CHAPTER TENIAbout a week later, a tall, thin, immaculate gentleman, in a suit of neutral taupe, entered the offices of theEvening Chronicle. A stand-up collar slightly tip-tilted his chin. But his expression was a friendly, not a haughty one. His small roving gray eyes looked around with a humorous inquisitiveness, as if they wondered what their immaculate owner could possibly hope to find in such a sloppy, disorderly place.In due time, a slovenly office boy stopped pounding on a typewriter and showed the stranger to an inner office. Here Hutchins Burley penned those inimitable effusions on "the ethereal feminine" which gave the Saturday special half a million female and male readers. It was an army that ran theSaturday Evening Postbrigade a close second, and rendered Burley's professional position unassailable.The roving gray eyes saw the swollen bulk of Mr. Hutchins Burley, squatting like a giant toad behind a roll-top desk and pawing over a visiting card."Well, Mr. Pryor?" said the pillar of theEvening Chronicle, with no waste of civility. "What d'you want?""Frankly, I want Mr. Robert Lloyd's job.""How do you know it's vacant? Are you a friend of his?""Hardly that. The information just drifted my way.""You handed me that stuff at the Outlaws' Ball. Who the devil are you, anyway?"Whenever Burley spoke vehemently, he shoveled the words from the left side of his mouth, a process that contorted his face into the exact likeness of a cartoon by Briggs."You might be a spy," he added, putting a cigar in his mouth and scowling horribly at his visitor.The latter replied in a quiet and dignified but judiciously injured tone."Mr. Burley, you have my card. Go into my personal history all you like. But first, let me refer to the service I did you at the ball. It was a small matter—""Don't get puffed up about it then," growled Burley, with much less hostility, however."No fear," continued Mark Pryor, as terse as his host and much more urbane. "I mention it only because an ounce of action is worth a ton of talk. Or a cartload of stuffy introductions. The point is this. Having learned that you had discharged Mr. Lloyd—""Who says I discharged him?" Burley noisily cut in. "He discharged himself.""Oh, did he?""Yes, damn him. I wasn't good enough for him, I suppose. You know his kind, brains, fatted brains. But no guts! Sticks his nose up at everything and hangs out with a lot of super-highbrows—New Republic gas-bags.""The sort that cut a pie from the periphery to the center?""Yah! That's their lingo. Still, Lloyd's got a head on his shoulders. I'll say that for him. And I don't fire a man that's worth his salary. Why should I?""You believe in keeping your grudges out of your business?""That's me. I could have given him his walking papers for a hundred good reasons. But I didn't. And what thanks did I get? He left me in the lurch. That's what he did. Left me on his own hook at a damn critical time.""A case of bad conscience, perhaps.""You said it! He'd done me all the harm he could. He and Claude Fontaine who put him up to it."Burley enlarged on his two-fold grievance. First, Robert and Claude had circulated a malicious story about Harry Kelly (a professional bruiser) making a punching bag of him; this story had ruined his prestige among the Outlaws of Kips Bay. Then, they had freely slandered him in Cornelia Covert's inner circle, with the result that Cornelia's friend, Janet Barr, had conceived an insane and utterly baseless dislike of him.His story was full of evasions and suppressions. Thus he forgot to tell Mark Pryor that he had twice waylaid Janet on the street and had been coldly repulsed each time. It was clear that these repulses had added fuel to his hatred of Claude and Robert, the two men who found favor in her eyes. Against them, rather than against her, he vented his spleen. When he spoke of her, his diatribe degenerated into a whine."I know," said Pryor, laconically, cheering him up. "You have that 'nobody loves me,' feeling. Nastiest feeling in the world. We all get it once in a while. I find there's only one remedy for it, and that's to stop bullying people.""Bullying people!" shouted Burley, jumping up and glaring at his visitor. "Say that again, if you dare."Mr. Pryor smiled faintly and sat unmoved, save that his neck seemed to rise a very little out of his stand-up collar, as the eye-piece of a microscope rises out of the tube."I'm a plain man, Mr. Burley," he said, imperturbably. "And I speak plainly. If you don't like plain speaking, I'd better withdraw my application.""The hell you'd better!"Mr. Pryor got up, everything quiet about him except his eyes.Burley looked as if he were about to launch a thunderbolt. But the roving eyes of his visitor were now fixed upon him like points of steel."Sit down," said Burley, suddenly limp.Mr. Pryor sat down very quietly, without taking his eyes off Hutchins Burley, who sat down, too, almost as if mesmerized."Tell you what," he said, after a while. "I need a sort of confidential assistant. A man who can keep his eyes and ears on the jump, and his pen and tongue under lock and key. Get me?"He went on to tell Mr. Pryor that he was willing to try him out and that faithful service would meet with very big rewards and with increasingly confidential commissions. For the present, his newspaper duties were to be subordinated to the one task of keeping track of the Lorillard tenements."Trust me," said Mark Pryor.He did not think it necessary to explain that keeping track of the Lorillard tenements was precisely what he had been doing for purposes of his own."And glue an eye on that fellow Fontaine," added Burley."To get a line on the diamond smuggling?" asked Pryor, with the most casual air imaginable.Burley straightened up with a yell of suspicion."What in blazes are you talking about?" he said."Merely what you yourself talked about, my dear sir," said Pryor soothingly. "At the ball you called Mr. Fontaine a diamond smuggler. More than one person will remember that remark."Burley's suspicions were disarmed."Forget it, my friend, forget it," he said. "A man says a good many things under the influence of liquor that he has no call to say. I don't suppose the Fontaines are less on the square about their importations than the other big jewelers are. That's no business of mine or yours, however, is it?"He declared emphatically that his interest in Claude Fontaine's doings had a totally different basis. On three occasions Fontaine had come between him and a woman. He did not hesitate to name the ladies. One was Lydia Dyson, another was Cornelia Covert, the third was Janet Barr. He had said nothing about the first two. He was not a greedy man. Anyhow, according to the ethics of Kips Bay, Lorillard females were nobody's property. That was no blasted secret, was it?"But this Janet Barr's no Lorillard female," he said, bringing his fist down heavily on the desk. "Any fool can see that. And I'm man enough, to refuse to stand by while Fontaine dirties her good name.""You don't mean to say that he has—""He'll do it, all right. Or why did he pick the girl up, when he's just got engaged to Armstrong's daughter?""Armstrong, the financier?""Yes. And Dupont Armstrong won't stand for a man who isn't on the level