IV"You're not doing your duty," she said to him. "We've just passed the church of St. Germain-des-Pres. Quick look back. Even darkness can't subdue those imposing walls. Doesn't it look solid and impregnable? Just like my mother and like your convictions. It's a structure that commands your faith, though you have it not. You'll miss the silhouette of St. Sulpice, too, if you don't look out.""Janet, I didn't come to Paris to look at churches. I came to look at you.""Well, you came, you saw, and—you conquered.""I saw more than you think," he went on, smiling at her flippancy. "As I said before, you've changed physically. But the physical change is of no importance.""I knew it. Those fine compliments were all bunk.""Not at all. You've changed physically for the better. But what is more important is that you've changed spiritually—""For the worse, of course. Now we're coming to it.""I didn't say it. I'm not at all sure.""This may be candor, Robert. But it sounds like revenge.""You may as well be serious, Janet. I've got volumes to pour out to you, and pour them out I will. When I'm with you, I'm like the Ancient Mariner. I want to tell you everything.""Everything?""Well, almost everything, as they say in the comic opera. What do you suppose was the most wonderful companionship I ever formed?""I can't guess.""Barr and Lloyd. Do you know why? Because, for one thing, there was nothing in reason that I couldn't talk to you about, with the most unvarnished frankness. I still feel that way.""I'm glad you do. We were very good pals, weren't we?""Yes, and I hope we still are. Anyhow, I want to speak of something I heard about you from Mark Pryor.""What was that?""Pryor seems to have kept in touch with Cornelia right along. You know Pryor.""Not a sparrow falleth but his eye doth see," she quoted."Exactly. He has been keeping tabs on this rich Alsatian. And, by the way, I ought to mention that he repeated to me what you told him about Monsieur St. Hilaire.""That's a nice way to treat my confidence," said Janet, seriously annoyed. "Pryor of all people. And I took him to be the only original human clam!""Well, I think he was fully justified—""In what way, I'd like to ask?""Please don't make me go into that now, Janet. The thing I'm driving at is this. Pryor heard that you were on the point of—of forming a free alliance with this Alsatian gentleman. Chiefly to escape Cornelia and this horrible business of clothes.""You've been misinformed," she retorted coldly. "Not about the clothes. Idoloathe them. But I've no intention of forming a free alliance with anybody. Certainly not with Monsieur St. Hilaire. Why should I? I don't love him. But I don't mind telling you that he has asked me to marry him.""Oh, then, that's what you're considering?""Yes," she said concisely.And "put that in your pipe and smoke it," added a defiant glance from her half-parted long-lashed eyes.If he had any notion of playing the medieval knight, plunging through fire and water for the damsel in distress, she would spoil that chivalrous pose in a jiffy."Janet, I don't understand you," he said, with quite unnecessary vehemence. "You said you wouldn't marry Claude, your reason being that you loved him. Now you say you will marry Monsieur St. Hilaire, and your reason is that you don't love him."His eyes added: "You are inexplicable, exasperating, maddening—and yet adorable: in short, you are Janet."The bus came to a full stop, and a few minutes later they were in the concert hall.VThe concert was one of a special series given by an orchestra from Rouen. Janet's attention had been drawn to the series by two circumstances. One was that a third of the members of the orchestra were women. The other was that the inclusion of women in a first-class orchestra had plunged musical circles into a controversy which the newspapers eagerly seized upon and played up with caricature or abuse, satire or eulogy, according to the partisanship, but never the merits of the case.Robert knew nothing of this controversy until he ventured on a remark during the first intermission."The tone and workmanship of the orchestra are splendid," he said. "I don't feel qualified to judge, but it strikes me that the women are doing every whit as well as the men.""As well? They're doing far better. Do you see that first violin in the front row, the third from the left? I could tell he was slacking all through the Cesar Franck number. And there were four or five others as bad. You couldn't say that of one of the women.""No. Their performance is amazing, isn't it?""Why amazing?" asked Janet, still detecting an echo of masculine superciliousness."Well, women don't generally reach the top-notch in the fine arts, do they?""How can they," said Janet warmly, "when the patronizing disparagement and merciless rivalry of men hold them back at every turn!""Well, they've managed to break into this crack orchestra. That doesn't look like merciless rivalry.""Ah, but wait till I tell you the facts, Robert. As the war went on, managers found it impossible to deny women the privilege of playing in high-class bands. But the men are now recovering their monopoly as fast and as unscrupulously as possible. How? They have set up a hue and cry against the women and have won the musical pundits to their side. I am told that the management of this Rouen orchestra is almost certain to yield to masculine pressure, which means that the women will be dislodged at the end of the current series."Did Robert appreciate the injustice of this abominable proceeding? It was a fact that the women brought a fire, intensity and freshness to their work which improved the tone and effectiveness of every band they played in. They were twice as keen as the men and worked fifty times harder. Several of the younger, more liberal musical critics both in Paris and in London fully admitted this. Not so the old-timers who sat in the seats of the mighty. And yet the men who were doing their vicious best to elbow their rivals out of the way were the very men who fluttered about town and with crocodile regret assured the public that, no matter whatequal chancesthe weaker sex received, the final incapacity of women to reach the top was beyond dispute.Janet's shot went home. But the resumption of the program made it impossible for Robert to offer a defense. He was annoyed at himself for having spoken tactlessly on a topic which Janet might well be touchy about. Still, he considered that her rebuke was far too severe to fit the crime, especially in view of his genuine equalitarian feeling toward women, a feeling that Janet ought to have been the last to deny him.It occurred to him that, if she was capable of regarding him, of all men, with so much detachment (not to say indifference) as to make him the target for a sharp anti-hominist fire, she might be deeper in the M. St. Hilaire entanglement than he or Mark Pryor had suspected.By the time the concert was over, Janet was sorry for the way she had pitched into her guest. Would he forgive her for letting the heat of argument carry her away? Not that she retracted a word she had said. Far from it. It was impossible to say too much on that score. Had he noticed the wide publicity which the Paris newspapers had given to an assertion appearing in one of Arnold Bennett's recent books? It was the assertion that women are inferior to men in intellectual power and that "no amount of education or liberty of action will sensibly alter this fact." This gesture of finality with which men, even men of genius like Bennett, invariably polished off the future of women and consigned them to an eternity of subordination! When would this superficial generalization ever stop, if avowed feminists like Robert fell to using the language of their opponents even while avoiding their errors?"I'm only taking the words out of your mouth, Robert," she concluded, in her softest pacifying tones. "I'm only repeating what you've told me a hundred times over in the past."He smiled at this sop to his vanity, which none the less helped to restore good feeling.VIJanet had taken him towards the river. They walked arm in arm along the Quai Voltaire and the Quai d'Orsay, the tranquil Seine and the starry skies almost their sole companions.The dispute of the evening still fresh in his mind, Robert alluded to Janet's former ambition to create a new profession for women of the middle class. A branch of law, wasn't it? Authorship law, so to speak. Had she given it any thought of late? What a nuisance it was that money should have to be the root of all experiment as well as the root of all evil. In the absence of enough capital, it was probably just as well that she deferred another attempt to realize her dream. Still, it was a pity. She had made such a good beginning with the firm of Barr & Lloyd, humble though the scale of its operations had been."Well, Robert, are you ready to renew the partnership?" she challenged him."Is this a strictly business proposal?" he replied, in a hesitating manner.She was chilled by his clumsiness."Barr & Lloyd was always a 'strictly business' affair, wasn't it?" she said, in a cool, quiet voice.He wanted to burst out with: "No, I never believed it was wholly that. If you'd had my sort of partnership in mind, I'd give a very swift and a very different answer." But the words stuck in his throat. For two reasons. Her sudden