famous formula.
"You don't breathe deep and down enough, old boy. Fill your lungs and your belly with good fresh wind, or you'll never travel on asphalt."
Cornelia had ceased to shudder at the inelegant word. But Mazie, happening to pop in at the moment, promptly caught it up and used the occasion to favor the two men with a fusillade of flippant, slangy phrases, not forgetting to add several thinly veiled impudences directed at the mistress of the house before the latter had time to expel her.
Cornelia herself suffered so many interruptions that even she had to postpone the confidential talk she had planned to hold with Robert before noon. After lunch, she allowed Robert to take his first stroll through Paris alone, reminding him to come back for an early dinner at half past six. According to her plan, the evening was to be spent in a general confab and merrymaking.
Unluckily, she forgot to announce this plan in so many words, but took it for granted that no move involving Robert would be made that day without first consulting her. Her overconfidence defeated her. In one of the few moments when she was off guard, Janet contrived to get Robert by himself and secured his joyful acceptance of an invitation to a concert in the evening, for which she chanced to have two tickets.
When Cornelia heard of it, she was in turn astounded and furious. Privately, to Harry and Mazie, she described Janet concisely as a selfish beast. In public, she kept herself commendably in hand.
The dinner passed off without much hilarity and with no incidents other than one or two casual allusions, on Cornelia's part, to M. St. Hilaire.
As Janet went out with Robert, Kelly, full of mournful resignation, hoped that their purses would survive the brigandage, and their lives the epileptic locomotion, of the Paris taxi-cab drivers. Mazie called out:
"Janet, my gentle pet, don't let Rob land by mistake into theMiroir de Venus." (This was a cafe notorious for its high jinks.)
"Why not?"
"He might reform the joint, before the joint reforms him."
II
They got into an Odéon bus.
On their way via the Boulevard des Italiennes to the Seine, she named a few of the sights they passed, such as the Théâtre Français and the Tuileries. Crossing the Pont du Carrousel, the bus jounced him against her and, as she thrilled to the touch, she felt his magnetic response.
Yet, outwardly, a year and a half had not changed him greatly, she thought. There was the same fire in his eyes (but wasn't there perhaps a shade less of friendliness?). He listened as politely as ever to routine chit-chat, and exhibited the same impetuous candor when the conversation flung up a new idea.
"Youhaven't changed much, either," he said, rather suddenly, as though he had divined her reflections. "Your contours are a little rounder, that's all, and I think your chin is much firmer."
"And my big nose?"
He pretended to appraise it judicially.
"It's a size smaller. Perhaps a size and a half."
She laughed delightedly. It was a new thing for Robert to pay attention to such physical details.
"Well, as long as you say it's a change for the better—"
"I don't," he said, affecting a stern tone. "Not in the least. Do you know what? I'm afraid you're fast turning yourself into one of these popular Paul Helleu beauties, a Parisian version of the Penrhyn Stanlaws girl."
"I wish I could. But I'm not a magician, Robert."
"Oh, there's no magic about it. Any girl can do it, if—"
"If, of course. Let's hear the giganticif."
"If she has a very moderate allotment of brains and looks, and a single-minded passion for beautifying herself."
"If this is praise, give me dispraise," she said, with a mischievous gleam in her eyes.
His senses were assailed by the tone and timbre of her voice. In self-protection he somewhat rudely remarked:
"The fact is I didn't come to Europe to tell you how beautiful you are."
"No, you came over on business," she said, drily. "You always do come on business. We all assumed that. You needn't fear that we're any of us flattering ourselves that you came specially to see him or her. You were sent as a delegate to some labor conference or other, weren't you?"
"Not as a delegate, but as a staff correspondent of the Confederated Press."
She learned that the Confederated Press was a new venture backed by several radical newspapers and designed to supply its clients with the news of the world, the straightforward news, before it was cooked or adulterated by the old established press services. Robert's assignment gave him an enormously valuable experience, although his position was not a lucrative one.
"That's what brought me to Geneva," he concluded. "But I came to Paris to see you."
Just before he left New York, he had seen Pryor, he told her. Of course Pryor had let out one or two startling bits of news gathered from the four quarters of the earth. About Hutchins Burley and Lydia Dyson—things he would tell her later. Pryor had all the town talk (Kips Bay talk) at his fingers' ends. The man was a regular human wireless station. Did Janet recall how he always spoke of information drifting his way? Well, it was from Pryor that he first had heard that Cornelia and the famous Madame Paulette were one and the same person.
"You see I'd lost complete track of Cornelia after she left the model tenements," he said. "I'm pretty sure that she wanted to sponge the Kips Bay connection clean off the slate. Naturally, my turning up now isn't in the least to her liking. I can feel that, in spite of her tremendous surface cordiality. But I had to come. Finding her was finding you."
("A pity you didn't look me up a little sooner," said Janet, to herself, not stopping to enlighten him as to the subtle cause of Cornelia's displeasure.)
"Look, here's the Ecole des Beaux Arts," she said aloud. "We'll be in the Boulevard St. Germain in a minute."