with his girl. Just put that in your pipe and smoke it.""I know a safer place," said Mr. Pryor, gently tapping his head. "Where it won't go up in smoke."He rose and, after coming to a few necessary understandings with Burley, took his leave.As he walked rapidly along Broadway towards the subway, he felt that he had done a very good morning's work. He was satisfied that Hutchins Burley knew more about the diamond smuggling than he cared to admit. The puzzle was that, although Burley obviously connected Claude Fontaine with the smuggling operations, he was unwilling to give the connection away. What was the motive that restrained him from exposing a man he bitterly hated? Clearly, either a lack of proof, or some consideration of a more personal kind.Reminding himself of his maxim that two and two never make four except in vulgar mathematics, Mark Pryor left the subway at Thirty-fourth Street, the Kips Bay station nearest the Lorillard tenements. Then he went directly to his flat.IIIncoming or outgoing denizens made barely a ripple on the surface of Kips Bay. The district was used to a shifting population. Even the colonization of Sutton and Beekman Places by Pierian millionaires "cut no ice." Honest men and thieves, artists, criminals and Bohemians, idle paupers and rich idlers, all these floated in and floated out, but the net hodge podge was much the same. Bomb makers might come and gunmen might go, but Kips Bay went on forever.The Lorillard tenements, the hub of the district, had experienced their fair share of changes during the week of Mark Pryor's advent. Robert and Janet were among the newcomers. Robert, thrown on his own scant resources, had secured a nook in Kelly's flat, Number Thirteen, his berth there being the fruit of Cornelia's good offices. And Janet had come to live with Cornelia in flat Number Fifteen.This last event was at once followed by a break in Cornelia's partnership with Mazie Ross. The three small rooms and kitchenette were not large enough for more than two people. And pretty, slovenly Mazie, her early enthusiasm for Cornelia cooled, had lately spent more and more time on her own appearance and less and less on her companion's wants.Cornelia always got rid of a companion the moment a better one turned up. A "better one" usually meant one who could do more of Cornelia's housework, or could look after her creature comforts more diligently, or could give her more of that flattering attention of which she never had her fill. Whenever the time came to change partners, Cornelia would send the old one flying without the smallest compunction. Nor was she ever at a loss for a good excuse.Janet's first day in Number Fifteen was Mazie's last. When Mazie came home that night, "instead of poppies, willows waved o'er her couch."The crash came after supper, while Janet was out shopping with Harry Kelly, who had quickly become a steady visitor at his next-door neighbor's flat. As a pretext, Cornelia chose the matter of Mazie's easy friendship with Hutchins Burley, a friendship reported to have gone as far as was possible, since the recent ball.There was nothing new in the charge that Mazie practiced principles of varietism about which Cornelia simply theorized. The only novelty was that Cornelia now declared the charge to be a good excuse for parting company. Mazie thought it a poor excuse. On this difference of opinion there sprang up a tempestuous scene. Words flew high, and the checks that polite society imposes on candid criticism of one's friends went completely by the board.The climax was reached when Cornelia offered the opinion that if Mazie wanted to become a vulgar little copy of Camille, that was her affair; but flat Number Fifteen was not the place in which to practice the part. In vain did Mazie reply with an unexpurgated review of Cornelia's history. Cornelia was unmoved. And her languid, cadenced retorts floated serenely above Mazie's torrent of invective like a violin obligato above the crashing brasses.It did not take Mazie long to pack her most necessary articles into a bag and go. On her way out, she said, with a good imitation of Cornelia's sweetest tone:"Good bye, Cornelia. I'd like to stay long enough to tell your next dupe what a fraud you are. But what's the use? She won't thank me for it, as I suppose she has a crush on you, like I had once. Well, it'll do her good to learn by experience. Finding you out, my dear, is such a complete education."By the time Janet and Harry Kelly returned, all was quiet along the Potomac.CHAPTER ELEVENIFor the next few weeks, Janet lived excitedly in the glamor of the Lorillard tenements. She could not well have imagined a bigger difference than that between the complete orthodoxy of the Barrs of Brooklyn and the complete heterodoxy of the model tenementers of Kips Bay.Her impression of the new life was put into words for her by Lydia Dyson, the author of "Brothers and Sisters," (then in its twenty-fifth big printing). Lydia, whose tall, thin form and pale olive skin lost none of their spectacular qualities by the snake-like movements she affected, the huge jet earrings she wore, or the gold-tipped cigarettes she smoked, assured Janet, in a rich Kentucky drawl:"We obey only one custom here, and that is to disobey all customs; we hold only one belief, and that is to hold no beliefs."Janet was fully persuaded that the first part of this statement was true and that the second part was a vast improvement upon the Barr regime.In truth, she found the Lorillardian absence of formality, constraint and regulated behavior a decided relief after her long course of Calvinistic repression at home. And, active though she was by nature, she did not at first notice how the days slipped by with great ado, but with very little done.The Lorillard tenementers were not exactly lazy. They were merely idle. Like the idle rich and the idle poor they were ceaselessly occupied—in killing time.Cornelia was in the habit of getting up somewhere between nine and eleven. After breakfast, the two friends would set out to look for a job. The spirit in which they proceeded was the spirit in which young people go skylarking. Hunting for a job was an old pastime of Cornelia's. If she ever came up to a job's requirements, the job never came up to hers. Or if by chance it did, she discovered a bewildering array of reasons for not taking it, or for speedily leaving it, when taken.At noon, the day's duty was considered fully done. After lunch, there was another jaunt; this time to an art gallery, concert hall, theatre or movie. Free tickets from Cornelia's theatrical friends were reasonably plentiful, and when these failed, there were return calls to pay.Thus, Charlotte Beecher's studio was a favorite stopping place, as Janet soon discovered. Charlotte possessed a million dollars or more in her own right, and she had three or four studios in totally different parts of the city. She did her hardest work in her double Lorillard flat every morning; her evenings were spent warding off fortune-hunting suitors like Denman Page, who besieged her Fifth Avenue apartment; on certain afternoons she served an "intellectual tea" in a studio sumptuously fitted up in Washington Mews.Janet was always taken to the