IIITowards midnight, the Outlaws' Ball in the old Murray Hill Lyceum on 34th Street had almost hit its stride. Two bands, an Hawaiian Jazz and the Kips Bay Roughnecks, furnished the music, and what with the crash and blare of instruments, the dazzle of costumes, the clouds of confetti, and the swirl of dancers, masked and unmasked, the dense motley crowd appeared to be squeezing the last ounce of pleasure out of its mad adventure in search of "a good time."Janet's appearance in her Spanish robes with the genuine Castilian mantilla, the high tortoise shell comb, and the silk Andalusian shawl flaming brilliantly against her dark hair, was one of the sensations of the evening. Robert's somber monk's cowl at her side subtracted nothing from this sensation. He conducted her through the mazes of the upper dancing floor and then brought her back to the gorgeous gypsy tent that had been set up on the floor below.There she began to play the gypsy fortune teller with as much subtlety as the professional exertions of the musical Roughnecks permitted.Robert stood near the tent as a sort of self-constituted watchman and bodyguard extraordinary. As John Barleycorn was being liberally dispensed in the refreshment room, a number of tipsy masqueraders soon turned up, and some of these roistered into Janet's tent despite Robert's efforts to fend them off.Hutchins Burley was among those who presently appeared on the scene. It was after Mazie Ross had repeatedly toyed with his erotic instincts and incited his hot pursuit only to defeat him at a point just short of possession. In a fury of frustration, he had descended to the first floor to inflame his passions further at the public bar. Thus inspirited, he propelled his Falstaffian proportions into the gypsy tent and requested Janet to read his palm.His breath alone would have decided Janet to refuse. But when he interrupted her first sentence by tearing off her mask and importuning a closer acquaintance with the face behind it, she pushed abruptly past him and, running outside the tent, waited for him to leave it.With surprising alacrity Hutchins Burley bundled after her."You're a lively little kipper," he shouted, filled with liquor and desire. And he wildly reached out one arm to clasp her around the waist. But Janet, uttering a low cry, dodged and slipped past him, while Burley's flopping arms were caught firmly by two men who had sprung forward for this purpose.One of these was Robert. The other was a tall, unobtrusive man who had quietly but deftly detached himself from the throng.The attention of several people had been arrested by Janet's cry and flight, and these now pressed forward to learn what the trouble was. A confusion of queries, blusterings and exclamations followed, during which the Roughnecks struck up the "Nobody Home" rag.Hutchins Burley had recovered some of his wits under the compulsion of several menacing faces around him. Seeing him become tractable, Robert contemptuously flung off the arm he held and walked away towards Janet. Burley followed his receding steps with a malevolent glare, and then turned savagely on the tall quiet stranger who was still holding his other arm in a grip of steel."Leggo my arm," he bellowed."A word in your ear, Mr. Burley," said the quiet one, relaxing his grip. "Plain clothes men are in the crowd. If you kick up a shindy, you'll be giving them what they're looking for.""And who the devil are you?" sputtered Burley, with the air of a man who is not to be easily frightened."Oh, nobody in particular," said the quiet man in a low voice. And, before he could be questioned further, he had melted unobtrusively into the crowd.IVA little later, Robert led three jovial young maskers into the gypsy tent. The foremost was dressed asCharles Surfaceand had quite enough gay confidence to do justice to the part."So here's the Outlaws' piece of resistance," he called out merrily. "We'll see whether she can do half as much justice to my palm as to her lovely gypsy shawl."He sat down at Janet's little table and held out his hand. She took it, examined it gravely for some seconds, and then, in her fine clarinet tones she reported swiftly, without a pause, and getting almost breathless towards the end:"You are handsome, graceful, false and cruel. You've been a good soldier, but you'll become a poor poet. I see you divided into three parts: part one—Charles Surface; part two—Joseph Surface; part three—Sir Peter Teazle. What a pity your name isn't Henry! For you are as dashing as Henry the Fifth, as amorous as Henry of Navarre, and as kind to women as Henry the Eighth. You will be married twice, but how many hearts you will break I dare not reveal. Your own heart is a safe deposit vault, fireproof and loveproof both. Hapless and witless damsels without number will try to blow it up or melt it—without success. One girl alone will refrain from the attempt, realizing the utter uselessness of piercing this too, too solid flesh—""Here," cried the young man, drawing away his hand, the laughter and jibing endorsements with which his comrades greeted the several revelations, proving too much for him. "I don't call this a fortune: I call it a raw deal.""No use abusing the cards," said Janet, still affecting the utmost gravity. "The cards never lie.""Oh, don't they, Miss Gypsy? That's where your professional prejudice blinds you. Take your discovery that I'm a poor poet, for instance. Well, the fact is, I'm no poet at all. I never so much as wrote a couplet to a girl in all my life.""I said: youwill becomea poet," remarked Janet, gently correcting him."And when will that be, pray?"Janet hastily cut the cards anew, dealt out five cards, and held out the Queen of Spades to the onlookers."When a dark lady enters your life," she said."A dark ladyhasentered my life," he said, his voice vibrating seductively. "Entered it with a very poor opinion of me, it seems. But I shouldn't call her the Queen of Spades. I should call her Janet, the Queen of Clubs.""Clubs, because I scored so many good hits?""No, because a Queen of Spades must have lustrous black eyes, and yours are heavenly gray. Come, let's unmask, and see who's the better fortune teller of the two."Claude pulled off his mask and stood, handsome and challenging, waiting for her to follow suit.He was very good to look upon. Handsome, graceful and proud, there was just enough disdain in his perfect manner to make every woman adore him and long to enslave his flawless form. He had wonderful blue eyes, a delicate mouth, a fine nose and a penetrating sympathetic voice. Great ease, great daring and great energy of animal passion gave him a hundred opportunities to show his fine points to excellent advantage. To qualities that almost made riches superfluous, riches were added. No wonder he seemed to be a darling of the gods.Janet's pulse was distinctly quickened by the telling exterior of this dazzling young man. And when she unfastened her domino and met his glance with her fearless gray eyes, his thrilling moment came. He was not greatly impressed with her looks, his social training having biased him towards more fashionable types of beauty. Yet a magnetic ecstacy set him on fire and sent rapturous messages throbbing along his nerves.It was an enthralling moment, one that seemed mysteriously to link up his being with other blissful moments in previous existences. Strange! Each time that he experienced this emotion anew, he was sure it was unique, sure it was not in this life that he had experienced it before. Stranger still, though it was as deep as the full flooded river of life itself, it was as transitory as an electric spark or a flash of lightning. The moment was poignant, intoxicating, miraculous; yet by no fraction of an instant could it be prolonged.Indeed, within a second or two, Claude and Janet were chatting about a good many matters which did not bear in the remotest way upon this magnetizing spark. Still, they chatted with an excited recklessness, and as if their essences were held together by a subtle force, a force whose irresistible urgency they would neither have dared to acknowledge nor wished to dispute.VSteeped in the enjoyment of the moment, Janet hardly noticed that Robert had tacitly resigned his watchful care of her to Claude Fontaine. She began to neglect her fortune telling duties as one result of this displacement, for Claude's appropriation of her time grew as his visits became more frequent. Nor did he share her compunction on this score. Far from doing so, he cajoled her into dancing with him again and again. In the intervals, he escorted her from one end of the reception floor to the other, introducing her to the groups he considered worth while. Thus she shared (much more fully than she desired to) the curiosity which his brilliant presence excited and the gossip which it was everywhere a signal for."Here's an interesting stunt," said Claude to his partner.He indicated a group of young people amongst whom she instantly recognized Robert and Mazie. Two others claimed her attention. In the center of the group was a young woman with a high color and a very energetic manner, who had adopted an unusual plan for swelling the box office receipts. She was making impromptu busts in putty of all who could afford a contribution, no reasonable sum being refused.When Claude and Janet came up, the sculptress had just finished modelling a head of Robert; and a remarkably spirited likeness it was. Robert was greatly taken with it, but his satisfaction was mild beside that of the artist, who handled the fragile image as though it were the apple of her eye.Two thoughts struck Janet. One was that Charlotte Beecher's fuss over the statuette of Robert Lloyd was excessive. The