return to the almost hostile manner that had baffled him earlier, was one. His knowledge that the limited and precarious means he disposed of would make an offer of marriage from him seem ridiculous, if not insane, was the second.Had he voiced his thoughts, they might then and there have thrashed their differences out in half an hour. But he could not voice them. For the first time in their friendship, neither of them was candid when candor was the sensible course. "This comes of caring for a woman not wisely but too well," thought Robert. He was amazed and incredulous to find that he cared so much; he was also a little indignant with himself, for he had vowed never to do that very thing."Don't be alarmed," he heard Janet saying. "I'm not going to impress you into the cause. You have bigger fish to fry than the feminist movement. As for me, I've had a very good offer from Mrs. R. H. L. Jerome."She sketched a picture of this whimsical lady, and gave a short account of Mrs. Jerome's interest in the organized effort to rid women of their professional disabilities. Robert learned that Mrs. Jerome had repeatedly expressed a desire to put Janet to some use in the cause she had at heart."The work would be quite in line with my old plans," added Janet."Then why don't you accept her offer at once?""I wish I knew," she said, evasively. "Perhaps I can do all I've wanted to do, and more, if I follow the beaten track, if I buy cheap and sell dear in the marriage market; in short, give as little of myself as I can to the richest bidder that offers. What do you think?""I think a cynical step of that sort would do very well for Mazie, whose words you appear to be repeating.""Oh, don't underrate Mazie's cynicism. It has been hammered into a durable, serviceable instrument by some very hard knocks. Knocks that she got from men. Her flippant manner often obscures some very sound remarks, like the one that there'll be no equality between the sexes until women exploit men as shamelessly as men exploit women.""Doesn't the modern woman do this, already?" asked Robert, with a smile."How often does she get the same chance? It's equality of chances that I'm aiming for, you know.""So am I for that matter," said Robert. "I hope we'll get your equality of chances before long. Then we can work together for decency."It was close upon midnight when they took a taxi back to the Boulevard Haussman.Not a soul was stirring in the Maison Paulette. Robert and Janet walked through the corridor on therez-de-chauséeto the rear building, the one used for sleeping quarters. For a few minutes they stopped in the vestibule at the foot of the staircase.Now, as throughout the evening, their instincts swayed them one way, their reason another. Each misunderstood the motives of the other; and, what with this misunderstanding and the economic insecurity of their circumstances, the scales were tipped in favor of discretion. Besides, Janet mistrusted her impulses far more than formerly. True, Robert mistrusted his far less. In spite of his better judgment, he was succumbing to her ensnaring voice and eyes, was surrendering to an intense longing to tempt her into a betrayal, an unambiguous betrayal, of her real feelings.But he proceeded in a manner too inadequate."I'm no clearer about your plans than before," he said, awkwardly. "You haven't really taken me into your confidence.""About Monsieur St. Hilaire?""Yes."A marked pause. She did not interrupt it. Discouraged, he lamely continued: "Still, I'm glad you've changed your point of view about men and women. It's something to find out that marriage, like adversity, has its uses.""Robert, what I've found out is that marriage, like honesty, may be the best policy. I've learned that woman cannot live by principle alone.""I protest I never urged it.""No. And if it's the least satisfaction to you, I'll admit that I don't intend to repeat any of my Kips Bay experiments—free love, outlawry, and so on—you know the sort of thing. Why should I? There are few moments in the old Lorillard tenement life that I regret; yet there are none that I'd live over again.""None?""Not one. Wait. There is a single moment—it just occurs to me—it was so like this one—""Like this one?""Yes, 'when my heart was a free and a fetterless thing, a wave—'"The line was completed without words, Robert, swept away by her enchantment, having seized heir in his arms and kissed her."Don't marry Monsieur St. Hilaire," he said, beseeching rather than commanding her, "whatever you do."She disengaged herself almost brutally, and went up the stairs. Pausing a few steps up, she turned and, in a tone supremely dispassionate, said:"Whatever I do! Well, whatever I do, I can't marry a poor man, can I?"CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHTIHoping to have a few words alone with Harry Kelly, Robert went down to breakfast early. But if he expected to learn anything further in regard to Janet or M. St. Hilaire, he was disappointed. Extracting teeth would have been easier than pumping Harry who, besides being more taciturn than ever, had developed a vein of pessimism quite out of keeping with his material prosperity.Robert was actually relieved when the appearance of Mazie Ross at the breakfast table put an end to his efforts to draw Kelly out."Her Ladyship was sweetly singing 'My Rosary' when I passed her bedroom door," said Mazie, alluding to Cornelia. "Things'll be humming in the Maison Paulette this morning, if I know the Indian sign."Mazie was getting to be very chipper of late. Whether from the force of association or not, the presence of Robert and Janet had given her a chance to recover some of her old position.Kelly appeared to agree with Mazie's inference, though he was not so cheerful about it. He wished Mark Pryor were somewhere within reach. That fellow was a regular clairvoyant, and could tip you off about the most astonishing things. A tip would be handy at this time."Something's going to happen," added Harry, gloomily. "I feel it in my bones.""I'd feel it in my bones," volunteered Mazie, "if I nearly killed myself like you do, Harry. You fairly chew up work. What's the use? Let the Empress do some of the worrying.""She's got enough to worry about, Mazie. She carries the whole responsibility for the artistic work of the house, and you know it.""You bet I do! The chief joy of my declining days is to watch her Ladyship curl up on a cozy sofa in the office and hug the responsibility while you do the work. When the weight is too much for her, she staggers over to the house switchboard, rings up each department in turn, and interferes with everybody impartially. Say, if you could limber up her knee action a bit—"At this point, poor Harry, after an ineffectual attempt to stare Mazie into silence, got up and went out, unable to listen any longer."The goof!" said Mazie, pitying him contemptuously. "She only married him as a sure salvation from work."She was so manifestly unjust to Cornelia (who, however much of a shirker she might have been in Kips Bay, was now busy enough making her talent for line and color productive) that Robert refrained from argument."What's the matter with Harry?" he said, attempting to change the subject. "He was always monosyllabic, but never as gloomy as this.""He wants a son and heir.""Oh!""Do you remember how Cornelia used to tell every man who paid us a call in Number Fifteen that the dearest wish of her life was to hold a che-ild to her maternal heart? Every brutal Outlaw that came along would offer to oblige on the spot. Except Harry. He melted right into putty when she sprang that mother gag; and then she gave the cue for the wild wedding bells to ring out. But now she's married, it's different. The muffler is on the maternal urge. On tight! And she's strong for the birth control propaganda. She's so strong for it that—"Here Cornelia entered and Mazie was put to instant flight.IICornelia's hour with Robert had come. She lost no time in giving him to understand that his arrival in Paris had, to put it mildly, been inopportune. Not that it was his fault. Naturally, he couldn't very well have foreseen the rapidly approaching crisis in Janet's life. But there it was! M. St. Hilaire, a man of parts and of wealth, was anxious to marry Janet, who had just begun to see that the match was greatly to her advantage. Here was Janet's golden opportunity to redeem the past—"To redeem the past or to redeem Monsieur St. Hilaire?""Don't be flippant, Cato. You know very well what I mean.""I'm quite serious.Redeemis a curious word to use in connection with Janet. It implies atonement for sin. Did you apply this word to your own case after your return from England to the model tenements?"She stared at him icily. Did he intimate that Janet's affair with Claude Fontaine was spiritually comparable to her affair with Percival Houghton? She would show him the difference. True, she had believed in free love ("a hundred years ahead of my time, Cato!") and Janet had followed suit. But when she, Cornelia, had taken up the gauntlet against the irrational knot, she had let herself be pilloried for her convictions. Had Janet done as much? Let his own fairness be his tutor.Not that she held Janet to blame. Oh, no. She would have Robert know that he and his principles had been the disturbing influence in Janet's destiny. This had been the case in Kips