III
Whilst he obediently turned his gaze from the sparkle of the arc lights and the glitter of the shops and streets, his thoughts were preoccupied by her puzzling manner. She was friendly, of course. Janet was always that. An equable, agreeable temper was the very essence of her. But what was this disconcerting aloofness of hers which was cleaving the air between them! Her generous eyes and her low clear voice were sending out vibrations that penetrated to his very soul; yet her mind was stubbornly withholding the confidence which in the old Lorillard days she had given him without reserve. What did the paradox of her behavior mean? Was this a new Janet at the opposite pole to the candid, unaffected Janet of Barr and Lloyd? He supposed that the Claude episode might furnish the answer. Had it changed her spiritually for the worse as it had changed her physically for the better?
Well, that episode had certainly changed him, though not precisely in any way that he could have predicted. Changed him! For one thing it had opened his eyes to the fact that he had been a good deal of a prig, as his Outlaw acquaintances were so fond of intimating. He blushed to recall hisex cathedrapronouncements on the subject of free love. With what assurance he had asserted that he did not object to free love as a matter of prejudice but only as a point of expediency. Hypocrite! The very reverse had been the case. When Janet ran away with Claude, the Old Adam had risen within him and almost smothered him with possessive emotion.
Like any common jealous man! To be sure, he had stoutly told himself that the Claude adventure made no difference in his estimate of Janet's worth. Absolutely none. She was, as always, a prize for any man. For any man? Well, he himself, on the sole ground that his life's work might suffer, would not consider himself eligible for the prize. That was how he had put it. That was where the prig had shown the cloven hoof.
Still, he could say this for himself. When he had met Janet face to face again, all these piffling considerations of expediency had instantly, along with his vulgar prejudices, gone by the board. The moment he set eyes on her in Paris, he felt himself at one with her as he had never felt at one with any other human being (save perhaps a certain long-lost friend of his own sex).
The cause was not far to seek. Janet could pull the trigger that released and expanded his faculties as no one else had ever been able to do. In her presence, not merely his better self, but his more adventurous self, his more aspiring self, his more poetic self, and his more heroic self—the several Roberts that other people were too dull to perceive, or too futile, ignorant, or base to cultivate—all these craving selves came into their own and grew in stature. What was a previous love affair, what were a dozen previous love affairs, in the teeth of this miracle? Claude Fontaine! One look into the depth of Janet's eyes, and all theories, prejudices, principles, expediencies, and conflicting emotions went up in smoke.
Meanwhile, Janet's thoughts had been taking a very different shape.
She did not know that Robert had never seen the long letter to Cornelia in which she had described her journey with Claude and had given her European address. Cornelia had withheld this letter from Robert for reasons scarcely admitted to herself; and what Cornelia did not admit to herself she was little likely to admit to an interested friend. In fact, in her letter to Janet and in casual conversations since their recent reunion, Cornelia had so often allowed it to be inferred that Robert had had access to the letter, that she ended by making this convenient inference herself.
Not unnaturally then, Janet reasoned that Robert's failure to communicate with her had been deliberate. What dovetailed with this conclusion was the memory of his dictum on free love. How well she remembered the relentless words: "I can never have anything to do with free love or with a woman who has had a free lover. It would defeat my purpose in life."
His purpose in life! He was the sort of man who took more joy in finding and workingthatout than in loving any woman. True, she no longer concurred in Cornelia's view that Robert was a fanatic. No. He just escaped fanaticism by the skin of his teeth. This view explained both his long silence and his sudden reappearance. That is, she knew quite well that he had borne her no grudge on account of the past, had indulged in no theatrical repudiation of her friendship because of her liaison with Claude. He had simply found it profitless to pursue a friendship with a woman in her situation. That would be enough to commit him to silence.
Nor did she take too seriously his assertion that he had made a special trip to Paris to see her. Why shouldn't he pay her or Madame Paulette a visit if the ordinary course of his business brought him almost to their doorstep? After all, a representative of labor interests could hardly come to Europe without visiting Paris. Paris, where a lurid, underground drama of industrial insurrection, half smothered by gold dust, was going on!
Was there any sensible reason why Robert shouldn't pick up the thread of an old friendship, if it was all in the day's work? It might even be useful to a labor man to get in touch with people who knew the ropes of the French capital. Anyhow, Robert would be the last person in the world to abstain from such a course if it promised to advance his principles.
His hateful principles! The worst of it was, she was beginning to have sympathy for his conviction that the drudgery which served a purpose you believed in might be a real pleasure, compared with which the pleasure that served no purpose worth believing in would be an intolerable pain.
Well, all these speculations were as nothing against the fact of the moment. The fact of the moment was that the swaying of the bus crushed Robert's arm against hers in an impact that was poignantly delightful. Nor was this all. Robert, his imperious principles notwithstanding, acted in every respect as if he liked having his arm against her; no as if he would like to have his armaroundher. Robert Lloyd amorous? She gave him a sidelong glance. Her senses provided her with abundant evidence that her surmise was correct. But this was a world of sensory illusions as she had learned to her cost; and she reminded herself sharply that she had more than one decisive reason for trusting neither to his feelings nor to her own.