other was that she now, for the first time, missed the living model. But this discovery, as well as her criticism of the sculptress, was promptly swallowed up in the kaleidoscopic whirl of meeting still other characters belonging to the strange new society into which she had been flung.Nevertheless, she contrived to recall Robert to her side."What a wonderful head Robert has!" Miss Beecher was rhapsodizing, while she glanced sentimentally from the statue to the living model. "I declare, it's all brain.""It sure is!" echoed Mazie, mockingly. "But it's not a patch on his wonderful heart."She laid her hand on the spot where she supposed this organ to be, and added, without crediting the epigram to Cornelia who had originated it:"That's all brain, too!"Everybody laughed, Robert no less heartily than his neighbors. Everybody, that is, save Charlotte Beecher, whose sharp glance at Mazie softened to tenderness as it swept on towards Robert.The second person to fascinate Janet was a youngish woman in a Syrian dress of many boldly brilliant color clashes. Contrasts as startling were achieved by her coal black hair, her pale olive skin, and the gorgeous green pendants attached to her ears. She had the barbaric picturesqueness of a White African Queen straight out of Rider Haggard, and about as much credibility. But she posed with unlimited self-confidence.So speculated Janet. The next moment she reminded herself of the necessity of keeping an eye (and perhaps a string) on Robert Lloyd.But he was nowhere to be seen. In his usual insidious fashion, he had taken French leave while the circle of spectators was absorbed in the ritual of weaving gossip amongst themselves or blessing Miss Beecher's next putty statuette with lavish adjectives and exclamations.His disappearance piqued Janet. But the exhilaration caused by all the enchantments of the ball and all the thrills of Claude's gallantry and charm, did not permit her to allow any one emotion more than a fleeting hospitality.Claude watched his chance of enticing her to another novelty. On the way, she begged him to enlighten her about the people she had just met."Tell me all about the sculptress and about the Rider Haggard lady with the earrings," she said.Claude explained that these ladies were both considered freaks even among the Outlaws: Charlotte Beecher, because she was an heiress who wore a working girl's clothes and toiled harder with the sculptor's chisel than a day laborer with a pickaxe; Lydia Morrow, not so much because she had a flair for spectacular dresses, Leon Bakst colors and startling jewelry, as because her authorship of half a dozen best sellers had given her almost unlimited means to gratify these vagaries."Lydia Morrow? I don't seem to know the name," said Janet."Lydia Dyson, her maiden name, is the name she writes under."This name Janet knew well enough. It was a familiar name wherever American magazines flourished; even among the Barrs of Brooklyn it was a household fixture. The stupendous fact was that Lydia Dyson's novels of approximated naughtiness, sensual slush and disembowelled passion, appeared serially and simultaneously in magazines with as different a clientele as theSaturday Morning Post, thePurple Book,Anybody'sand theWomen's Bazaar.Claude added that he had his own reasons for calling the two young women freaks."All these people are loony on the subject of love," he said, with a wave of the hand that appeared to include the whole membership of the ball. "Some because they've had too much of it, but more because they've had too little. Mazie is one of a small group that is suffering from surfeit. But Charlotte and Lydia belong to the other class. Charlotte wants a husband without a whole lot of love, and Lydia wants a whole lot of love without a husband. As for Mazie, there's nothing left for her to want but a rich protector, with as little love in the bargain as possible."This offhand analysis set Janet to wondering what Claude's own conception of love might be. He went blithely on:"The difficulty with Charlotte is that she's too particular; with Lydia, that she's not particular enough. Not one-tenth particular enough for Gordon Morrow, her husband, who lives on her money but won't be kept in his place. He actually presumes to be furiously jealous. But, however comic a figure he may cut, who can blame him for drawing the line at a blackguard like Hutchins Burley? Here's Hutch staggering this way, now. After you, the impudent beggar!"Naturally, in this quarter, Burley had little luck. Janet shrank away from him, and Claude froze him off as he had already done two or three times that night. Envenomed, but nothing daunted, Hutchins Burley careered, none too steadily, over to the circle around the sculptress. Claude watched him disgustedly."If Morrow catches him pawing all over his wife, there'll be trouble. And Lydia Dyson's not the woman to lift her little finger to avert it. She has a theory that 'Big Burley' is a sort of twentieth century edition of the Cave Man, a theory she is not above putting to the proof. Husband or no husband, a big scene is nectar and ambrosia to her."He looked anxiously back at Charlotte Beecher's group. "Let's go away from here," he said, taking her arm with protective tenderness."Shall we go back to the tent?""I'd like to take you much further than that. You are too wonderful and genuine to fit into this hothouse crowd."Janet liked his pretty speeches, but she had not yet had her fill of the carnival of pleasure.Claude's fears were only too speedily realized. Hardly had he returned Janet to her gypsy tent, than shouts and screams ascended from the sculptress' quarter. Claude hastened to the spot and found two knots of men pulling Burley away from Lydia's husband and heightening the disorder in the act.The commotion now took a new turn. Burley had not forgotten the man who had cold-shouldered him out of Janet's way several times. As soon as he laid eyes on Claude and observed him assisting Charlotte Beecher in a feverish effort to save her putty models, his rage reached its climax. Every ounce of his bulky weight was put into a titanic pull that jerked him loose from those who restrained him. Using his momentary freedom to snatch up the little bust of Robert, he flung it at Claude's head."No diamond shark can come butting in here," he shouted, in a purple fury.The bust went far wide of its mark. But not the taunt. It stung Claude into sudden violence, so that he sprang towards Burley with the object of thrashing him. Thirty or forty people having now been drawn into the melee, however, he was saved the ignominy of a public brawl.At the height of the turmoil Claude's arm was clasped by an iron hand. It was the hand of a tall immaculate man who spoke to him in a low calm voice."A word of warning, Mr. Fontaine," he said, urging him away from the fracas. "Get your friends out of here at once! Detectives are about to raid the place.""Detectives! Are you one?" asked Claude, more or less bewildered."No, not particularly," was the whimsical reply of the stranger, who then moved decisively away and evaporated as suddenly as he had turned up.As soon as Claude rallied his wits, he acted swiftly. He persuaded Charlotte Beecher, who happened to be near, to follow him; and then took the shortest cut to the gypsy tent, where Janet greeted his return with a happy cry of relief. Excitedly he warned her of the raid, and urged her to lose no time in preparing to leave with him.She obeyed, not without a pang of regret.Regret? It was not parting with the musical Roughnecks, though they were better than their names; it was not turning her back on the dancing, though this had intoxicated her; and it was not saying farewell to the riot of color, costume and confetti, though these had put her in an ecstacy of delight. At least, it was not an extravagant hunger for these pleasures. And she certainly had nothing but measureless disgust for a crowd of brawling, shouting, turbulent men.Why regret then?It was merely because of the obvious difference between her joyless home and this night's experience. Beside the deathlike stagnation of the Barrs of Brooklyn, the movement, intensity and go of the Outlaws had what she cheerfully accepted as the quality and flavor of reality. "This is life," a still, small voice cried within her, meaning that this was at least a fairly good imitation of life on its gayer side. And she revelled unblushingly in the enchantment that her ignorance of pleasure and her natural high spirits had cast around Kips Bay, the model tenements, Cornelia, Robert and Claude.Ah yes, and Claude! With Claude at her side she doubted whether she should mind even a raid. Indeed, wouldn't it be rather fun to be caught in one? And so, while Claude was preoccupied with piloting his charges to safety, Janet half hoped that she might not be cheated of a practical answer to her question.VIMeanwhile the quiet stranger had contrived to get into one of the twisting, struggling whirlpools of men in the fracas, and to insinuate his immaculate person next to Hutchins Burley."Have a care," he said, in Burley's ear. "In another minute this rough-house will be cleaned up by plain-clothes men."Who in hellareyou?" yelled Burley, none too pleased with the features of the man who had warned him before."Why, nobody in particular," answered the stranger coolly, and beginning to edge rapidly away. Burley tramped after him, his befuddled wits somewhat cleared by the recent pummelling."Then how the devil didyouspot the cops?" he said, ploughing his way ruthlessly through human obstructions. "Do they whisper the secrets in your beautiful ears?""Oh, secrets are always coming my way," was the nonchalant answer.The mysterious one halted