Bay. She feared it would again be the case in Paris."I the disturbing influence? Absurd, Cornelia. When did I ever demand that you, or Janet, or anybody else live up to my vaunted principles?""Cato, there's something about you, some Satanic magnetism, that gives you a strange hold upon a woman's soul. It makes her strive to appear before you always in her loftier, sublimer flights, to put on her Sabbath character, so to speak.""Why do you call this Sabbath magnetismSatanic?""Because it's unnatural to ask a woman to assume her Sabbath character seven days a week. She's bound to come to grief."She assured him that this Satanic faculty of his was what caused him to pique or fascinate women, though it seldom inspired them with passion. And, in the long run, it always threw them out of gear. As in the case of Janet! What had his intoxicating mixture of visionary theories and expedient compromises done for her in the Claude Fontaine affair? It had brought her out at the pitifully small end of the horn."I may remind you, Robert, thatIwas ready to ruin myself for Percival Houghton, ready to stand, upright and reckless, facing the world with him.Ididn't go slinking from one hotel to another, as his pretendedwife."Cornelia's heroics would have amused Robert but for the jibe flung at Janet. Thank heaven, Janet never declaimed about having faced a whole world or having ruined herself for anyone. After listening to such windy phrases, who would not be biased towards any course that seemed right to Janet and wrong to Cornelia?He hung on her lips with rapt absorption, hoping by this look of intenseness to mask his thoughts.In this hope he was deceived."Why on earth don't you marry Charlotte Beecher?" she cross-questioned him abruptly."I don't know.""You don't know! Do you suppose a girl with position, wealth and brains turns up every day in the week? A girl who reallywantsyou! I'm sure I can't imaginewhyshe does.""Nor can I."She repeated her question. Had he given Charlotte Beecher up merely because she loved him so much more than he loved her?He couldn't very well answer this question in the affirmative. So he said:"Charlotte is a very intellectual girl, the most intellectual girl I know. She never met a man whom she regarded as her equal in point of brains until she met me. The regard was mutual. She mistook her admiration for love. I might have made the same mistake—if I hadn't met you.""You can't blarney me, Cato," she said, highly flattered none the less. "It's too late in the day!""I mean it, Cornelia. Meeting you, made me alive to the full force of the attraction between the sexes.""It is the one thing needful," said Cornelia, in low siren tones. "For without it, love is as the dry stubble.""I, too, used to think so," replied Robert, turning a cold douche on this sentiment. "We've all had that notion rammed down our throats since childhood. But can we be certain that sexual attraction is the only road to love? The poets assure us that pity is a famous short-cut. In the case of very young people,allroads seem to lead to love. For older folk, mutual admiration may be as good a road as any. Speaking for myself, I'm still considering a proposal to Charlotte Beecher—""Oh, you're still considering her? And Janet is still considering M. St. Hilaire. For ice-cold calculation, give me a one-hundred per cent enthusiast like you or Janet.""Are you suggesting that Janet is so well-suited to me that I ought to propose to her?"She rose, with a growing sense of contempt for him. If he did anything so insane—and he was doubtless capable of it—the results would be on his own head. He had already made a mess of his newspaper career, he had been too proud to cultivate the Fontaine influence, he had gratuitously antagonized his only well-to-do relation in California, even now he could barely make a hand-to-mouth living out of his connection with the radical press. And he actually proposed to lengthen this catalog of disasters! Well, he'd better remember one thing. His friends could pull him out of a hole, but not out of a bottomless abyss.Really, did he believe in miracles? To put it bluntly: did he suppose that two failures added together made a success? Yes, two failures! He was an impecunious journalist or a discredited labor propagandist—which was it? And Janet! What had she to offer? A pirated soul (this to remind him of Claude Fontaine) and shattered prospects."Really, Cornelia, these phrases belong to the screen grade of fiction, not to the facts of the twentieth century."Here Mazie interrupted with an urgent message from the exhibition room."Stay and talk to Robert," said Cornelia with frigid disdain. "He's a great salvager of damaged reputations."Mazie looked inquiringly Robert's way, while Cornelia swept towards the door. In a mock-heroic tone, he explained:"Cornelia says that Janetwent wrong; therefore, unless M. St. Hilaire marries her, she'll beruined for life."Mazie caught the drift of the situation at once."Ruined!" she cried out, in a steaming torrent of slang. "Say, people in the States won't believe a girl is 'ruined' nowadays, even when she's committed to the House of the Good Shepherd. Ruined! Who's to ruin her? Why, the average American is such a hokey-pokey, near-beer, Sunday-school man of straw, he wouldn't ruin Cleopatra if she begged him on her bended knees! Take it from me. If Janet's people at the cemetery end of Brooklyn heard Claude described as the Duc de la Fontaine, they might give her the glassy eye. They might. They'll believe cruel things about a foreigner. But she mustn't let on that he's a gent from the U.S.A., or they'll think she's stringing them. Think! They'll know it. Why, my brown-eyed cherub, there's only one way a girl can go wrong in little old New York. And that's to have somebody break into her bank account."Of the latter part of this choicely sustained opinion, Robert was the exclusive audience, Cornelia having already closed the door with a bang.IIIA little later in the morning Janet, glancing through a copy ofLe Matinthree days old, caught sight of a familiar name in a telegraphic despatch from New York. The name was Fontaine. According to the brief news report, headedC'est fini de rire!(the fun is over!), Fontaine and Company, the most noted of the Fifth Avenue dealers in precious stones, were charged with complicity in a sensational attempt at smuggling.Piecing the somewhat disjointed details together, Janet gathered that secret agents of the Department of Justice on the lookout for spies had inadvertently found thousands of dollars' worth of diamonds concealed in the bottom boards of what purported to be cases of Japanese books. The cases, which had been opened by the Secret Service agents shortly after the "Ionic" docked in Hoboken, were ostensibly consigned to a San Francisco book dealer for whom one Hutchins Burley, a New York editor and foreign correspondent, appeared as the representative.Burley was held, and the newspapers featured him as the "master mind" of a very clever band. On examination he confessed that the book dealer was a mere dummy for Fontaine and Company, whose stock rooms were the real destination of the diamonds. A warrant for the arrest of Mr. Rene Fontaine, head of the firm, was at once issued. Officials of the customs house alleged that the operations of the smugglers, whose ingenuity had baffled detection for years, reached gigantic proportions, the government's loss being estimated at many millions.News so startling had to be told without delay. Janet excitedly reported it to Harry Kelly and then descended to the exhibition room where as a rule Cornelia held sway at this hour.Entering the salon somewhat precipitately, she saw the young Duchess of Keswick seated in great state and surrounded by deferential minions. But no Cornelia visible. Janet beat a swift retreat. The Duchess reminded her, not altogether pleasantly, of Marjorie Armstrong at the Mineola Aerodrome. The two young ladies had the same fashionable contours, the same self-conscious pride of position, the same patricianism of the made-to-order rather than of the inborn type.Hastening up a flight of stairs to Cornelia's office, Janet was brought to a stop outside the door by the sound of voices, which she recognized at once as those of her friend and of the Duchess's mother, Mrs. R. H. L. Jerome.It was easy to overhear the conversation. Mrs. Jerome announced her departure for London the next day to inspect an apartment house restricted exclusively to professional women who, besides being mothers, were the sole supporters of their children. She intended to open a similar house (as a humanitarian, not a charitable undertaking) in New York. She had already offered Janet the post of resident business manager. Naturally, she would like to take the young lady with her to England at once, but she wouldn't insist on this. If the inconvenience to the Maison Paulette was too great, Janet could follow later, as soon as she had wound up her affairs.Cornelia's reply was couched in a low voice so tense with emotion that Janet could distinguish only a word or two here and there. These words were ample.M. St. Hilaire, woman-with-her-back-to-the-wall, Henriette, redemption, iron-law-of-retribution, etc., such proper names and stagey phrases showed quite clearly that Cornelia was delivering her customary rigmarole about the sacrifices she was making to the end that Janet might cover up her past and glorify her future.To Janet's ears, this rigmarole was now so stale as no longer to invite even remonstrance. But to declaim it to a comparative outsider! And to embroider it with all sorts of sticky innuendoes! Janet grew hot and cold by turns. So this was how one's name was buffeted about after an episode like hers with Claude Fontaine! If one's best friends talked this way behind one's back, what might not less intimate associates say or take for granted?She had tried to steel herself against inevitable collisions with public opinion; yet this first impact, though only an oblique one, had given her a much nastier shock than any she had anticipated.M. St. Hilaire, the Chateau in Normandy, the prestige that was to cover a multitude of past sins—Cornelia was going it again!Mrs. Jerome replied that these matters were none of her affair. She needed Janet and she believed Janet needed her. Surely, the decision lay with the young woman herself?While Janet was still debating whether or not she should walk straight in and interrupt, Cornelia shifted the attack, her diplomatic allusions to Janet's love affair being replaced by blunter speech. She effected the change with a great show of diffidence and hesitation. Her sense of loyalty alike to her friend and to Mrs. Jerome obliged her, etc.