studiode luxein the Mews. Cornelia, invariably busy, would be sketching some new design of a hat, or pinning together a one-piece dress, whilst she luxuriated happily amidst the rich Chinese rugs and the soft silken cushions of Charlotte's show room. The serpent in this garden of Eden was the "little group of serious thinkers" (an element alien to Kips Bay) that met in the Mews by virtue of Charlotte's encouragement."These intellectuals!" Cornelia would say scornfully to Janet on the way home. "Did you ever hear such bumptious talk?""I find them rather amusing," Janet would perhaps reply."Araminta, what nonsense! They positively put the furniture on edge. But that's Charlotte all over. There's a nigger in every woodpile, and there's a jarring note in every one of Charlotte's rooms. My dear, it bores me cruelly."Still, Cornelia went on visiting the Mews, intellectuals, cruel boredom, and all. It puzzled Janet for a time. She had still to learn that a perfect Kipsite is prepared to suffer no end of martyrdom in the sacred cause of luxury.Every evening was like a new party to Janet, flat Number Fifteen being one of the chief rendezvous in the tenements. After supper, visitors of both sexes dropped in unannounced and uninvited, until by midnight, a dozen people, more or less, were sure to be occupying the whole flat.Generally, the guests split up into small groups and spent the time in play. Some played at dancing or at music, others at clever repartee or giddy flirting. To this play, the counterpoint was enthusiasm. A magnificent enthusiasm for self. In a rapturous torrent of words, each Kipsite painted a roseate future that led by startling steps to a supreme moment in which the world lay prostrate at the enthusiast's feet.It was a cosmopolitan gathering. All the arts and sciences and occupations, all the moral and immoral standards, and all the races and nationalities of New York were represented. A dancer from the Hindoo Kush, several would-be Fokines or Stravinskys, two or three imitation Oscar Wildes, Theodore Dreisers or Frank Harrises—these were sure to be there. Even the solid banker (or aspiring Pierpont Morgan), who kept a quiet flat and a lady in it, was an occasional visitor. No one was excluded who was piquant or picturesque.Cornelia's specially privileged guests were a scanty handful. Among the men were Claude Fontaine, Robert Lloyd, Denman Page, and Harry Kelly, the "Harlem Gorilla." Soon after Janet's coming, Mark Pryor, immaculate and unobtrusive, joined the ultimate circle and began mysteriously to appear and to disappear.Still fewer were the women admitted to the inner ring. Of these the chief were Lydia Dyson, the spectacular, and Charlotte Beecher, the industrious. The novelist came in silks, the heiress in calicos. Charlotte's cheap but natty working costume was looked upon among the Outlaws as an affectation. Her blouses and skirts gave Cornelia the horrors.So did her marked preference for Robert Lloyd.Janet had an idea that these evening visitors came chiefly to admire Cornelia or to be admired by her. She assumed that Cornelia was "the whole show." It was a pardonable assumption. Cornelia sat in a rocking chair in the central room and was feline, and languid, and observant, while the excitement eddied and swirled around her. To all appearances she held the reins of her party with the masterly skill of the Borax man who drives the celebrated twenty mule team.Robert would have it that Cornelia was neither the star nor the manager of the nightly performance in Number Fifteen. According to him, the only management she displayed was in the skill with which she focused attention upon herself. The cadenced laugh, the sugary stab, the artful question—these were not the subtle devices of a clever hostess; they were merely the centripetal pulls of an egomaniac against the centrifugal interests of her guests.Janet dismissed this explanation lightly and begged Robert not to analyze every joy until its very essence had been probed—and destroyed. She laughed at his attempt to convince her that these gay evenings of Cornelia's were a kind of renaissance. His theory was that the light of Cornelia's splendor had been getting dim of late, as it had got dim on several previous occasions. But the impact of a new partner against her, like the impact of an astral visitor against a dying sun, now as always gave her a new lease of brilliance.In short, Robert asserted that it was the replacement of Mazie by Janet which had caused a tremendous revival of interest in Cornelia's flat. Everybody in the inner ring of the Outlaws or in the outer ring of the tenements, everybody indeed, that had any shadow of a claim to an entree, had come trooping in to sun themselves in the restored glory of Number Fifteen.To most of Robert's remarks, Janet paid little attention. But she carefully treasured up one of them.This was that never before had Claude Fontaine been such a constant visitor.IIYet for a few days after the Outlaws' Ball, Claude had behaved as if his confession of love had never been made, or had merely been the expression of an impulse, for which he disclaimed responsibility. There had been no return to the intimacy that instantly abolishes all the formulas of mere politeness and all the prescriptions of mere etiquette; there had been no recurrence of that world-without-end moment at the ball or of that other moment in the limousine next day.At the ball he had treated her as he would have treated any respectable middle-class girl who might take his fancy. That is, he had stretched the conventions as far as an impressionable young woman will usually allow a dashing young man to stretch them, but not further.After she joined Cornelia, however, his attitude changed. He treated her with a certain wariness of manner by which he appeared to convey the following:"I took you to be a girl who strictly observed the moral customs established and honored in Brooklyn, but long fallen into disuse in certain parts of Manhattan, and nowhere less respected than in Kips Bay. It amused me to tempt you to violate these customs, especially as I had little hope of meeting with success. But now that you have become a Lorillard girl, what spice is there in tempting you? Either you never were the girl I took you for; or, at any rate, you soon won't be."At all events I shall be on my guard. You are the first girl to work upon me so mightily with a single glance. But you are not the first girl who has looked as innocent as a dove and acted as subtly as a serpent. Be warned! Neither your innocent subtlety nor subtle innocence can make me forget that a Claude Fontaine is in the habit of forming but one sort of friendship with a girl in the Lorillard tenements."Janet, always very sensitive to atmosphere, got the effect of this train of thought, and in consequence kept Claude at as great a distance as her naturally cordial nature would let her.In one of the evening gatherings at Cornelia's the talk turned on marriage, and it came out that Janet had adopted Cornelia's views on the wickedness of marriage in its modern form. Claude, with the common failing of lovers, promptly referred her action to himself.Was this Janet's way of announcing that she meant to make