as soon as he had put several yards between himself and the mob. Cool and self-contained, he was a striking contrast to Hutchins Burley as the latter, dishevelled, muttering and out of breath, bore down upon him."Mr. Burley, you'd better go, while the going's good! Here's an emergency exit. Good night. I'll look you up in the morning."While the stranger's unobtrusive figure merged into the environment, Burley took the hint with loud Falstaffian clatter. He had barely passed through the door, when the lights went out and the raid actually began.CHAPTER FIVEIDuring the Outlaws' Ball, Cornelia sat alone in the Lorillard apartment. Had she dressed for the masquerade she had declined to attend? One might have been pardoned for thinking so. To a piece of black satin, draped around her in sensuous lines, a girdle of tangerine velvet added the sole touch of color. It also served to draw her dress in high above the waist and to bring out the burnished gold of her hair. The fabric was ingeniously held together by pins, Cornelia being an advocate of a mode of dressing or draping that dispensed with sewing as much as possible.One handsome shoulder was bare; and this arrangement detracted nothing from the garment's look of insecurity. Cornelia's men friends were apt to be on tenterhooks lest her pinned dresses should suddenly come to pieces. It was an emotion she was not altogether unconscious of, or wholly displeased with.To the very last she had persisted in her refusal to take part in the festivity, and had held out firmly against the friendly blandishments with which Janet, Robert, Mazie, and Hutchins Burley had successively tried to shake her determination. She defended her position by declaring that dancing bored her to distraction, not to mention that the current dance forms, the fox trot, the jazz steps and the glide, seemed to her to be unspeakable profanations of a fine art.With this explanation her friends had to be content, while they guessed at the true reason for her refusal. Claude hazarded the view that her real motive was a dread of emerging in public while her affair with Percival Houghton, the artist, was still fresh in everybody's memory. Mazie repeated her laconic opinion that Cornelia could spite more people and attract more attention by being missed than by being present.About eleven o'clock some one rang. When Cornelia opened the door, she was confronted by an athletic young man whom she recognized as the occupant of apartment number thirteen, the one next to her own. Mistaking her dress for negligee, he apologized profusely and then explained that the gas in his room having suddenly given out he needed a twenty-five-cent piece to set the meter in action again. Cornelia observed that whereas his form was the form of the roaring lion, his voice was the voice of the cooing dove."I always keep an extra quarter on the mantelpiece," he said, coloring with embarrassment, "but the light went down all of a sudden, and in the dark I couldn't locate the pesky coin."Cornelia hastened to get the necessary money. Returning, she sympathized with him upon the fickleness of quarter meters."Horrid, mercenary things! I'd give them 'no quarter,' if I dared, wouldn't you?""Yes—the light always goes out in the dark," he said, quaintly.He was obviously anxious to make a good impression, and ill at ease because of this anxiety."Just wait a second, will you, Miss," he said, as she handed him the money. "I'll give it back right away."As his door was only a few feet away from hers, she waited in the hall and looked curiously into his room after he had lighted up. She noticed that the place was filled with gymnastic paraphernalia—clubs, dumb-bells, weights, and a boxing bag apparatus. Meanwhile, he rummaged through the articles on the mantelpiece until he discovered the missing money tucked snugly away in an empty match-box."I don't know how it got there," he said, ruefully. "I guess I meant to put it underneath, but slipped it into the box absent-mindedly."She smiled. "You have a complete pocket gymnasium," she commented."Yes, I'm pretty well rigged out," he replied, delighted at her show of interest.He was very much impressed with her appearance, which mirrored a world socially more elevated and more beautiful than his own. He racked his wits for an excuse to detain her."Is this how you keep in trim?" asked Cornelia, indicating the apparatus."I—I'm a professional wrestler and a physical culture expert," he went on, fumbling in his pocket for a visiting card."Ah, I see. It's business, not pleasure." She did not look at the card, but flashed eloquent glances at his figure."That's it," he replied, emboldened by her mute flattery. "Will you come in and let me show you around? Young ladies aren't always interested in these things.""Another time. It's too late now."Her phrases emerged so curtly and her relapse into frigid conventionality was so abrupt that the young man stammered a hurt good night, and rather hastily closed his door.Cornelia gained her sexual gratification in diluted but frequent doses. Without being a deliberate flirt like Mazie, she instinctively tried out the subtler weapons of sex on every man she liked and, since her appearance was both striking and agreeable and her likings fairly far flung, men often responded to her charm with a crudeness that gave her great offence. She seemed unconscious of the incitement in her manner; when, on one occasion, Robert pointed it out, she denied the charge with mingled passion and surprise.And it was quite true that she took no pleasure in arousing a man's desire. All her pleasure was derived from baffling it. Curiously enough, an enamored man was an object which aroused in her only a feeling of distaste. And the presence of this feeling satisfied her that she was the innocent victim of his condition rather than the responsible author.Perhaps it was this attitude of Cornelia's that Robert had in mind when he said that there was an indefinable suggestion of latent wickedness about her, of wickedness she had neither the vitality nor the courage to live up to. How much her luckless amour had to do with her inverted sex emotions, it would be hard to say. Robert's private view was that it had thrown her into the society of people like the Kips Bay tenementers who, by all current moral standards, were not "respectable." He also held that it had inspired her with a passion for respectability, as secret and as strong as the drunkard's longing to be considered a sober man.After her neighbor's retirement, Cornelia looked at his card. In the middle was inscribed the name "Harry Kelly" and underneath appeared: "The Harlem Gorilla, Champion of the Mat."IIIt was an hour or more before the doorbell of suite number fifteen rang again. This time the visitor was Robert Lloyd. His entrance drove Cornelia's languor away. But she concealed her immense delight and received him neutrally enough."I couldn't endure the monotony of the ball another minute," he declared. "You've no idea what a relief it is to be able to come here.""What was so monotonous, Cato?""What wasn't!" said Robert, taking off his overcoat and revealing the black friar's hood and gown that had served him during the evening. "The music, the dancing, the ogling, the drinking, the sickening coquetry, the silly speeches to and from brainless companions—in short, everything!""My dear!" exclaimed Cornelia. "At a ball, what can you expect?""Oh, I know I'm a fool for my pains," said Robert, laughing off the vexation he felt at having frittered away a whole evening.He began to undo the girdle of his gown."Stop!" she cried. "I haven't had a really good look at your costume.""Nor I at yours," he said, noticing how her dress lapped and caressed her form. He praised the effect freely.Pleased, she went to his side, pulled his hood over his head, set his girdle and gown aright, and then stepped back to inspect the result, clapping her hands in approval as she did so."When the devil is sick of the world, the devil a monk would be!""The devil a monk am I!" said Robert, "unless an unholy rage at the world is a first-class qualification for monastic honors.""Robert, the part fits you to perfection. It's astonishing how neatly you manage to blend the temper of a devil with the austerity of a monk.""Not astonishing at all," said Robert, divesting himself of the costume. "Like most young men I have a craving for pleasure, excitement and female society. That's what you call the devil in me. But my observation is keen enough to show me that, under present social conditions, I can't give this craving either a temperate or an honorable satisfaction. So I repress it as much as common sense allows, and you call that repression austerity.""Cato, you ought to be writing tracts for the Ethical Culture Society instead of newspaper articles for Hutchins' wickedEvening Chronicle. What are you doing among the Outlaws instead of in a goody-goody Sunday School?"He took her raillery in good part."Every journalist is a patcher-up of unconsidered trifles," he said. "He makes a crazy quilt of them as orderly and coherent as he can. Well, where can I get the raw material I need in greater supply than in this little community of criminality and sentimentality, of Radicalism and bad debts? Kips Bay is an inexhaustible mine of police news and town talk.""Well, I can't say that your kind stay among us has broadened you out much, Rob!""No?" he replied, amused at the shot. "I suppose I do grow more squeamish every day. Nothing like a steady diet of police episodes for purifying purposes. It acts the way some nauseous drugs do.""You're perfectly detestable," she cried. She didn't like anybody but herself to disparage Kips Bay. "You've put your