—Claude Fontaine, thebeau idealof the Junior smart set, etc.—the transatlantic honeymoon to which the newspaper troubadours had given a far-flung notoriety, etc.—But doubtless Mrs. Jerome recalled these particulars well enough?Came the tart rejoinder:"No, I never do read newspaper scandal! The fact is, when I'm not gambling in Paulette frocks, I'm a very busy woman. If it wasn't for the Duchess, the Magpie Club in Mayfair would make short work of me. But the Duchess reads me some of the necessary tittle-tattle at breakfast so as to keep meau fait. She's a great newspaper fan, is the Duchess."When Janet finally opened the door, walked in, and electrified the room, Cornelia had just been sweetly remarking:"But about the managership of this house, a house for unattached mothers—widows and feminist women I presume?—about such projects public curiosity is simply insatiable,' isn't it? Do you really think that Janet is exactly the person for such a delicate position—?"Ignoring Cornelia and her innuendo, Janet spoke directly to Mrs. Jerome."I'm sorry you didn't let me tell you everything last week, Mrs. Jerome," she said, keeping herself well in hand. "You see, all this would have been superfluous then.""My policy, child, is never to learn more than it's good for me to know. But perhaps I was in the wrong this time.""I had no idea you could overhear us, Janet," said Cornelia, with as much acerbity as if she were the injured party.Janet scorned to reply on the level of this remark."I came to show you a piece of news in the Matin," was all she deigned to say.Pointing out the place, she handed Cornelia the newspaper."I'd like to speak to Mrs. Jerome alone for a few minutes," she said. "Would you very much mind?""Oh, by no means," replied Cornelia, trying hard to be superior and authoritative. "Make any arrangements you like to suit your own interests. Never mind the Maison Paulette. Don't think thatIshall stand in your light."And as she went out, unabashed, she offered the flowery remark that she had only done her poor best to follow the impulses of her heart, her sole desire having been to help both Janet and Mrs. Jerome to a mutual understanding, in the absence of which any joint project they might embark on would be only too likely to suffer shipwreck.IVMrs. Jerome drew Janet down to a place beside her on the leather settee."Now, my dear," she said, "I'd just as soon you didn't dig up ancient history. Unless it's going to relieve your mind. But I shan't be any the wiser for it when you've finished, trust me. Why, if you told me that you were a new version of the Old Nick himself, one look into your lovely gray eyes would convince me that it wasn't true."None the less, Janet, not wishing to sail under false colors, gave a very short résumé of her life from the time she went to the Lorillard tenements in Kips Bay to the day she left M. St. Hilaire.Throughout this narrative, Mrs. Jerome's round little face was sphinx-like, becoming animated only at the point of Janet's separation from Claude."He left you in the lurch, then?" she had interposed, much affected."Oh, no, he would have kept on providing for me," said Janet, evasively, and after a moment's hesitation.Nobody had really believed the story that she had left Claude. Even Robert appeared to take the reverse for granted. Perhaps, on the whole, she had better fall into a view that people would be sure to adopt in any case, and that she was almost beginning to adopt herself."But of course you didn't let him," said Mrs. Jerome."No.""Good. We mustn't be under any obligation of that sort to the selfish sex. Now don't worry about the matter any more. You're a plucky girl, my dear. Keep your pluck, and your pluck will keep you."Mrs. Jerome added that she hoped Claude Fontaine had not behaved any worse than Janet had represented. She knew the young man. Who in New York didn't? As regards possible criticism, Janet should be comforted with the reflection that glass houses made the whole world kin, human architecture being nowhere complete without them. Why, most of the girls in the Younger Set had lost their heads over Claude, which was all they had had a chance to lose. She herself, meeting him once at a costume ball of the Junior League, had been knocked silly by his dashing airs and Apollo curls, not to mention the best pair of calves she had ever beheld."So you see, my dear, an old woman can be quite as feeble-minded as a debutante. Nobody has ever had a monopoly of making mistakes."Janet pointed out that the world did not take quite so liberal a view. This being so, might she not prove a source of embarrassment to Mrs. Jerome? As people looked at it, running away with a man was—"Child, for every woman who runs away with a man, there's a man who runs away with a woman."This obvious truth had been lost sight of, and the time had come for its emphatic reassertion. Did Janet imagine that Claude had lost any credit? Well, let her look at the facts. Mr. Fontaine, senior, had just got himself into a very bad mess, one that involved the Fontaine firm in a case of diamond smuggling. The Duchess had read her the story from the papers. And only last nightLe Tempshad reported that Mr. Fontaine was believed to have jumped his bail, leaving his son Claude behind to pull the firm out of the hole. And everybody felt so sorry for Claude! Not that he had anything to fear. He could not be held personally accountable. Still, there were the court proceedings, which were reckoned a terrible load for his handsome young shoulders to bear. And so bankers and clubmen and "sealskin" artists were rushing to his aid; matrons from upper Fifth Avenue were pulling wires; Colonel Armstrong, the great financier, was on the job behind the scenes; and it was freely whispered that when the storm had blown over, Claude and Marjorie Armstrong were to be married in St. Thomas'. Here was retribution! If you judged from the international tidal wave of sympathy and helpfulness that was sweeping towards Claude, you might be pardoned for thinking that he was Galahad, Parsifal, and Lohengrin rolled into one."But men stand by one another," added Mrs. Jerome, pointing the moral succinctly.Women would have to take this lesson to heart and stand by one another just as men did. If Janet joined the Jerome forces, she could depend on one thing, and that was her support through thick and thin.Janet felt inexcusably ungrateful at not accepting the managership on the spot, and frankly said so. She made no attempt to explain her indecision, her motives at the time being far from clear to herself.Mrs. Jerome, blissfully unaware of the existence of Robert Lloyd as a factor in this hesitation, took it in very good part. Janet should make up her mind when she pleased. But surely, she wasn't again playing with the thought of marrying M. St. Hilaire? After her emphatic assertion that she didn't love him!"Yet I don't dislike him, by any means," said Janet. "I was very fond of him in Brussels, before he lost his head.""Fond! Child, one may marry for money without affection, or for affection without money, but one shouldn't marry for either money or affection without a little romance thrown in."Saying which, this whimsical little lady laughed, rose, and put an arm lovingly around her favorite."Come back to the States with me, Janet," she continued. "You'll see what we women can do when we put on steam. You shall make an independent place for yourself in New York, besides helping other women to do the same. And by and by some suitable countryman of ours will come along, and we'll have you nicely married off."
IV
"You're not doing your duty," she said to him. "We've just passed the church of St. Germain-des-Pres. Quick look back. Even darkness can't subdue those imposing walls. Doesn't it look solid and impregnable? Just like my mother and like your convictions. It's a structure that commands your faith, though you have it not. You'll miss the silhouette of St. Sulpice, too, if you don't look out."