no greater demands on a rich man than any other girl in the Lorillard environment? At first, it seemed so to Claude, and he felt relieved. But, on second thoughts, another question occurred to him. Might not Janet's conversion to Cornelia's beliefs in free love be a mere blind? A pretended dislike of wedlock was a recognized bait for landing a man at the altar. Was her conversion of this type or was it of the franker type of Mazie Ross, who asked all that was due to a Lorillard tenement girl but asked no more?On the whole, it seemed fairly safe to treat Janet on the Mazie Ross plane, and this he proceeded to do.Mazie, by the way, had returned as a visitor to Number Fifteen within a week of her spectacular exit. Her doll-like face had recovered its pretty smile and her baby blue eyes gave no clue to whether she was seeking vengeance or merely currying favor again. No one asked or cared, hatred, like love, being a very fluctuating stock in the model tenements.Janet had not failed to notice that Claude made little difference between his manner to her and his manner to Mazie. She did not like it, but she had to wait some time for the chance of showing how much she scorned his judgment.IIIThe opportunity came at one of Cornelia's gayest parties given at the end of Janet's second week in Kips Bay. It was really a sort of "coming out" party for Janet. All the Outlaws, both of the inner and the outer ring turned out to hail the new favorite. Even Mark Pryor put in an appearance and actually remained on deck until the end, perhaps because the trio of Cornelia's friends who provided the music played Lehar, Straus, and more recent dance tunes without the customary sentimental whine.Contemptuous of the fitness of things, Claude did his best to monopolize Janet. When the gayety was at its highest and the music at its most intoxicating, he danced her into a room which, for the moment, proved to be nearly but not quite empty.Pushed out of the way against a corner stood a screen. Behind this he whirled her, and then swiftly took her in his arms and kissed her passionately. As swiftly, she pushed him away with an expression of extreme distaste."I don't like my friends to imitate Hutchins Burley," she said, her voice quiet and cool, her gray eyes full of life and scorn.The others in the room laughed in mockery or applause. For an instant, Claude's all-conquering look was replaced by a crestfallen one. But he quickly regained his poise and spirits."Just a kiss to try," he said jauntily, as he attempted to recapture her arm."It's much too trying for gentle Janet," blithely chirped Mazie, who had danced into the room and taken in the situation, as Janet again turned away from Claude.AS a matter of fact, it was Janet's sense of propriety in public that was offended more than anything else. As for Claude, he was only less mortified by the affront to his vanity than by the haunting fear that Janet's rebuff came from genuine dislike.No girl had ever given the brilliant, impetuous Claude Fontaine a glance of undisguised repugnance.Janet spent the rest of the evening chiefly in conversation with Robert Lloyd and Mark Pryor. Meanwhile, Claude affected a complete indifference to her actions. He threw himself into the party with a mad abandon, and whipped up the conviviality with a riotous, headstrong wildness until everybody voted it the merriest evening in years. Amongst the other sex, he exploited to the utmost his patrician graces and masculine daring, and was so much the center of the occasion that the party might have been his rather than Janet's.The women thought him magnificent, graceful, cruel—in a word, irresistible; the men laughed at his impudence, and envied or admired his readiness, effrontery and ease.And yet, as he showed his fine points triumphantly now to this adoring girl and now to that, his voice vibrated towards Janet.Janet took it all in, and continued talking to Robert with undisturbed satisfaction. She saw Claude pass recklessly from one favorite to another, and guessed easily that none of these was his real aim.When the party broke up, Claude induced Janet to listen to him alone for a moment. He was suddenly all contrition. To his whispered plea for forgiveness, she said, in a not unkindly tone:"Forgiveness for what? For advertising your emotions?""For the kiss," he said, his voice full of sensuous charm. And he added, on a more audacious note: "I wish I could take it back.""Oh, do you? You'd better begin with the publicity.""Please forgive the kissandthe publicity, Janet.""I'll forgive the second when I forget the first," she replied, much more gaily than she intended, thus proving that Claude was not the only one in the grip of a resistless passion.Claude went home, satisfied that his daring had once again enabled him to snatch victory out of the arms of defeat.CHAPTER TWELVEIAnd so it had. None the less, the experience had taught Claude a lesson which, for once, he took to heart. He never again supposed that Janet's friendship was to be had on the same terms as Mazie's or even Cornelia's.True, he remained in the dark as to what precisely her idea of self-respect was. Conflicting and irreconcilable inferences were the only ones he could draw from the conduct of a girl who lived in the Lorillard tenements, moved in the Outlaws' circle, professed to be hostile to marriage, yet stood on her dignity withal, in quite a traditional womanly way.But Claude was not the man to waste time on psychological conundrums. Besides, he was too happy to be critical. He was back in the good graces of Janet, or rather, as he soon paraphrased the case, she was back in his. He flattered himself that he was the dominant influence over a girl who was a piquant, if puzzling, amalgam of Brooklyn and Bohemia.In the next two weeks, his position as Janet's particular friend was established beyond dispute. Few afternoons passed in which his motor car did not drive up to the Lorillard and whirl her away to a place of gayety or recreation. The chief rival claimant upon her time was Robert Lloyd. But as Claude, in point of social advantages and personal graces, far outdistanced him, this rivalry was not taken seriously by any of the three persons concerned, least of all by Claude.One day, to Cornelia's astonishment, Janet announced that she had planned to spend the afternoon, not with Claude, but with Robert. She made the announcement from a tuffet on which she sat soberly, while reading a book by Mrs. Beatrice Webb."Is this your pensive day?" asked Cornelia, ironically."Yes," replied Janet. "Robert complains that I'm neglecting him, and consequently my education. I think I ought to give him a chance to prove both assertions. So I've asked him to come here this afternoon. I can't spend all my days in sky-larking, can I?""My dear, 'youth's a stuff will not endure.' If you choose Mrs. Sidney Webb and Robert Lloyd rather than Claude Fontaine, the choice is your own. Of course, Robert is very entertaining. He pledges you with facts and figures. But when I was a rosebud like you, Araminta, I preferred a man who drank to me only with his eyes.""Cornelia, I adore being made love to; yet I get horribly tired of it—even of Claude's love making—when it's kept up too