mind in a prison, Rob. Your symptoms require a drastic remedy. If I were a physician of the soul, I should prescribe marriage.""Don't be a Job's comforter, Cornelia. I said I wanted female society, not female satiety. And, by the way, since when did you begin to advocate marriage as the door to freedom? You have always denounced it as the trapdoor to slavery.""I don't advocate it for women, and even for men I recommend it only in the most desperate cases.""Well, mine isn't desperate. But Hutchins Burley's is, judging from his conduct at the ball tonight. You might prescribe for him.""Oh, he's past all treatment. What do you think he told me in strict confidence yesterday? That he's weighed down by a great sorrow; too many women find him irresistible, and persecute him to death with their lovesick attentions.""I call that a new form of persecutional mania.""He was in dead earnest, Rob. He called himself a martyr to love, fancy that!""Well, he seemed to be a remarkably willing martyr tonight. He buzzed like a huge wasp from one pair of lips to another. When he got to Mazie, who unfolds her petals so alluringly, he became quite intoxicated.""Which means that Mazie acted in a perfectly shameless way, as usual.""Whose mind is a prison now?""I don't know what you mean," said Cornelia acridly. "Please don't assume that, because I no longer believe in marriage, I've turned my back on decency and good manners.""This is breaking a butterfly on a wheel, Cornelia. The fact is, Mazie doesn't have toactto produce the peculiar behavior in men which I described. You know that quite well. She is what Joseph Conrad calls 'one of the women of all time.' I'd call her a throw-back with the emotions and appetites of a cave woman and the thoughts and looks of a Ziegfield chorus girl. It's not by acting shamelessly, or by acting at all, but by just passively being herself that she sets a man's blood boiling.""A man's blood boils so easily—like a kettle on a mountain!""Be fair, Cornelia. Some men's blood does, yes. Men on Mazie's own level. Burley's one of them.""Well," said Cornelia, waiving the point, "what did Hutchins do, or rather undo?""I'd better not go into details. He played several questionable pranks. Once, it looked as though he were on the point of seizing Mazie by her locks and dragging her, stone-man fashion, to his lair. Even Mazie had to act then, really toact, for she was after bigger game.""You mean, Claude?""Yes. But Claude had no eyes for the woman of all time. His gaze was absolutely absorbed by a new star of the first magnitude, a star not charted in the heavens before.""And this starry wonder?""Was Janet Barr."He tried to say the name casually, but Cornelia's jealous ear detected a caressing tone."Hard on Mazie, wasn't it?" he pursued."On Mazie least of all," she said pointedly.The shaft missed."Yes, Burley got the worst end of it," he went on innocently. "I dare say Mazie consoled herself easily enough. But Burley's aspirations have met more than one jolt to-night. When he made a dead set at Janet—that was another rebuff."Robert described the riotous scene outside the gypsy tent."Then, as I've already told you, Mazie gave him the slip; with the result that I've never seen Burley more completely divested of his first-prize bumptiousness. However, he soon pulled himself together.""Goodness knows there must have been plenty of Outlaw girls ready to lay balm on the big scamp's wounds.""Yes. And I needn't remind you that many of these young ladies believe in free speech, free men and free love. Well, Hutchins made the rounds of those he knew and publicly challenged them to live up to their pretensions. His proposals were brutally frank.""The girls received them with amusement, I suppose?""They received them with scornful resentment—just like ordinary conventional creatures. That was what was so surprising. For Hutchins was simply a man who took their professed opinions at face value. 'Darling,' he would say bluntly, to one of his pets, 'Darling, I like you and your ruby lips. If you like me and are not otherwise engaged, suppose we go off to Paradise.' It was raw, of course. But you can't say it wasn't what is called 'free love'.""Really, Rob!""Exactly. They were every bit as scandalized as you are. After gasping for breath, they called for their escorts. Whereupon I concluded that instinct is mightier than opinion and that the beliefs we inherit are vastly stronger than the beliefs we acquire."Cornelia ignored this piece of satire. And Robert then told how Burley had resumed his pursuit of Janet."Luckily, Claude held him off," he said."Another champion! Little Janet must be quite the belle of the ball.""She's been much in demand. There was the gypsy tent, remember. When it comes to innocent credulity, a radical's capacity is just as great as any honest man's. So what with examining scores of palms and eluding Hutchins Burley, Janet might have died from exhaustion but for Claude's gallant interference.""Just like Claude's knight-errantry," she said. "He has always had a passion for novelties.""And the novelties have usually returned the passion!"Cornelia felt a twinge of jealousy. But as Janet had evidently not been very attentive to Robert, and had even hurt his feelings, she was hardly conscious of the emotion."Janet is young, impressionable and fresh from a Puritan home," she said, with a languid air of detachment. "Small wonder if Lothario's dash and distinction have captivated her."They fell to talking of Janet's history, and Robert spoke of the surprising change in her sphere of interests."A month ago she was demure enough to have stood model for the heroine ofMiles Standish. She could hardly be induced to drink at a soda-water fountain on a Sunday. Now she is full of 'equal pay for equal work.' And she appears to have a voice as well as a vote. I'm told that she reads theLiberatorand that she broke the last Sabbath by attending a meeting of the new Labor Party in Madison Square Garden.""She's been under my wing for several weeks," said Cornelia, proudly.IIICornelia's assumption that she was entirely responsible for the change in Janet's outlook on life was without warrant. Yet she was so self-satisfied as scarcely to suspect that Robert had anything to do with the matter; and it was interest in the man rather than curiosity about the girl that caused her to question him about his previous acquaintance with Janet.She learnt that Robert's mother was not a very distant cousin of Mrs. Barr, and that both ladies had spent their girlhood in the same Connecticut town, where they had been friends until Mrs. Lloyd married and went out West. When Robert left Los Angeles, he bore this relationship in mind and, on the strength of it, paid his respects to the Barrs soon after settling in New York.Cornelia inferred that the young man's acquaintance with the Barrs had continued on a very superficial footing. Robert knew better than to undeceive her. As a matter of fact, he had repeated his visits to the Barr household for the simple reason that there had sprung up between himself and Janet a mental fellowship which the hostility of her mother, the timid aloofness of her father and the envy of her sister had been able to obstruct but not to destroy.Janet had more than repaid him for the inhospitality of her relatives. She in turn amused, puzzled, inspired and electrified him. So much unsophistication in the midst of a guileful city, so much candor surrounded by pious make-believe, above all, so much eagerness for experience held in leash by a vegetating family routine, had filled Robert with the hope that he might play Pygmalion to her Galatea.Galatea, however, did not exactly go into raptures over Pygmalion. Though her insurgent nature was full of silent sympathy with Robert, her instincts were so much under the bondage of the Barr atmosphere as to prevent her from fully estimating his worth. Still, she conscientiously followed up the leads he gave her. She made her first bewildered acquaintance with the new paintings, the new music and the new social sciences. She began to look forward to copies of theRepublic, theNation, theLondon Statesman; and she joined him in reading the great contemporary writers: Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Anatole France, Romain Rolland. In short, she ranged with silent delight through the new world of modernity that he opened up to her, though it had to be explored in an obstinate little way of her own.As her unofficial pilot Robert was very happy and might long have held the post but for a fatal blunder. Mrs. Barr learned one day that he had tempted Janet to attend a performance of Shaw's "Blanco Posnet," given on a Sunday by the Stage Reform Players. According to Emily, her informant, this play was immoral, not to say blasphemous, as was proved by the refusal of the British censor to license its performance.Such a flagrant breach of holy writ, family propriety and the Sabbath, raised a domestic tempest to which Janet deemed it wise to bend. Robert was forced to discontinue his visits. What he did not tell Cornelia was that, during the last two months, he had regularly met Janet at Brentano's, where she had formed the habit of browsing through the new books and magazines every Friday afternoon.
III
Towards midnight, the Outlaws' Ball in the old Murray Hill Lyceum on 34th Street had almost hit its stride. Two bands, an Hawaiian Jazz and the Kips Bay Roughnecks, furnished the music, and what with the crash and blare of instruments, the dazzle of costumes, the clouds of confetti, and the swirl of dancers, masked and unmasked, the dense motley crowd appeared to be squeezing the last ounce of pleasure out of its mad adventure in search of "a good time."