"Janet, I didn't come to Paris to look at churches. I came to look at you."
"Well, you came, you saw, and—you conquered."
"I saw more than you think," he went on, smiling at her flippancy. "As I said before, you've changed physically. But the physical change is of no importance."
"I knew it. Those fine compliments were all bunk."
"Not at all. You've changed physically for the better. But what is more important is that you've changed spiritually—"
"For the worse, of course. Now we're coming to it."
"I didn't say it. I'm not at all sure."
"This may be candor, Robert. But it sounds like revenge."
"You may as well be serious, Janet. I've got volumes to pour out to you, and pour them out I will. When I'm with you, I'm like the Ancient Mariner. I want to tell you everything."
"Everything?"
"Well, almost everything, as they say in the comic opera. What do you suppose was the most wonderful companionship I ever formed?"
"I can't guess."
"Barr and Lloyd. Do you know why? Because, for one thing, there was nothing in reason that I couldn't talk to you about, with the most unvarnished frankness. I still feel that way."
"I'm glad you do. We were very good pals, weren't we?"
"Yes, and I hope we still are. Anyhow, I want to speak of something I heard about you from Mark Pryor."
"What was that?"
"Pryor seems to have kept in touch with Cornelia right along. You know Pryor."
"Not a sparrow falleth but his eye doth see," she quoted.
"Exactly. He has been keeping tabs on this rich Alsatian. And, by the way, I ought to mention that he repeated to me what you told him about Monsieur St. Hilaire."
"That's a nice way to treat my confidence," said Janet, seriously annoyed. "Pryor of all people. And I took him to be the only original human clam!"
"Well, I think he was fully justified—"
"In what way, I'd like to ask?"
"Please don't make me go into that now, Janet. The thing I'm driving at is this. Pryor heard that you were on the point of—of forming a free alliance with this Alsatian gentleman. Chiefly to escape Cornelia and this horrible business of clothes."
"You've been misinformed," she retorted coldly. "Not about the clothes. Idoloathe them. But I've no intention of forming a free alliance with anybody. Certainly not with Monsieur St. Hilaire. Why should I? I don't love him. But I don't mind telling you that he has asked me to marry him."
"Oh, then, that's what you're considering?"
"Yes," she said concisely.
And "put that in your pipe and smoke it," added a defiant glance from her half-parted long-lashed eyes.
If he had any notion of playing the medieval knight, plunging through fire and water for the damsel in distress, she would spoil that chivalrous pose in a jiffy.
"Janet, I don't understand you," he said, with quite unnecessary vehemence. "You said you wouldn't marry Claude, your reason being that you loved him. Now you say you will marry Monsieur St. Hilaire, and your reason is that you don't love him."
His eyes added: "You are inexplicable, exasperating, maddening—and yet adorable: in short, you are Janet."
The bus came to a full stop, and a few minutes later they were in the concert hall.
V
The concert was one of a special series given by an orchestra from Rouen. Janet's attention had been drawn to the series by two circumstances. One was that a third of the members of the orchestra were women. The other was that the inclusion of women in a first-class orchestra had plunged musical circles into a controversy which the newspapers eagerly seized upon and played up with caricature or abuse, satire or eulogy, according to the partisanship, but never the merits of the case.
Robert knew nothing of this controversy until he ventured on a remark during the first intermission.
"The tone and workmanship of the orchestra are splendid," he said. "I don't feel qualified to judge, but it strikes me that the women are doing every whit as well as the men."
"As well? They're doing far better. Do you see that first violin in the front row, the third from the left? I could tell he was slacking all through the Cesar Franck number. And there were four or five others as bad. You couldn't say that of one of the women."
"No. Their performance is amazing, isn't it?"
"Why amazing?" asked Janet, still detecting an echo of masculine superciliousness.
"Well, women don't generally reach the top-notch in the fine arts, do they?"
"How can they," said Janet warmly, "when the patronizing disparagement and merciless rivalry of men hold them back at every turn!"
"Well, they've managed to break into this crack orchestra. That doesn't look like merciless rivalry."
"Ah, but wait till I tell you the facts, Robert. As the war went on, managers found it impossible to deny women the privilege of playing in high-class bands. But the men are now recovering their monopoly as fast and as unscrupulously as possible. How? They have set up a hue and cry against the women and have won the musical pundits to their side. I am told that the management of this Rouen orchestra is almost certain to yield to masculine pressure, which means that the women will be dislodged at the end of the current series."
Did Robert appreciate the injustice of this abominable proceeding? It was a fact that the women brought a fire, intensity and freshness to their work which improved the tone and effectiveness of every band they played in. They were twice as keen as the men and worked fifty times harder. Several of the younger, more liberal musical critics both in Paris and in London fully admitted this. Not so the old-timers who sat in the seats of the mighty. And yet the men who were doing their vicious best to elbow their rivals out of the way were the very men who fluttered about town and with crocodile regret assured the public that, no matter whatequal chancesthe weaker sex received, the final incapacity of women to reach the top was beyond dispute.
Janet's shot went home. But the resumption of the program made it impossible for Robert to offer a defense. He was annoyed at himself for having spoken tactlessly on a topic which Janet might well be touchy about. Still, he considered that her rebuke was far too severe to fit the crime, especially in view of his genuine equalitarian feeling toward women, a feeling that Janet ought to have been the last to deny him.
It occurred to him that, if she was capable of regarding him, of all men, with so much detachment (not to say indifference) as to make him the target for a sharp anti-hominist fire, she might be deeper in the M. St. Hilaire entanglement than he or Mark Pryor had suspected.
By the time the concert was over, Janet was sorry for the way she had pitched into her guest. Would he forgive her for letting the heat of argument carry her away? Not that she retracted a word she had said. Far from it. It was impossible to say too much on that score. Had he noticed the wide publicity which the Paris newspapers had given to an assertion appearing in one of Arnold Bennett's recent books? It was the assertion that women are inferior to men in intellectual power and that "no amount of education or liberty of action will sensibly alter this fact." This gesture of finality with which men, even men of genius like Bennett, invariably polished off the future of women and consigned them to an eternity of subordination! When would this superficial generalization ever stop, if avowed feminists like Robert fell to using the language of their opponents even while avoiding their errors?
"I'm only taking the words out of your mouth, Robert," she concluded, in her softest pacifying tones. "I'm only repeating what you've told me a hundred times over in the past."
He smiled at this sop to his vanity, which none the less helped to restore good feeling.
VI
Janet had taken him towards the river. They walked arm in arm along the Quai Voltaire and the Quai d'Orsay, the tranquil Seine and the starry skies almost their sole companions.
The dispute of the evening still fresh in his mind, Robert alluded to Janet's former ambition to create a new profession for women of the middle class. A branch of law, wasn't it? Authorship law, so to speak. Had she given it any thought of late? What a nuisance it was that money should have to be the root of all experiment as well as the root of all evil. In the absence of enough capital, it was probably just as well that she deferred another attempt to realize her dream. Still, it was a pity. She had made such a good beginning with the firm of Barr & Lloyd, humble though the scale of its operations had been.
"Well, Robert, are you ready to renew the partnership?" she challenged him.
"Is this a strictly business proposal?" he replied, in a hesitating manner.
She was chilled by his clumsiness.
"Barr & Lloyd was always a 'strictly business' affair, wasn't it?" she said, in a cool, quiet voice.
He wanted to burst out with: "No, I never believed it was wholly that. If you'd had my sort of partnership in mind, I'd give a very swift and a very different answer." But the words stuck in his throat. For two reasons. Her sudden return to the almost hostile manner that had baffled him earlier, was one. His knowledge that the limited and precarious means he disposed of would make an offer of marriage from him seem ridiculous, if not insane, was the second.