long. And I hate facts and figures; yet Robert's never bore me.""What a morbid symptom, my dear!""Oh, don't say that. I feel sure it's quite a natural condition, in my case. But perhaps there's a quality left out of me, a quality that other women possess."Janet was clearly eager to carry on her self-analysis, but Cornelia gave no sign of sharing this eagerness.Cornelia, in fact, was far from pleased. Her unconscious game was to keep Robert revolving in an orbit around herself. He was such an excellent drawing card! For had he not the rare power of raising the value of any object or person he admired? Not that people ever credited him with unusual discernment or insight. Yet the fact remained that Robert had only to praise a human being or a work of art hitherto undervalued or overlooked, and presto, the article or the person instantly became subject to an urgent popular demand. This was one of the reasons why Cornelia (who felt that she had been handsome enough in surrendering Claude without a murmur) did not wish Robert as well to gravitate from her stellar system to Janet's.But, seeing no way of cancelling Robert's visit, she determined not to be a spectator of it."I must run in next door, Janet," she said, "and ask the Gorilla to do an errand for me."She left, omitting her customary lyrical phrases of affection. Janet did not suspect the jealousy behind this omission. But she was undeniably disappointed because Cornelia had not encouraged her to discuss her friendships with Claude and Robert about whom her heart and her thoughts were brimful.Thus quickly did Cornelia damp down the fire of intimacy by treating the exchange of self-revelation as a strictly one-sided transaction. She had (so it struck Janet) a very low opinion of all confidences—other than her own.IIWhen the bell rang, Janet opened the door wondering why Robert had come an hour before the appointed time.But it was Claude who entered! He came in, like the god of the glorious spring without, in his gayest, most engaging mood."What luck, to find you in!" he cried. "Janet, I've come in an open car on the chance of taking you for a spin to Mineola to see the start of the great Cross-Continental airplane race.""Oh, Claude, how nice of you. But—I'm afraid I can't go.""Why not?""Well—you see—I've promised to go out with Robert this afternoon."His face clouded."And you never told me!" escaped from him."You are not my diarist," she said, faintly ironical."Please forgive me, Janet," he said, dropping his possessive tone, as he reminded himself how touchy she was about her independence. "But I'm disappointed, bitterly disappointed. I planned the excursion as a surprise for you. And how I've counted on it!""Not more than I long to go, Claude. But what can I do?"He took her hands in his, and said eagerly:"Mustyou keep the engagement? Can't you think of some excuse? Where on earth was he going to take you to?""To the Japanese Industrial Exhibition at the Grand Central Palace."He made a contemptuous grimace."A stuffy exhibition!" he exclaimed. "Good Heavens, Janet, why hesitate to change your plans? It isn't as if Robert wanted you for himself, as I do. He'll understand."Janet wondered whether Claude would understand if she confessed that she was actually more interested in the Japanese Exhibition than in the cross-continent air race. But though she kept silent on this point, because she really wanted greatly to go with Claude, she was rather troubled. It was not easy for her to gratify a private desire at the expense of a social obligation."I don't like to hurt Robert's feelings," she said, turning away in her indecision."Oh, very well, if you don't wish to come with me!"He flung himself sulkily into a chair.Janet was astonished at his complete change of mood. She might have felt hurt, had she not had a woman's instinctive weakness for spoiling the man she was fond of.She sat down irresolutely, and reflected that this would be the second time she had broken an engagement with Robert."It's idiotic," he said, rising, with a sense of deep injury. "Here is the most sensational race in a century, on a perfectly glorious day. And I'm mad to be with you.""Perhaps Robert is, too," she said, a merry light dancing in her eyes."Of course, he's no fool. He'd rather be with a wonderful girl than an ordinary one. But what he wants more even than a wonderful girl is a chopping-block, any chopping-block, for his sociological theories. Why on earth did you leave your home, if all you crave is more instruction, and if the only freedom you want is the freedom to stand on more ceremony than before?""That has nothing to do with the matter, Claude," said Janet, refusing to ignore the truth simply because it was disagreeable. "Robert may not be offended at finding me away, but he is sure to be offended at finding me rude.""It seems to me that you are far more concerned with Robert's feelings than with mine," said Claude, changing to a tone of melancholy reproach."But I really haven't a good excuse, Claude," she said, troubled, but still indecisive."I know girls who wouldn't take two minutes to find an excellent one," he said, with a return of his superior authoritative air.Janet's temptation was great; greater yet when Claude, in his most handsome and daring manner, drew her out of the chair and put an arm around her waist."It's an occasion in a million, Janet. I've set my heart on this ride with you. What does it matter what Robert may think, or what anyone may think, as long as we two want so much to be together? You must come. I shall believe you don't care a straw for me, if you don't."His flawless form and vibrant voice annihilated argument. With a happy heart but a guilty conscience, Janet dismissed her scruples.On the way out, she stopped in at Number Thirteen to beg Cornelia to smooth matters over with Robert.Cornelia, serene and all smiles again, promised to do her best.IIIRobert came home soon after and, getting no response from Number Fifteen, went to his own room in Kelly's suite next door.He got all the news from Cornelia, who politely tried not to gloat over his disappointment. She professed to see no reason for finding fault with Janet's easy submission to the force of an irresistible attraction.As it was fairly plain that Robert would have preferred to be alone, Cornelia perversely lost no time in proposing that he carry out his original intention of visiting the Japanese Industrial Exhibition, she, of course, to take Janet's place as his companion.She had another reason for inviting herself out with Robert. This reason was the Harlem Gorilla. He, though almost superstitiously devoted to her, sometimes had to be "managed," in accordance with Cornelia's view that love makes the most constant of men uncertain, coy, and hard to please. Luckily, the treatment that Harry Kelly's case required was not a subtle one, and so it was Cornelia's practice to alternate a little encouraging discouragement, with a little discouraging encouragement. On this occasion, by accompanying Robert who didn't want her, and deserting Kelly who wanted her very much, she neatly killed two birds with the same stone.On the way to the exhibition, Robert gave Cornelia an account of his latest occupation. He had been