Janet's appearance in her Spanish robes with the genuine Castilian mantilla, the high tortoise shell comb, and the silk Andalusian shawl flaming brilliantly against her dark hair, was one of the sensations of the evening. Robert's somber monk's cowl at her side subtracted nothing from this sensation. He conducted her through the mazes of the upper dancing floor and then brought her back to the gorgeous gypsy tent that had been set up on the floor below.
There she began to play the gypsy fortune teller with as much subtlety as the professional exertions of the musical Roughnecks permitted.
Robert stood near the tent as a sort of self-constituted watchman and bodyguard extraordinary. As John Barleycorn was being liberally dispensed in the refreshment room, a number of tipsy masqueraders soon turned up, and some of these roistered into Janet's tent despite Robert's efforts to fend them off.
Hutchins Burley was among those who presently appeared on the scene. It was after Mazie Ross had repeatedly toyed with his erotic instincts and incited his hot pursuit only to defeat him at a point just short of possession. In a fury of frustration, he had descended to the first floor to inflame his passions further at the public bar. Thus inspirited, he propelled his Falstaffian proportions into the gypsy tent and requested Janet to read his palm.
His breath alone would have decided Janet to refuse. But when he interrupted her first sentence by tearing off her mask and importuning a closer acquaintance with the face behind it, she pushed abruptly past him and, running outside the tent, waited for him to leave it.
With surprising alacrity Hutchins Burley bundled after her.
"You're a lively little kipper," he shouted, filled with liquor and desire. And he wildly reached out one arm to clasp her around the waist. But Janet, uttering a low cry, dodged and slipped past him, while Burley's flopping arms were caught firmly by two men who had sprung forward for this purpose.
One of these was Robert. The other was a tall, unobtrusive man who had quietly but deftly detached himself from the throng.
The attention of several people had been arrested by Janet's cry and flight, and these now pressed forward to learn what the trouble was. A confusion of queries, blusterings and exclamations followed, during which the Roughnecks struck up the "Nobody Home" rag.
Hutchins Burley had recovered some of his wits under the compulsion of several menacing faces around him. Seeing him become tractable, Robert contemptuously flung off the arm he held and walked away towards Janet. Burley followed his receding steps with a malevolent glare, and then turned savagely on the tall quiet stranger who was still holding his other arm in a grip of steel.
"Leggo my arm," he bellowed.
"A word in your ear, Mr. Burley," said the quiet one, relaxing his grip. "Plain clothes men are in the crowd. If you kick up a shindy, you'll be giving them what they're looking for."
"And who the devil are you?" sputtered Burley, with the air of a man who is not to be easily frightened.
"Oh, nobody in particular," said the quiet man in a low voice. And, before he could be questioned further, he had melted unobtrusively into the crowd.
IV
A little later, Robert led three jovial young maskers into the gypsy tent. The foremost was dressed asCharles Surfaceand had quite enough gay confidence to do justice to the part.
"So here's the Outlaws' piece of resistance," he called out merrily. "We'll see whether she can do half as much justice to my palm as to her lovely gypsy shawl."
He sat down at Janet's little table and held out his hand. She took it, examined it gravely for some seconds, and then, in her fine clarinet tones she reported swiftly, without a pause, and getting almost breathless towards the end:
"You are handsome, graceful, false and cruel. You've been a good soldier, but you'll become a poor poet. I see you divided into three parts: part one—Charles Surface; part two—Joseph Surface; part three—Sir Peter Teazle. What a pity your name isn't Henry! For you are as dashing as Henry the Fifth, as amorous as Henry of Navarre, and as kind to women as Henry the Eighth. You will be married twice, but how many hearts you will break I dare not reveal. Your own heart is a safe deposit vault, fireproof and loveproof both. Hapless and witless damsels without number will try to blow it up or melt it—without success. One girl alone will refrain from the attempt, realizing the utter uselessness of piercing this too, too solid flesh—"
"Here," cried the young man, drawing away his hand, the laughter and jibing endorsements with which his comrades greeted the several revelations, proving too much for him. "I don't call this a fortune: I call it a raw deal."
"No use abusing the cards," said Janet, still affecting the utmost gravity. "The cards never lie."
"Oh, don't they, Miss Gypsy? That's where your professional prejudice blinds you. Take your discovery that I'm a poor poet, for instance. Well, the fact is, I'm no poet at all. I never so much as wrote a couplet to a girl in all my life."
"I said: youwill becomea poet," remarked Janet, gently correcting him.
"And when will that be, pray?"
Janet hastily cut the cards anew, dealt out five cards, and held out the Queen of Spades to the onlookers.
"When a dark lady enters your life," she said.
"A dark ladyhasentered my life," he said, his voice vibrating seductively. "Entered it with a very poor opinion of me, it seems. But I shouldn't call her the Queen of Spades. I should call her Janet, the Queen of Clubs."
"Clubs, because I scored so many good hits?"
"No, because a Queen of Spades must have lustrous black eyes, and yours are heavenly gray. Come, let's unmask, and see who's the better fortune teller of the two."
Claude pulled off his mask and stood, handsome and challenging, waiting for her to follow suit.
He was very good to look upon. Handsome, graceful and proud, there was just enough disdain in his perfect manner to make every woman adore him and long to enslave his flawless form. He had wonderful blue eyes, a delicate mouth, a fine nose and a penetrating sympathetic voice. Great ease, great daring and great energy of animal passion gave him a hundred opportunities to show his fine points to excellent advantage. To qualities that almost made riches superfluous, riches were added. No wonder he seemed to be a darling of the gods.
Janet's pulse was distinctly quickened by the telling exterior of this dazzling young man. And when she unfastened her domino and met his glance with her fearless gray eyes, his thrilling moment came. He was not greatly impressed with her looks, his social training having biased him towards more fashionable types of beauty. Yet a magnetic ecstacy set him on fire and sent rapturous messages throbbing along his nerves.
It was an enthralling moment, one that seemed mysteriously to link up his being with other blissful moments in previous existences. Strange! Each time that he experienced this emotion anew, he was sure it was unique, sure it was not in this life that he had experienced it before. Stranger still, though it was as deep as the full flooded river of life itself, it was as transitory as an electric spark or a flash of lightning. The moment was poignant, intoxicating, miraculous; yet by no fraction of an instant could it be prolonged.
Indeed, within a second or two, Claude and Janet were chatting about a good many matters which did not bear in the remotest way upon this magnetizing spark. Still, they chatted with an excited recklessness, and as if their essences were held together by a subtle force, a force whose irresistible urgency they would neither have dared to acknowledge nor wished to dispute.
V
Steeped in the enjoyment of the moment, Janet hardly noticed that Robert had tacitly resigned his watchful care of her to Claude Fontaine. She began to neglect her fortune telling duties as one result of this displacement, for Claude's appropriation of her time grew as his visits became more frequent. Nor did he share her compunction on this score. Far from doing so, he cajoled her into dancing with him again and again. In the intervals, he escorted her from one end of the reception floor to the other, introducing her to the groups he considered worth while. Thus she shared (much more fully than she desired to) the curiosity which his brilliant presence excited and the gossip which it was everywhere a signal for.
"Here's an interesting stunt," said Claude to his partner.
He indicated a group of young people amongst whom she instantly recognized Robert and Mazie. Two others claimed her attention. In the center of the group was a young woman with a high color and a very energetic manner, who had adopted an unusual plan for swelling the box office receipts. She was making impromptu busts in putty of all who could afford a contribution, no reasonable sum being refused.
When Claude and Janet came up, the sculptress had just finished modelling a head of Robert; and a remarkably spirited likeness it was. Robert was greatly taken with it, but his satisfaction was mild beside that of the artist, who handled the fragile image as though it were the apple of her eye.
Two thoughts struck Janet. One was that Charlotte Beecher's fuss over the statuette of Robert Lloyd was excessive. The other was that she now, for the first time, missed the living model. But this discovery, as well as her criticism of the sculptress, was promptly swallowed up in the kaleidoscopic whirl of meeting still other characters belonging to the strange new society into which she had been flung.