Had he voiced his thoughts, they might then and there have thrashed their differences out in half an hour. But he could not voice them. For the first time in their friendship, neither of them was candid when candor was the sensible course. "This comes of caring for a woman not wisely but too well," thought Robert. He was amazed and incredulous to find that he cared so much; he was also a little indignant with himself, for he had vowed never to do that very thing.
"Don't be alarmed," he heard Janet saying. "I'm not going to impress you into the cause. You have bigger fish to fry than the feminist movement. As for me, I've had a very good offer from Mrs. R. H. L. Jerome."
She sketched a picture of this whimsical lady, and gave a short account of Mrs. Jerome's interest in the organized effort to rid women of their professional disabilities. Robert learned that Mrs. Jerome had repeatedly expressed a desire to put Janet to some use in the cause she had at heart.
"The work would be quite in line with my old plans," added Janet.
"Then why don't you accept her offer at once?"
"I wish I knew," she said, evasively. "Perhaps I can do all I've wanted to do, and more, if I follow the beaten track, if I buy cheap and sell dear in the marriage market; in short, give as little of myself as I can to the richest bidder that offers. What do you think?"
"I think a cynical step of that sort would do very well for Mazie, whose words you appear to be repeating."
"Oh, don't underrate Mazie's cynicism. It has been hammered into a durable, serviceable instrument by some very hard knocks. Knocks that she got from men. Her flippant manner often obscures some very sound remarks, like the one that there'll be no equality between the sexes until women exploit men as shamelessly as men exploit women."
"Doesn't the modern woman do this, already?" asked Robert, with a smile.
"How often does she get the same chance? It's equality of chances that I'm aiming for, you know."
"So am I for that matter," said Robert. "I hope we'll get your equality of chances before long. Then we can work together for decency."
It was close upon midnight when they took a taxi back to the Boulevard Haussman.
Not a soul was stirring in the Maison Paulette. Robert and Janet walked through the corridor on therez-de-chauséeto the rear building, the one used for sleeping quarters. For a few minutes they stopped in the vestibule at the foot of the staircase.
Now, as throughout the evening, their instincts swayed them one way, their reason another. Each misunderstood the motives of the other; and, what with this misunderstanding and the economic insecurity of their circumstances, the scales were tipped in favor of discretion. Besides, Janet mistrusted her impulses far more than formerly. True, Robert mistrusted his far less. In spite of his better judgment, he was succumbing to her ensnaring voice and eyes, was surrendering to an intense longing to tempt her into a betrayal, an unambiguous betrayal, of her real feelings.
But he proceeded in a manner too inadequate.
"I'm no clearer about your plans than before," he said, awkwardly. "You haven't really taken me into your confidence."
"About Monsieur St. Hilaire?"
"Yes."
A marked pause. She did not interrupt it. Discouraged, he lamely continued: "Still, I'm glad you've changed your point of view about men and women. It's something to find out that marriage, like adversity, has its uses."
"Robert, what I've found out is that marriage, like honesty, may be the best policy. I've learned that woman cannot live by principle alone."
"I protest I never urged it."
"No. And if it's the least satisfaction to you, I'll admit that I don't intend to repeat any of my Kips Bay experiments—free love, outlawry, and so on—you know the sort of thing. Why should I? There are few moments in the old Lorillard tenement life that I regret; yet there are none that I'd live over again."
"None?"
"Not one. Wait. There is a single moment—it just occurs to me—it was so like this one—"
"Like this one?"
"Yes, 'when my heart was a free and a fetterless thing, a wave—'"
The line was completed without words, Robert, swept away by her enchantment, having seized heir in his arms and kissed her.
"Don't marry Monsieur St. Hilaire," he said, beseeching rather than commanding her, "whatever you do."
She disengaged herself almost brutally, and went up the stairs. Pausing a few steps up, she turned and, in a tone supremely dispassionate, said:
"Whatever I do! Well, whatever I do, I can't marry a poor man, can I?"
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
I
Hoping to have a few words alone with Harry Kelly, Robert went down to breakfast early. But if he expected to learn anything further in regard to Janet or M. St. Hilaire, he was disappointed. Extracting teeth would have been easier than pumping Harry who, besides being more taciturn than ever, had developed a vein of pessimism quite out of keeping with his material prosperity.
Robert was actually relieved when the appearance of Mazie Ross at the breakfast table put an end to his efforts to draw Kelly out.
"Her Ladyship was sweetly singing 'My Rosary' when I passed her bedroom door," said Mazie, alluding to Cornelia. "Things'll be humming in the Maison Paulette this morning, if I know the Indian sign."
Mazie was getting to be very chipper of late. Whether from the force of association or not, the presence of Robert and Janet had given her a chance to recover some of her old position.
Kelly appeared to agree with Mazie's inference, though he was not so cheerful about it. He wished Mark Pryor were somewhere within reach. That fellow was a regular clairvoyant, and could tip you off about the most astonishing things. A tip would be handy at this time.
"Something's going to happen," added Harry, gloomily. "I feel it in my bones."
"I'd feel it in my bones," volunteered Mazie, "if I nearly killed myself like you do, Harry. You fairly chew up work. What's the use? Let the Empress do some of the worrying."
"She's got enough to worry about, Mazie. She carries the whole responsibility for the artistic work of the house, and you know it."
"You bet I do! The chief joy of my declining days is to watch her Ladyship curl up on a cozy sofa in the office and hug the responsibility while you do the work. When the weight is too much for her, she staggers over to the house switchboard, rings up each department in turn, and interferes with everybody impartially. Say, if you could limber up her knee action a bit—"
At this point, poor Harry, after an ineffectual attempt to stare Mazie into silence, got up and went out, unable to listen any longer.
"The goof!" said Mazie, pitying him contemptuously. "She only married him as a sure salvation from work."
She was so manifestly unjust to Cornelia (who, however much of a shirker she might have been in Kips Bay, was now busy enough making her talent for line and color productive) that Robert refrained from argument.
"What's the matter with Harry?" he said, attempting to change the subject. "He was always monosyllabic, but never as gloomy as this."
"He wants a son and heir."
"Oh!"
"Do you remember how Cornelia used to tell every man who paid us a call in Number Fifteen that the dearest wish of her life was to hold a che-ild to her maternal heart? Every brutal Outlaw that came along would offer to oblige on the spot. Except Harry. He melted right into putty when she sprang that mother gag; and then she gave the cue for the wild wedding bells to ring out. But now she's married, it's different. The muffler is on the maternal urge. On tight! And she's strong for the birth control propaganda. She's so strong for it that—"
Here Cornelia entered and Mazie was put to instant flight.
II
Cornelia's hour with Robert had come. She lost no time in giving him to understand that his arrival in Paris had, to put it mildly, been inopportune. Not that it was his fault. Naturally, he couldn't very well have foreseen the rapidly approaching crisis in Janet's life. But there it was! M. St. Hilaire, a man of parts and of wealth, was anxious to marry Janet, who had just begun to see that the match was greatly to her advantage. Here was Janet's golden opportunity to redeem the past—
"To redeem the past or to redeem Monsieur St. Hilaire?"
"Don't be flippant, Cato. You know very well what I mean."
"I'm quite serious.Redeemis a curious word to use in connection with Janet. It implies atonement for sin. Did you apply this word to your own case after your return from England to the model tenements?"
She stared at him icily. Did he intimate that Janet's affair with Claude Fontaine was spiritually comparable to her affair with Percival Houghton? She would show him the difference. True, she had believed in free love ("a hundred years ahead of my time, Cato!") and Janet had followed suit. But when she, Cornelia, had taken up the gauntlet against the irrational knot, she had let herself be pilloried for her convictions. Had Janet done as much? Let his own fairness be his tutor.
Not that she held Janet to blame. Oh, no. She would have Robert know that he and his principles had been the disturbing influence in Janet's destiny. This had been the case in Kips Bay. She feared it would again be the case in Paris.