made organizing secretary of a body called the League of Guildsmen. Was this a fanciful name for another set of Outlaws? No, the Guildsmen were servers of the community, the Outlaws were spongers on it."You have golden opinions of us," said Cornelia, theatrically. "I marvel that you soil your garments by staying in our midst.""It's nothing to marvel at, Cornelia. I had to learn what Kips Bay and its slum population were at first hand before I could desire in earnest to destroy them, root and branch. Familiarity, which sometimes breeds contempt, often breeds homicidal mania. Do you recollect how Caesar spent a short vacation among a band of desperate pirates and how the experience filled him with a conviction that it was his duty to exterminate them? Well, I am filled with the same conviction about Kips Bay.""What a passion you have for reforming everybody and everything, Cato! I am sure it is a very noble passion, though it does include poor me in its program of extermination. Still, I wonder whether reform, like charity, oughtn't to begin at home?""I used to think so," replied Robert, unmoved by her sarcasm. "In my schooldays, my elders obliged me to hack my way through obsolete French tragedies or the differential calculus instead of allowing me to gain a working knowledge of current English plays or of modern political economy. And when I made a fearful hash of their instruction, they voted me a miserable failure. Whereupon, I determined to reform myself in order that I might reform the world. I am wiser now. I know that I must reform the world before I can hope to reform myself.""Cato, you are a perfectly gorgeous mixture of building air castles and of seeing things upside down! One can never tell whether your head is in the clouds or on the ground."Robert indulgently proceeded to say that the Guildsmen were young people of like sentiments with his own. In a general way, their aim was to advance the idea that the producers and servers of society, being the rightful possessors of the earth, must eliminate the profiteers and the parasites who have usurped possession."If that is your aim, Robert, I predict that your league and your secretaryship will have a short life and a merry one."Robert laughed and admitted that he did not expect a long tenure of office. The Guild plan was a European idea for which America was by no means ripe."I fancy we are as progressive in industrial matters as the Europeans are," said Cornelia, on her mettle."Oh, more so," replied Robert, drily. "Our giant industries lead the world in maximizing the production of things of a mediocre quality and the creation of human life of a contemptible quality. Yes, in crude capacity, we are ahead of our European competitors. But in political capacity, we still lag far behind. Hence the difficulty of transplanting to our soil a high-class social policy like that of the Guildsmen.""But when this Guild plan dies a natural death, what forlorn hope will you champion next?""I fear there'll be nothing left but to throw myself on the mercy of a rich uncle.""What, an uncle in a fairy tale?""No, an uncle in California, a real live one."Cornelia evinced little more than a languid interest in Robert's information. Fabulously rich relatives—who were cast for the parts ofDeus ex machina, but who never materialized in flesh or cash—made a golden splash in the 'scutcheon of too many veteran Lorillard inhabitants. She preferred a conversation dealing with more tangible personages. Truth to tell, she rather hoped that Robert would try to undo the painful impression he had made on her by his recent criticism of her affair with Percival Houghton.All the greater was her chagrin when he brought the talk around to the subject of Janet.
CHAPTER TEN
I
About a week later, a tall, thin, immaculate gentleman, in a suit of neutral taupe, entered the offices of theEvening Chronicle. A stand-up collar slightly tip-tilted his chin. But his expression was a friendly, not a haughty one. His small roving gray eyes looked around with a humorous inquisitiveness, as if they wondered what their immaculate owner could possibly hope to find in such a sloppy, disorderly place.
In due time, a slovenly office boy stopped pounding on a typewriter and showed the stranger to an inner office. Here Hutchins Burley penned those inimitable effusions on "the ethereal feminine" which gave the Saturday special half a million female and male readers. It was an army that ran theSaturday Evening Postbrigade a close second, and rendered Burley's professional position unassailable.
The roving gray eyes saw the swollen bulk of Mr. Hutchins Burley, squatting like a giant toad behind a roll-top desk and pawing over a visiting card.
"Well, Mr. Pryor?" said the pillar of theEvening Chronicle, with no waste of civility. "What d'you want?"
"Frankly, I want Mr. Robert Lloyd's job."
"How do you know it's vacant? Are you a friend of his?"
"Hardly that. The information just drifted my way."
"You handed me that stuff at the Outlaws' Ball. Who the devil are you, anyway?"
Whenever Burley spoke vehemently, he shoveled the words from the left side of his mouth, a process that contorted his face into the exact likeness of a cartoon by Briggs.
"You might be a spy," he added, putting a cigar in his mouth and scowling horribly at his visitor.
The latter replied in a quiet and dignified but judiciously injured tone.
"Mr. Burley, you have my card. Go into my personal history all you like. But first, let me refer to the service I did you at the ball. It was a small matter—"
"Don't get puffed up about it then," growled Burley, with much less hostility, however.
"No fear," continued Mark Pryor, as terse as his host and much more urbane. "I mention it only because an ounce of action is worth a ton of talk. Or a cartload of stuffy introductions. The point is this. Having learned that you had discharged Mr. Lloyd—"
"Who says I discharged him?" Burley noisily cut in. "He discharged himself."
"Oh, did he?"
"Yes, damn him. I wasn't good enough for him, I suppose. You know his kind, brains, fatted brains. But no guts! Sticks his nose up at everything and hangs out with a lot of super-highbrows—New Republic gas-bags."
"The sort that cut a pie from the periphery to the center?"
"Yah! That's their lingo. Still, Lloyd's got a head on his shoulders. I'll say that for him. And I don't fire a man that's worth his salary. Why should I?"
"You believe in keeping your grudges out of your business?"
"That's me. I could have given him his walking papers for a hundred good reasons. But I didn't. And what thanks did I get? He left me in the lurch. That's what he did. Left me on his own hook at a damn critical time."
"A case of bad conscience, perhaps."
"You said it! He'd done me all the harm he could. He and Claude Fontaine who put him up to it."
Burley enlarged on his two-fold grievance. First, Robert and Claude had circulated a malicious story about Harry Kelly (a professional bruiser) making a punching bag of him; this story had ruined his prestige among the Outlaws of Kips Bay. Then, they had freely slandered him in Cornelia Covert's inner circle, with the result that Cornelia's friend, Janet Barr, had conceived an insane and utterly baseless dislike of him.