Nevertheless, she contrived to recall Robert to her side.
"What a wonderful head Robert has!" Miss Beecher was rhapsodizing, while she glanced sentimentally from the statue to the living model. "I declare, it's all brain."
"It sure is!" echoed Mazie, mockingly. "But it's not a patch on his wonderful heart."
She laid her hand on the spot where she supposed this organ to be, and added, without crediting the epigram to Cornelia who had originated it:
"That's all brain, too!"
Everybody laughed, Robert no less heartily than his neighbors. Everybody, that is, save Charlotte Beecher, whose sharp glance at Mazie softened to tenderness as it swept on towards Robert.
The second person to fascinate Janet was a youngish woman in a Syrian dress of many boldly brilliant color clashes. Contrasts as startling were achieved by her coal black hair, her pale olive skin, and the gorgeous green pendants attached to her ears. She had the barbaric picturesqueness of a White African Queen straight out of Rider Haggard, and about as much credibility. But she posed with unlimited self-confidence.
So speculated Janet. The next moment she reminded herself of the necessity of keeping an eye (and perhaps a string) on Robert Lloyd.
But he was nowhere to be seen. In his usual insidious fashion, he had taken French leave while the circle of spectators was absorbed in the ritual of weaving gossip amongst themselves or blessing Miss Beecher's next putty statuette with lavish adjectives and exclamations.
His disappearance piqued Janet. But the exhilaration caused by all the enchantments of the ball and all the thrills of Claude's gallantry and charm, did not permit her to allow any one emotion more than a fleeting hospitality.
Claude watched his chance of enticing her to another novelty. On the way, she begged him to enlighten her about the people she had just met.
"Tell me all about the sculptress and about the Rider Haggard lady with the earrings," she said.
Claude explained that these ladies were both considered freaks even among the Outlaws: Charlotte Beecher, because she was an heiress who wore a working girl's clothes and toiled harder with the sculptor's chisel than a day laborer with a pickaxe; Lydia Morrow, not so much because she had a flair for spectacular dresses, Leon Bakst colors and startling jewelry, as because her authorship of half a dozen best sellers had given her almost unlimited means to gratify these vagaries.
"Lydia Morrow? I don't seem to know the name," said Janet.
"Lydia Dyson, her maiden name, is the name she writes under."
This name Janet knew well enough. It was a familiar name wherever American magazines flourished; even among the Barrs of Brooklyn it was a household fixture. The stupendous fact was that Lydia Dyson's novels of approximated naughtiness, sensual slush and disembowelled passion, appeared serially and simultaneously in magazines with as different a clientele as theSaturday Morning Post, thePurple Book,Anybody'sand theWomen's Bazaar.
Claude added that he had his own reasons for calling the two young women freaks.
"All these people are loony on the subject of love," he said, with a wave of the hand that appeared to include the whole membership of the ball. "Some because they've had too much of it, but more because they've had too little. Mazie is one of a small group that is suffering from surfeit. But Charlotte and Lydia belong to the other class. Charlotte wants a husband without a whole lot of love, and Lydia wants a whole lot of love without a husband. As for Mazie, there's nothing left for her to want but a rich protector, with as little love in the bargain as possible."
This offhand analysis set Janet to wondering what Claude's own conception of love might be. He went blithely on:
"The difficulty with Charlotte is that she's too particular; with Lydia, that she's not particular enough. Not one-tenth particular enough for Gordon Morrow, her husband, who lives on her money but won't be kept in his place. He actually presumes to be furiously jealous. But, however comic a figure he may cut, who can blame him for drawing the line at a blackguard like Hutchins Burley? Here's Hutch staggering this way, now. After you, the impudent beggar!"
Naturally, in this quarter, Burley had little luck. Janet shrank away from him, and Claude froze him off as he had already done two or three times that night. Envenomed, but nothing daunted, Hutchins Burley careered, none too steadily, over to the circle around the sculptress. Claude watched him disgustedly.
"If Morrow catches him pawing all over his wife, there'll be trouble. And Lydia Dyson's not the woman to lift her little finger to avert it. She has a theory that 'Big Burley' is a sort of twentieth century edition of the Cave Man, a theory she is not above putting to the proof. Husband or no husband, a big scene is nectar and ambrosia to her."
He looked anxiously back at Charlotte Beecher's group. "Let's go away from here," he said, taking her arm with protective tenderness.
"Shall we go back to the tent?"
"I'd like to take you much further than that. You are too wonderful and genuine to fit into this hothouse crowd."
Janet liked his pretty speeches, but she had not yet had her fill of the carnival of pleasure.
Claude's fears were only too speedily realized. Hardly had he returned Janet to her gypsy tent, than shouts and screams ascended from the sculptress' quarter. Claude hastened to the spot and found two knots of men pulling Burley away from Lydia's husband and heightening the disorder in the act.
The commotion now took a new turn. Burley had not forgotten the man who had cold-shouldered him out of Janet's way several times. As soon as he laid eyes on Claude and observed him assisting Charlotte Beecher in a feverish effort to save her putty models, his rage reached its climax. Every ounce of his bulky weight was put into a titanic pull that jerked him loose from those who restrained him. Using his momentary freedom to snatch up the little bust of Robert, he flung it at Claude's head.
"No diamond shark can come butting in here," he shouted, in a purple fury.
The bust went far wide of its mark. But not the taunt. It stung Claude into sudden violence, so that he sprang towards Burley with the object of thrashing him. Thirty or forty people having now been drawn into the melee, however, he was saved the ignominy of a public brawl.
At the height of the turmoil Claude's arm was clasped by an iron hand. It was the hand of a tall immaculate man who spoke to him in a low calm voice.
"A word of warning, Mr. Fontaine," he said, urging him away from the fracas. "Get your friends out of here at once! Detectives are about to raid the place."
"Detectives! Are you one?" asked Claude, more or less bewildered.
"No, not particularly," was the whimsical reply of the stranger, who then moved decisively away and evaporated as suddenly as he had turned up.
As soon as Claude rallied his wits, he acted swiftly. He persuaded Charlotte Beecher, who happened to be near, to follow him; and then took the shortest cut to the gypsy tent, where Janet greeted his return with a happy cry of relief. Excitedly he warned her of the raid, and urged her to lose no time in preparing to leave with him.
She obeyed, not without a pang of regret.
Regret? It was not parting with the musical Roughnecks, though they were better than their names; it was not turning her back on the dancing, though this had intoxicated her; and it was not saying farewell to the riot of color, costume and confetti, though these had put her in an ecstacy of delight. At least, it was not an extravagant hunger for these pleasures. And she certainly had nothing but measureless disgust for a crowd of brawling, shouting, turbulent men.
Why regret then?
It was merely because of the obvious difference between her joyless home and this night's experience. Beside the deathlike stagnation of the Barrs of Brooklyn, the movement, intensity and go of the Outlaws had what she cheerfully accepted as the quality and flavor of reality. "This is life," a still, small voice cried within her, meaning that this was at least a fairly good imitation of life on its gayer side. And she revelled unblushingly in the enchantment that her ignorance of pleasure and her natural high spirits had cast around Kips Bay, the model tenements, Cornelia, Robert and Claude.
Ah yes, and Claude! With Claude at her side she doubted whether she should mind even a raid. Indeed, wouldn't it be rather fun to be caught in one? And so, while Claude was preoccupied with piloting his charges to safety, Janet half hoped that she might not be cheated of a practical answer to her question.
VI
Meanwhile the quiet stranger had contrived to get into one of the twisting, struggling whirlpools of men in the fracas, and to insinuate his immaculate person next to Hutchins Burley.
"Have a care," he said, in Burley's ear. "In another minute this rough-house will be cleaned up by plain-clothes men.
"Who in hellareyou?" yelled Burley, none too pleased with the features of the man who had warned him before.
"Why, nobody in particular," answered the stranger coolly, and beginning to edge rapidly away. Burley tramped after him, his befuddled wits somewhat cleared by the recent pummelling.
"Then how the devil didyouspot the cops?" he said, ploughing his way ruthlessly through human obstructions. "Do they whisper the secrets in your beautiful ears?"