"I the disturbing influence? Absurd, Cornelia. When did I ever demand that you, or Janet, or anybody else live up to my vaunted principles?"
"Cato, there's something about you, some Satanic magnetism, that gives you a strange hold upon a woman's soul. It makes her strive to appear before you always in her loftier, sublimer flights, to put on her Sabbath character, so to speak."
"Why do you call this Sabbath magnetismSatanic?"
"Because it's unnatural to ask a woman to assume her Sabbath character seven days a week. She's bound to come to grief."
She assured him that this Satanic faculty of his was what caused him to pique or fascinate women, though it seldom inspired them with passion. And, in the long run, it always threw them out of gear. As in the case of Janet! What had his intoxicating mixture of visionary theories and expedient compromises done for her in the Claude Fontaine affair? It had brought her out at the pitifully small end of the horn.
"I may remind you, Robert, thatIwas ready to ruin myself for Percival Houghton, ready to stand, upright and reckless, facing the world with him.Ididn't go slinking from one hotel to another, as his pretendedwife."
Cornelia's heroics would have amused Robert but for the jibe flung at Janet. Thank heaven, Janet never declaimed about having faced a whole world or having ruined herself for anyone. After listening to such windy phrases, who would not be biased towards any course that seemed right to Janet and wrong to Cornelia?
He hung on her lips with rapt absorption, hoping by this look of intenseness to mask his thoughts.
In this hope he was deceived.
"Why on earth don't you marry Charlotte Beecher?" she cross-questioned him abruptly.
"I don't know."
"You don't know! Do you suppose a girl with position, wealth and brains turns up every day in the week? A girl who reallywantsyou! I'm sure I can't imaginewhyshe does."
"Nor can I."
She repeated her question. Had he given Charlotte Beecher up merely because she loved him so much more than he loved her?
He couldn't very well answer this question in the affirmative. So he said:
"Charlotte is a very intellectual girl, the most intellectual girl I know. She never met a man whom she regarded as her equal in point of brains until she met me. The regard was mutual. She mistook her admiration for love. I might have made the same mistake—if I hadn't met you."
"You can't blarney me, Cato," she said, highly flattered none the less. "It's too late in the day!"
"I mean it, Cornelia. Meeting you, made me alive to the full force of the attraction between the sexes."
"It is the one thing needful," said Cornelia, in low siren tones. "For without it, love is as the dry stubble."
"I, too, used to think so," replied Robert, turning a cold douche on this sentiment. "We've all had that notion rammed down our throats since childhood. But can we be certain that sexual attraction is the only road to love? The poets assure us that pity is a famous short-cut. In the case of very young people,allroads seem to lead to love. For older folk, mutual admiration may be as good a road as any. Speaking for myself, I'm still considering a proposal to Charlotte Beecher—"
"Oh, you're still considering her? And Janet is still considering M. St. Hilaire. For ice-cold calculation, give me a one-hundred per cent enthusiast like you or Janet."
"Are you suggesting that Janet is so well-suited to me that I ought to propose to her?"
She rose, with a growing sense of contempt for him. If he did anything so insane—and he was doubtless capable of it—the results would be on his own head. He had already made a mess of his newspaper career, he had been too proud to cultivate the Fontaine influence, he had gratuitously antagonized his only well-to-do relation in California, even now he could barely make a hand-to-mouth living out of his connection with the radical press. And he actually proposed to lengthen this catalog of disasters! Well, he'd better remember one thing. His friends could pull him out of a hole, but not out of a bottomless abyss.
Really, did he believe in miracles? To put it bluntly: did he suppose that two failures added together made a success? Yes, two failures! He was an impecunious journalist or a discredited labor propagandist—which was it? And Janet! What had she to offer? A pirated soul (this to remind him of Claude Fontaine) and shattered prospects.
"Really, Cornelia, these phrases belong to the screen grade of fiction, not to the facts of the twentieth century."
Here Mazie interrupted with an urgent message from the exhibition room.
"Stay and talk to Robert," said Cornelia with frigid disdain. "He's a great salvager of damaged reputations."
Mazie looked inquiringly Robert's way, while Cornelia swept towards the door. In a mock-heroic tone, he explained:
"Cornelia says that Janetwent wrong; therefore, unless M. St. Hilaire marries her, she'll beruined for life."
Mazie caught the drift of the situation at once.
"Ruined!" she cried out, in a steaming torrent of slang. "Say, people in the States won't believe a girl is 'ruined' nowadays, even when she's committed to the House of the Good Shepherd. Ruined! Who's to ruin her? Why, the average American is such a hokey-pokey, near-beer, Sunday-school man of straw, he wouldn't ruin Cleopatra if she begged him on her bended knees! Take it from me. If Janet's people at the cemetery end of Brooklyn heard Claude described as the Duc de la Fontaine, they might give her the glassy eye. They might. They'll believe cruel things about a foreigner. But she mustn't let on that he's a gent from the U.S.A., or they'll think she's stringing them. Think! They'll know it. Why, my brown-eyed cherub, there's only one way a girl can go wrong in little old New York. And that's to have somebody break into her bank account."
Of the latter part of this choicely sustained opinion, Robert was the exclusive audience, Cornelia having already closed the door with a bang.
III
A little later in the morning Janet, glancing through a copy ofLe Matinthree days old, caught sight of a familiar name in a telegraphic despatch from New York. The name was Fontaine. According to the brief news report, headedC'est fini de rire!(the fun is over!), Fontaine and Company, the most noted of the Fifth Avenue dealers in precious stones, were charged with complicity in a sensational attempt at smuggling.
Piecing the somewhat disjointed details together, Janet gathered that secret agents of the Department of Justice on the lookout for spies had inadvertently found thousands of dollars' worth of diamonds concealed in the bottom boards of what purported to be cases of Japanese books. The cases, which had been opened by the Secret Service agents shortly after the "Ionic" docked in Hoboken, were ostensibly consigned to a San Francisco book dealer for whom one Hutchins Burley, a New York editor and foreign correspondent, appeared as the representative.
Burley was held, and the newspapers featured him as the "master mind" of a very clever band. On examination he confessed that the book dealer was a mere dummy for Fontaine and Company, whose stock rooms were the real destination of the diamonds. A warrant for the arrest of Mr. Rene Fontaine, head of the firm, was at once issued. Officials of the customs house alleged that the operations of the smugglers, whose ingenuity had baffled detection for years, reached gigantic proportions, the government's loss being estimated at many millions.
News so startling had to be told without delay. Janet excitedly reported it to Harry Kelly and then descended to the exhibition room where as a rule Cornelia held sway at this hour.
Entering the salon somewhat precipitately, she saw the young Duchess of Keswick seated in great state and surrounded by deferential minions. But no Cornelia visible. Janet beat a swift retreat. The Duchess reminded her, not altogether pleasantly, of Marjorie Armstrong at the Mineola Aerodrome. The two young ladies had the same fashionable contours, the same self-conscious pride of position, the same patricianism of the made-to-order rather than of the inborn type.
Hastening up a flight of stairs to Cornelia's office, Janet was brought to a stop outside the door by the sound of voices, which she recognized at once as those of her friend and of the Duchess's mother, Mrs. R. H. L. Jerome.
It was easy to overhear the conversation. Mrs. Jerome announced her departure for London the next day to inspect an apartment house restricted exclusively to professional women who, besides being mothers, were the sole supporters of their children. She intended to open a similar house (as a humanitarian, not a charitable undertaking) in New York. She had already offered Janet the post of resident business manager. Naturally, she would like to take the young lady with her to England at once, but she wouldn't insist on this. If the inconvenience to the Maison Paulette was too great, Janet could follow later, as soon as she had wound up her affairs.
Cornelia's reply was couched in a low voice so tense with emotion that Janet could distinguish only a word or two here and there. These words were ample.M. St. Hilaire, woman-with-her-back-to-the-wall, Henriette, redemption, iron-law-of-retribution, etc., such proper names and stagey phrases showed quite clearly that Cornelia was delivering her customary rigmarole about the sacrifices she was making to the end that Janet might cover up her past and glorify her future.