His story was full of evasions and suppressions. Thus he forgot to tell Mark Pryor that he had twice waylaid Janet on the street and had been coldly repulsed each time. It was clear that these repulses had added fuel to his hatred of Claude and Robert, the two men who found favor in her eyes. Against them, rather than against her, he vented his spleen. When he spoke of her, his diatribe degenerated into a whine.
"I know," said Pryor, laconically, cheering him up. "You have that 'nobody loves me,' feeling. Nastiest feeling in the world. We all get it once in a while. I find there's only one remedy for it, and that's to stop bullying people."
"Bullying people!" shouted Burley, jumping up and glaring at his visitor. "Say that again, if you dare."
Mr. Pryor smiled faintly and sat unmoved, save that his neck seemed to rise a very little out of his stand-up collar, as the eye-piece of a microscope rises out of the tube.
"I'm a plain man, Mr. Burley," he said, imperturbably. "And I speak plainly. If you don't like plain speaking, I'd better withdraw my application."
"The hell you'd better!"
Mr. Pryor got up, everything quiet about him except his eyes.
Burley looked as if he were about to launch a thunderbolt. But the roving eyes of his visitor were now fixed upon him like points of steel.
"Sit down," said Burley, suddenly limp.
Mr. Pryor sat down very quietly, without taking his eyes off Hutchins Burley, who sat down, too, almost as if mesmerized.
"Tell you what," he said, after a while. "I need a sort of confidential assistant. A man who can keep his eyes and ears on the jump, and his pen and tongue under lock and key. Get me?"
He went on to tell Mr. Pryor that he was willing to try him out and that faithful service would meet with very big rewards and with increasingly confidential commissions. For the present, his newspaper duties were to be subordinated to the one task of keeping track of the Lorillard tenements.
"Trust me," said Mark Pryor.
He did not think it necessary to explain that keeping track of the Lorillard tenements was precisely what he had been doing for purposes of his own.
"And glue an eye on that fellow Fontaine," added Burley.
"To get a line on the diamond smuggling?" asked Pryor, with the most casual air imaginable.
Burley straightened up with a yell of suspicion.
"What in blazes are you talking about?" he said.
"Merely what you yourself talked about, my dear sir," said Pryor soothingly. "At the ball you called Mr. Fontaine a diamond smuggler. More than one person will remember that remark."
Burley's suspicions were disarmed.
"Forget it, my friend, forget it," he said. "A man says a good many things under the influence of liquor that he has no call to say. I don't suppose the Fontaines are less on the square about their importations than the other big jewelers are. That's no business of mine or yours, however, is it?"
He declared emphatically that his interest in Claude Fontaine's doings had a totally different basis. On three occasions Fontaine had come between him and a woman. He did not hesitate to name the ladies. One was Lydia Dyson, another was Cornelia Covert, the third was Janet Barr. He had said nothing about the first two. He was not a greedy man. Anyhow, according to the ethics of Kips Bay, Lorillard females were nobody's property. That was no blasted secret, was it?
"But this Janet Barr's no Lorillard female," he said, bringing his fist down heavily on the desk. "Any fool can see that. And I'm man enough, to refuse to stand by while Fontaine dirties her good name."
"You don't mean to say that he has—"
"He'll do it, all right. Or why did he pick the girl up, when he's just got engaged to Armstrong's daughter?"
"Armstrong, the financier?"
"Yes. And Dupont Armstrong won't stand for a man who isn't on the level with his girl. Just put that in your pipe and smoke it."
"I know a safer place," said Mr. Pryor, gently tapping his head. "Where it won't go up in smoke."
He rose and, after coming to a few necessary understandings with Burley, took his leave.
As he walked rapidly along Broadway towards the subway, he felt that he had done a very good morning's work. He was satisfied that Hutchins Burley knew more about the diamond smuggling than he cared to admit. The puzzle was that, although Burley obviously connected Claude Fontaine with the smuggling operations, he was unwilling to give the connection away. What was the motive that restrained him from exposing a man he bitterly hated? Clearly, either a lack of proof, or some consideration of a more personal kind.
Reminding himself of his maxim that two and two never make four except in vulgar mathematics, Mark Pryor left the subway at Thirty-fourth Street, the Kips Bay station nearest the Lorillard tenements. Then he went directly to his flat.
II
Incoming or outgoing denizens made barely a ripple on the surface of Kips Bay. The district was used to a shifting population. Even the colonization of Sutton and Beekman Places by Pierian millionaires "cut no ice." Honest men and thieves, artists, criminals and Bohemians, idle paupers and rich idlers, all these floated in and floated out, but the net hodge podge was much the same. Bomb makers might come and gunmen might go, but Kips Bay went on forever.
The Lorillard tenements, the hub of the district, had experienced their fair share of changes during the week of Mark Pryor's advent. Robert and Janet were among the newcomers. Robert, thrown on his own scant resources, had secured a nook in Kelly's flat, Number Thirteen, his berth there being the fruit of Cornelia's good offices. And Janet had come to live with Cornelia in flat Number Fifteen.
This last event was at once followed by a break in Cornelia's partnership with Mazie Ross. The three small rooms and kitchenette were not large enough for more than two people. And pretty, slovenly Mazie, her early enthusiasm for Cornelia cooled, had lately spent more and more time on her own appearance and less and less on her companion's wants.
Cornelia always got rid of a companion the moment a better one turned up. A "better one" usually meant one who could do more of Cornelia's housework, or could look after her creature comforts more diligently, or could give her more of that flattering attention of which she never had her fill. Whenever the time came to change partners, Cornelia would send the old one flying without the smallest compunction. Nor was she ever at a loss for a good excuse.
Janet's first day in Number Fifteen was Mazie's last. When Mazie came home that night, "instead of poppies, willows waved o'er her couch."
The crash came after supper, while Janet was out shopping with Harry Kelly, who had quickly become a steady visitor at his next-door neighbor's flat. As a pretext, Cornelia chose the matter of Mazie's easy friendship with Hutchins Burley, a friendship reported to have gone as far as was possible, since the recent ball.
There was nothing new in the charge that Mazie practiced principles of varietism about which Cornelia simply theorized. The only novelty was that Cornelia now declared the charge to be a good excuse for parting company. Mazie thought it a poor excuse. On this difference of opinion there sprang up a tempestuous scene. Words flew high, and the checks that polite society imposes on candid criticism of one's friends went completely by the board.