"Oh, secrets are always coming my way," was the nonchalant answer.
The mysterious one halted as soon as he had put several yards between himself and the mob. Cool and self-contained, he was a striking contrast to Hutchins Burley as the latter, dishevelled, muttering and out of breath, bore down upon him.
"Mr. Burley, you'd better go, while the going's good! Here's an emergency exit. Good night. I'll look you up in the morning."
While the stranger's unobtrusive figure merged into the environment, Burley took the hint with loud Falstaffian clatter. He had barely passed through the door, when the lights went out and the raid actually began.
CHAPTER FIVE
I
During the Outlaws' Ball, Cornelia sat alone in the Lorillard apartment. Had she dressed for the masquerade she had declined to attend? One might have been pardoned for thinking so. To a piece of black satin, draped around her in sensuous lines, a girdle of tangerine velvet added the sole touch of color. It also served to draw her dress in high above the waist and to bring out the burnished gold of her hair. The fabric was ingeniously held together by pins, Cornelia being an advocate of a mode of dressing or draping that dispensed with sewing as much as possible.
One handsome shoulder was bare; and this arrangement detracted nothing from the garment's look of insecurity. Cornelia's men friends were apt to be on tenterhooks lest her pinned dresses should suddenly come to pieces. It was an emotion she was not altogether unconscious of, or wholly displeased with.
To the very last she had persisted in her refusal to take part in the festivity, and had held out firmly against the friendly blandishments with which Janet, Robert, Mazie, and Hutchins Burley had successively tried to shake her determination. She defended her position by declaring that dancing bored her to distraction, not to mention that the current dance forms, the fox trot, the jazz steps and the glide, seemed to her to be unspeakable profanations of a fine art.
With this explanation her friends had to be content, while they guessed at the true reason for her refusal. Claude hazarded the view that her real motive was a dread of emerging in public while her affair with Percival Houghton, the artist, was still fresh in everybody's memory. Mazie repeated her laconic opinion that Cornelia could spite more people and attract more attention by being missed than by being present.
About eleven o'clock some one rang. When Cornelia opened the door, she was confronted by an athletic young man whom she recognized as the occupant of apartment number thirteen, the one next to her own. Mistaking her dress for negligee, he apologized profusely and then explained that the gas in his room having suddenly given out he needed a twenty-five-cent piece to set the meter in action again. Cornelia observed that whereas his form was the form of the roaring lion, his voice was the voice of the cooing dove.
"I always keep an extra quarter on the mantelpiece," he said, coloring with embarrassment, "but the light went down all of a sudden, and in the dark I couldn't locate the pesky coin."
Cornelia hastened to get the necessary money. Returning, she sympathized with him upon the fickleness of quarter meters.
"Horrid, mercenary things! I'd give them 'no quarter,' if I dared, wouldn't you?"
"Yes—the light always goes out in the dark," he said, quaintly.
He was obviously anxious to make a good impression, and ill at ease because of this anxiety.
"Just wait a second, will you, Miss," he said, as she handed him the money. "I'll give it back right away."
As his door was only a few feet away from hers, she waited in the hall and looked curiously into his room after he had lighted up. She noticed that the place was filled with gymnastic paraphernalia—clubs, dumb-bells, weights, and a boxing bag apparatus. Meanwhile, he rummaged through the articles on the mantelpiece until he discovered the missing money tucked snugly away in an empty match-box.
"I don't know how it got there," he said, ruefully. "I guess I meant to put it underneath, but slipped it into the box absent-mindedly."
She smiled. "You have a complete pocket gymnasium," she commented.
"Yes, I'm pretty well rigged out," he replied, delighted at her show of interest.
He was very much impressed with her appearance, which mirrored a world socially more elevated and more beautiful than his own. He racked his wits for an excuse to detain her.
"Is this how you keep in trim?" asked Cornelia, indicating the apparatus.
"I—I'm a professional wrestler and a physical culture expert," he went on, fumbling in his pocket for a visiting card.
"Ah, I see. It's business, not pleasure." She did not look at the card, but flashed eloquent glances at his figure.
"That's it," he replied, emboldened by her mute flattery. "Will you come in and let me show you around? Young ladies aren't always interested in these things."
"Another time. It's too late now."
Her phrases emerged so curtly and her relapse into frigid conventionality was so abrupt that the young man stammered a hurt good night, and rather hastily closed his door.
Cornelia gained her sexual gratification in diluted but frequent doses. Without being a deliberate flirt like Mazie, she instinctively tried out the subtler weapons of sex on every man she liked and, since her appearance was both striking and agreeable and her likings fairly far flung, men often responded to her charm with a crudeness that gave her great offence. She seemed unconscious of the incitement in her manner; when, on one occasion, Robert pointed it out, she denied the charge with mingled passion and surprise.
And it was quite true that she took no pleasure in arousing a man's desire. All her pleasure was derived from baffling it. Curiously enough, an enamored man was an object which aroused in her only a feeling of distaste. And the presence of this feeling satisfied her that she was the innocent victim of his condition rather than the responsible author.
Perhaps it was this attitude of Cornelia's that Robert had in mind when he said that there was an indefinable suggestion of latent wickedness about her, of wickedness she had neither the vitality nor the courage to live up to. How much her luckless amour had to do with her inverted sex emotions, it would be hard to say. Robert's private view was that it had thrown her into the society of people like the Kips Bay tenementers who, by all current moral standards, were not "respectable." He also held that it had inspired her with a passion for respectability, as secret and as strong as the drunkard's longing to be considered a sober man.
After her neighbor's retirement, Cornelia looked at his card. In the middle was inscribed the name "Harry Kelly" and underneath appeared: "The Harlem Gorilla, Champion of the Mat."
II
It was an hour or more before the doorbell of suite number fifteen rang again. This time the visitor was Robert Lloyd. His entrance drove Cornelia's languor away. But she concealed her immense delight and received him neutrally enough.
"I couldn't endure the monotony of the ball another minute," he declared. "You've no idea what a relief it is to be able to come here."
"What was so monotonous, Cato?"
"What wasn't!" said Robert, taking off his overcoat and revealing the black friar's hood and gown that had served him during the evening. "The music, the dancing, the ogling, the drinking, the sickening coquetry, the silly speeches to and from brainless companions—in short, everything!"
"My dear!" exclaimed Cornelia. "At a ball, what can you expect?"
"Oh, I know I'm a fool for my pains," said Robert, laughing off the vexation he felt at having frittered away a whole evening.
He began to undo the girdle of his gown.
"Stop!" she cried. "I haven't had a really good look at your costume."
"Nor I at yours," he said, noticing how her dress lapped and caressed her form. He praised the effect freely.
Pleased, she went to his side, pulled his hood over his head, set his girdle and gown aright, and then stepped back to inspect the result, clapping her hands in approval as she did so.
"When the devil is sick of the world, the devil a monk would be!"
"The devil a monk am I!" said Robert, "unless an unholy rage at the world is a first-class qualification for monastic honors."
"Robert, the part fits you to perfection. It's astonishing how neatly you manage to blend the temper of a devil with the austerity of a monk."
"Not astonishing at all," said Robert, divesting himself of the costume. "Like most young men I have a craving for pleasure, excitement and female society. That's what you call the devil in me. But my observation is keen enough to show me that, under present social conditions, I can't give this craving either a temperate or an honorable satisfaction. So I repress it as much as common sense allows, and you call that repression austerity."
"Cato, you ought to be writing tracts for the Ethical Culture Society instead of newspaper articles for Hutchins' wickedEvening Chronicle. What are you doing among the Outlaws instead of in a goody-goody Sunday School?"
He took her raillery in good part.
"Every journalist is a patcher-up of unconsidered trifles," he said. "He makes a crazy quilt of them as orderly and coherent as he can. Well, where can I get the raw material I need in greater supply than in this little community of criminality and sentimentality, of Radicalism and bad debts? Kips Bay is an inexhaustible mine of police news and town talk."
"Well, I can't say that your kind stay among us has broadened you out much, Rob!"
"No?" he replied, amused at the shot. "I suppose I do grow more squeamish every day. Nothing like a steady diet of police episodes for purifying purposes. It acts the way some nauseous drugs do."