To Janet's ears, this rigmarole was now so stale as no longer to invite even remonstrance. But to declaim it to a comparative outsider! And to embroider it with all sorts of sticky innuendoes! Janet grew hot and cold by turns. So this was how one's name was buffeted about after an episode like hers with Claude Fontaine! If one's best friends talked this way behind one's back, what might not less intimate associates say or take for granted?
She had tried to steel herself against inevitable collisions with public opinion; yet this first impact, though only an oblique one, had given her a much nastier shock than any she had anticipated.
M. St. Hilaire, the Chateau in Normandy, the prestige that was to cover a multitude of past sins—Cornelia was going it again!
Mrs. Jerome replied that these matters were none of her affair. She needed Janet and she believed Janet needed her. Surely, the decision lay with the young woman herself?
While Janet was still debating whether or not she should walk straight in and interrupt, Cornelia shifted the attack, her diplomatic allusions to Janet's love affair being replaced by blunter speech. She effected the change with a great show of diffidence and hesitation. Her sense of loyalty alike to her friend and to Mrs. Jerome obliged her, etc.—Claude Fontaine, thebeau idealof the Junior smart set, etc.—the transatlantic honeymoon to which the newspaper troubadours had given a far-flung notoriety, etc.—But doubtless Mrs. Jerome recalled these particulars well enough?
Came the tart rejoinder:
"No, I never do read newspaper scandal! The fact is, when I'm not gambling in Paulette frocks, I'm a very busy woman. If it wasn't for the Duchess, the Magpie Club in Mayfair would make short work of me. But the Duchess reads me some of the necessary tittle-tattle at breakfast so as to keep meau fait. She's a great newspaper fan, is the Duchess."
When Janet finally opened the door, walked in, and electrified the room, Cornelia had just been sweetly remarking:
"But about the managership of this house, a house for unattached mothers—widows and feminist women I presume?—about such projects public curiosity is simply insatiable,' isn't it? Do you really think that Janet is exactly the person for such a delicate position—?"
Ignoring Cornelia and her innuendo, Janet spoke directly to Mrs. Jerome.
"I'm sorry you didn't let me tell you everything last week, Mrs. Jerome," she said, keeping herself well in hand. "You see, all this would have been superfluous then."
"My policy, child, is never to learn more than it's good for me to know. But perhaps I was in the wrong this time."
"I had no idea you could overhear us, Janet," said Cornelia, with as much acerbity as if she were the injured party.
Janet scorned to reply on the level of this remark.
"I came to show you a piece of news in the Matin," was all she deigned to say.
Pointing out the place, she handed Cornelia the newspaper.
"I'd like to speak to Mrs. Jerome alone for a few minutes," she said. "Would you very much mind?"
"Oh, by no means," replied Cornelia, trying hard to be superior and authoritative. "Make any arrangements you like to suit your own interests. Never mind the Maison Paulette. Don't think thatIshall stand in your light."
And as she went out, unabashed, she offered the flowery remark that she had only done her poor best to follow the impulses of her heart, her sole desire having been to help both Janet and Mrs. Jerome to a mutual understanding, in the absence of which any joint project they might embark on would be only too likely to suffer shipwreck.
IV
Mrs. Jerome drew Janet down to a place beside her on the leather settee.
"Now, my dear," she said, "I'd just as soon you didn't dig up ancient history. Unless it's going to relieve your mind. But I shan't be any the wiser for it when you've finished, trust me. Why, if you told me that you were a new version of the Old Nick himself, one look into your lovely gray eyes would convince me that it wasn't true."
None the less, Janet, not wishing to sail under false colors, gave a very short résumé of her life from the time she went to the Lorillard tenements in Kips Bay to the day she left M. St. Hilaire.
Throughout this narrative, Mrs. Jerome's round little face was sphinx-like, becoming animated only at the point of Janet's separation from Claude.
"He left you in the lurch, then?" she had interposed, much affected.
"Oh, no, he would have kept on providing for me," said Janet, evasively, and after a moment's hesitation.
Nobody had really believed the story that she had left Claude. Even Robert appeared to take the reverse for granted. Perhaps, on the whole, she had better fall into a view that people would be sure to adopt in any case, and that she was almost beginning to adopt herself.
"But of course you didn't let him," said Mrs. Jerome.
"No."
"Good. We mustn't be under any obligation of that sort to the selfish sex. Now don't worry about the matter any more. You're a plucky girl, my dear. Keep your pluck, and your pluck will keep you."
Mrs. Jerome added that she hoped Claude Fontaine had not behaved any worse than Janet had represented. She knew the young man. Who in New York didn't? As regards possible criticism, Janet should be comforted with the reflection that glass houses made the whole world kin, human architecture being nowhere complete without them. Why, most of the girls in the Younger Set had lost their heads over Claude, which was all they had had a chance to lose. She herself, meeting him once at a costume ball of the Junior League, had been knocked silly by his dashing airs and Apollo curls, not to mention the best pair of calves she had ever beheld.
"So you see, my dear, an old woman can be quite as feeble-minded as a debutante. Nobody has ever had a monopoly of making mistakes."
Janet pointed out that the world did not take quite so liberal a view. This being so, might she not prove a source of embarrassment to Mrs. Jerome? As people looked at it, running away with a man was—
"Child, for every woman who runs away with a man, there's a man who runs away with a woman."
This obvious truth had been lost sight of, and the time had come for its emphatic reassertion. Did Janet imagine that Claude had lost any credit? Well, let her look at the facts. Mr. Fontaine, senior, had just got himself into a very bad mess, one that involved the Fontaine firm in a case of diamond smuggling. The Duchess had read her the story from the papers. And only last nightLe Tempshad reported that Mr. Fontaine was believed to have jumped his bail, leaving his son Claude behind to pull the firm out of the hole. And everybody felt so sorry for Claude! Not that he had anything to fear. He could not be held personally accountable. Still, there were the court proceedings, which were reckoned a terrible load for his handsome young shoulders to bear. And so bankers and clubmen and "sealskin" artists were rushing to his aid; matrons from upper Fifth Avenue were pulling wires; Colonel Armstrong, the great financier, was on the job behind the scenes; and it was freely whispered that when the storm had blown over, Claude and Marjorie Armstrong were to be married in St. Thomas'. Here was retribution! If you judged from the international tidal wave of sympathy and helpfulness that was sweeping towards Claude, you might be pardoned for thinking that he was Galahad, Parsifal, and Lohengrin rolled into one.
"But men stand by one another," added Mrs. Jerome, pointing the moral succinctly.
Women would have to take this lesson to heart and stand by one another just as men did. If Janet joined the Jerome forces, she could depend on one thing, and that was her support through thick and thin.
Janet felt inexcusably ungrateful at not accepting the managership on the spot, and frankly said so. She made no attempt to explain her indecision, her motives at the time being far from clear to herself.
Mrs. Jerome, blissfully unaware of the existence of Robert Lloyd as a factor in this hesitation, took it in very good part. Janet should make up her mind when she pleased. But surely, she wasn't again playing with the thought of marrying M. St. Hilaire? After her emphatic assertion that she didn't love him!
"Yet I don't dislike him, by any means," said Janet. "I was very fond of him in Brussels, before he lost his head."
"Fond! Child, one may marry for money without affection, or for affection without money, but one shouldn't marry for either money or affection without a little romance thrown in."
Saying which, this whimsical little lady laughed, rose, and put an arm lovingly around her favorite.
"Come back to the States with me, Janet," she continued. "You'll see what we women can do when we put on steam. You shall make an independent place for yourself in New York, besides helping other women to do the same. And by and by some suitable countryman of ours will come along, and we'll have you nicely married off."