"You're perfectly detestable," she cried. She didn't like anybody but herself to disparage Kips Bay. "You've put your mind in a prison, Rob. Your symptoms require a drastic remedy. If I were a physician of the soul, I should prescribe marriage."
"Don't be a Job's comforter, Cornelia. I said I wanted female society, not female satiety. And, by the way, since when did you begin to advocate marriage as the door to freedom? You have always denounced it as the trapdoor to slavery."
"I don't advocate it for women, and even for men I recommend it only in the most desperate cases."
"Well, mine isn't desperate. But Hutchins Burley's is, judging from his conduct at the ball tonight. You might prescribe for him."
"Oh, he's past all treatment. What do you think he told me in strict confidence yesterday? That he's weighed down by a great sorrow; too many women find him irresistible, and persecute him to death with their lovesick attentions."
"I call that a new form of persecutional mania."
"He was in dead earnest, Rob. He called himself a martyr to love, fancy that!"
"Well, he seemed to be a remarkably willing martyr tonight. He buzzed like a huge wasp from one pair of lips to another. When he got to Mazie, who unfolds her petals so alluringly, he became quite intoxicated."
"Which means that Mazie acted in a perfectly shameless way, as usual."
"Whose mind is a prison now?"
"I don't know what you mean," said Cornelia acridly. "Please don't assume that, because I no longer believe in marriage, I've turned my back on decency and good manners."
"This is breaking a butterfly on a wheel, Cornelia. The fact is, Mazie doesn't have toactto produce the peculiar behavior in men which I described. You know that quite well. She is what Joseph Conrad calls 'one of the women of all time.' I'd call her a throw-back with the emotions and appetites of a cave woman and the thoughts and looks of a Ziegfield chorus girl. It's not by acting shamelessly, or by acting at all, but by just passively being herself that she sets a man's blood boiling."
"A man's blood boils so easily—like a kettle on a mountain!"
"Be fair, Cornelia. Some men's blood does, yes. Men on Mazie's own level. Burley's one of them."
"Well," said Cornelia, waiving the point, "what did Hutchins do, or rather undo?"
"I'd better not go into details. He played several questionable pranks. Once, it looked as though he were on the point of seizing Mazie by her locks and dragging her, stone-man fashion, to his lair. Even Mazie had to act then, really toact, for she was after bigger game."
"You mean, Claude?"
"Yes. But Claude had no eyes for the woman of all time. His gaze was absolutely absorbed by a new star of the first magnitude, a star not charted in the heavens before."
"And this starry wonder?"
"Was Janet Barr."
He tried to say the name casually, but Cornelia's jealous ear detected a caressing tone.
"Hard on Mazie, wasn't it?" he pursued.
"On Mazie least of all," she said pointedly.
The shaft missed.
"Yes, Burley got the worst end of it," he went on innocently. "I dare say Mazie consoled herself easily enough. But Burley's aspirations have met more than one jolt to-night. When he made a dead set at Janet—that was another rebuff."
Robert described the riotous scene outside the gypsy tent.
"Then, as I've already told you, Mazie gave him the slip; with the result that I've never seen Burley more completely divested of his first-prize bumptiousness. However, he soon pulled himself together."
"Goodness knows there must have been plenty of Outlaw girls ready to lay balm on the big scamp's wounds."
"Yes. And I needn't remind you that many of these young ladies believe in free speech, free men and free love. Well, Hutchins made the rounds of those he knew and publicly challenged them to live up to their pretensions. His proposals were brutally frank."
"The girls received them with amusement, I suppose?"
"They received them with scornful resentment—just like ordinary conventional creatures. That was what was so surprising. For Hutchins was simply a man who took their professed opinions at face value. 'Darling,' he would say bluntly, to one of his pets, 'Darling, I like you and your ruby lips. If you like me and are not otherwise engaged, suppose we go off to Paradise.' It was raw, of course. But you can't say it wasn't what is called 'free love'."
"Really, Rob!"
"Exactly. They were every bit as scandalized as you are. After gasping for breath, they called for their escorts. Whereupon I concluded that instinct is mightier than opinion and that the beliefs we inherit are vastly stronger than the beliefs we acquire."
Cornelia ignored this piece of satire. And Robert then told how Burley had resumed his pursuit of Janet.
"Luckily, Claude held him off," he said.
"Another champion! Little Janet must be quite the belle of the ball."
"She's been much in demand. There was the gypsy tent, remember. When it comes to innocent credulity, a radical's capacity is just as great as any honest man's. So what with examining scores of palms and eluding Hutchins Burley, Janet might have died from exhaustion but for Claude's gallant interference."
"Just like Claude's knight-errantry," she said. "He has always had a passion for novelties."
"And the novelties have usually returned the passion!"
Cornelia felt a twinge of jealousy. But as Janet had evidently not been very attentive to Robert, and had even hurt his feelings, she was hardly conscious of the emotion.
"Janet is young, impressionable and fresh from a Puritan home," she said, with a languid air of detachment. "Small wonder if Lothario's dash and distinction have captivated her."
They fell to talking of Janet's history, and Robert spoke of the surprising change in her sphere of interests.
"A month ago she was demure enough to have stood model for the heroine ofMiles Standish. She could hardly be induced to drink at a soda-water fountain on a Sunday. Now she is full of 'equal pay for equal work.' And she appears to have a voice as well as a vote. I'm told that she reads theLiberatorand that she broke the last Sabbath by attending a meeting of the new Labor Party in Madison Square Garden."
"She's been under my wing for several weeks," said Cornelia, proudly.
III
Cornelia's assumption that she was entirely responsible for the change in Janet's outlook on life was without warrant. Yet she was so self-satisfied as scarcely to suspect that Robert had anything to do with the matter; and it was interest in the man rather than curiosity about the girl that caused her to question him about his previous acquaintance with Janet.
She learnt that Robert's mother was not a very distant cousin of Mrs. Barr, and that both ladies had spent their girlhood in the same Connecticut town, where they had been friends until Mrs. Lloyd married and went out West. When Robert left Los Angeles, he bore this relationship in mind and, on the strength of it, paid his respects to the Barrs soon after settling in New York.
Cornelia inferred that the young man's acquaintance with the Barrs had continued on a very superficial footing. Robert knew better than to undeceive her. As a matter of fact, he had repeated his visits to the Barr household for the simple reason that there had sprung up between himself and Janet a mental fellowship which the hostility of her mother, the timid aloofness of her father and the envy of her sister had been able to obstruct but not to destroy.
Janet had more than repaid him for the inhospitality of her relatives. She in turn amused, puzzled, inspired and electrified him. So much unsophistication in the midst of a guileful city, so much candor surrounded by pious make-believe, above all, so much eagerness for experience held in leash by a vegetating family routine, had filled Robert with the hope that he might play Pygmalion to her Galatea.
Galatea, however, did not exactly go into raptures over Pygmalion. Though her insurgent nature was full of silent sympathy with Robert, her instincts were so much under the bondage of the Barr atmosphere as to prevent her from fully estimating his worth. Still, she conscientiously followed up the leads he gave her. She made her first bewildered acquaintance with the new paintings, the new music and the new social sciences. She began to look forward to copies of theRepublic, theNation, theLondon Statesman; and she joined him in reading the great contemporary writers: Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Anatole France, Romain Rolland. In short, she ranged with silent delight through the new world of modernity that he opened up to her, though it had to be explored in an obstinate little way of her own.
As her unofficial pilot Robert was very happy and might long have held the post but for a fatal blunder. Mrs. Barr learned one day that he had tempted Janet to attend a performance of Shaw's "Blanco Posnet," given on a Sunday by the Stage Reform Players. According to Emily, her informant, this play was immoral, not to say blasphemous, as was proved by the refusal of the British censor to license its performance.
Such a flagrant breach of holy writ, family propriety and the Sabbath, raised a domestic tempest to which Janet deemed it wise to bend. Robert was forced to discontinue his visits. What he did not tell Cornelia was that, during the last two months, he had regularly met Janet at Brentano's, where she had formed the habit of browsing through the new books and magazines every Friday afternoon.