The climax was reached when Cornelia offered the opinion that if Mazie wanted to become a vulgar little copy of Camille, that was her affair; but flat Number Fifteen was not the place in which to practice the part. In vain did Mazie reply with an unexpurgated review of Cornelia's history. Cornelia was unmoved. And her languid, cadenced retorts floated serenely above Mazie's torrent of invective like a violin obligato above the crashing brasses.
It did not take Mazie long to pack her most necessary articles into a bag and go. On her way out, she said, with a good imitation of Cornelia's sweetest tone:
"Good bye, Cornelia. I'd like to stay long enough to tell your next dupe what a fraud you are. But what's the use? She won't thank me for it, as I suppose she has a crush on you, like I had once. Well, it'll do her good to learn by experience. Finding you out, my dear, is such a complete education."
By the time Janet and Harry Kelly returned, all was quiet along the Potomac.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I
For the next few weeks, Janet lived excitedly in the glamor of the Lorillard tenements. She could not well have imagined a bigger difference than that between the complete orthodoxy of the Barrs of Brooklyn and the complete heterodoxy of the model tenementers of Kips Bay.
Her impression of the new life was put into words for her by Lydia Dyson, the author of "Brothers and Sisters," (then in its twenty-fifth big printing). Lydia, whose tall, thin form and pale olive skin lost none of their spectacular qualities by the snake-like movements she affected, the huge jet earrings she wore, or the gold-tipped cigarettes she smoked, assured Janet, in a rich Kentucky drawl:
"We obey only one custom here, and that is to disobey all customs; we hold only one belief, and that is to hold no beliefs."
Janet was fully persuaded that the first part of this statement was true and that the second part was a vast improvement upon the Barr regime.
In truth, she found the Lorillardian absence of formality, constraint and regulated behavior a decided relief after her long course of Calvinistic repression at home. And, active though she was by nature, she did not at first notice how the days slipped by with great ado, but with very little done.
The Lorillard tenementers were not exactly lazy. They were merely idle. Like the idle rich and the idle poor they were ceaselessly occupied—in killing time.
Cornelia was in the habit of getting up somewhere between nine and eleven. After breakfast, the two friends would set out to look for a job. The spirit in which they proceeded was the spirit in which young people go skylarking. Hunting for a job was an old pastime of Cornelia's. If she ever came up to a job's requirements, the job never came up to hers. Or if by chance it did, she discovered a bewildering array of reasons for not taking it, or for speedily leaving it, when taken.
At noon, the day's duty was considered fully done. After lunch, there was another jaunt; this time to an art gallery, concert hall, theatre or movie. Free tickets from Cornelia's theatrical friends were reasonably plentiful, and when these failed, there were return calls to pay.
Thus, Charlotte Beecher's studio was a favorite stopping place, as Janet soon discovered. Charlotte possessed a million dollars or more in her own right, and she had three or four studios in totally different parts of the city. She did her hardest work in her double Lorillard flat every morning; her evenings were spent warding off fortune-hunting suitors like Denman Page, who besieged her Fifth Avenue apartment; on certain afternoons she served an "intellectual tea" in a studio sumptuously fitted up in Washington Mews.
Janet was always taken to the studiode luxein the Mews. Cornelia, invariably busy, would be sketching some new design of a hat, or pinning together a one-piece dress, whilst she luxuriated happily amidst the rich Chinese rugs and the soft silken cushions of Charlotte's show room. The serpent in this garden of Eden was the "little group of serious thinkers" (an element alien to Kips Bay) that met in the Mews by virtue of Charlotte's encouragement.
"These intellectuals!" Cornelia would say scornfully to Janet on the way home. "Did you ever hear such bumptious talk?"
"I find them rather amusing," Janet would perhaps reply.
"Araminta, what nonsense! They positively put the furniture on edge. But that's Charlotte all over. There's a nigger in every woodpile, and there's a jarring note in every one of Charlotte's rooms. My dear, it bores me cruelly."
Still, Cornelia went on visiting the Mews, intellectuals, cruel boredom, and all. It puzzled Janet for a time. She had still to learn that a perfect Kipsite is prepared to suffer no end of martyrdom in the sacred cause of luxury.
Every evening was like a new party to Janet, flat Number Fifteen being one of the chief rendezvous in the tenements. After supper, visitors of both sexes dropped in unannounced and uninvited, until by midnight, a dozen people, more or less, were sure to be occupying the whole flat.
Generally, the guests split up into small groups and spent the time in play. Some played at dancing or at music, others at clever repartee or giddy flirting. To this play, the counterpoint was enthusiasm. A magnificent enthusiasm for self. In a rapturous torrent of words, each Kipsite painted a roseate future that led by startling steps to a supreme moment in which the world lay prostrate at the enthusiast's feet.
It was a cosmopolitan gathering. All the arts and sciences and occupations, all the moral and immoral standards, and all the races and nationalities of New York were represented. A dancer from the Hindoo Kush, several would-be Fokines or Stravinskys, two or three imitation Oscar Wildes, Theodore Dreisers or Frank Harrises—these were sure to be there. Even the solid banker (or aspiring Pierpont Morgan), who kept a quiet flat and a lady in it, was an occasional visitor. No one was excluded who was piquant or picturesque.
Cornelia's specially privileged guests were a scanty handful. Among the men were Claude Fontaine, Robert Lloyd, Denman Page, and Harry Kelly, the "Harlem Gorilla." Soon after Janet's coming, Mark Pryor, immaculate and unobtrusive, joined the ultimate circle and began mysteriously to appear and to disappear.
Still fewer were the women admitted to the inner ring. Of these the chief were Lydia Dyson, the spectacular, and Charlotte Beecher, the industrious. The novelist came in silks, the heiress in calicos. Charlotte's cheap but natty working costume was looked upon among the Outlaws as an affectation. Her blouses and skirts gave Cornelia the horrors.
So did her marked preference for Robert Lloyd.
Janet had an idea that these evening visitors came chiefly to admire Cornelia or to be admired by her. She assumed that Cornelia was "the whole show." It was a pardonable assumption. Cornelia sat in a rocking chair in the central room and was feline, and languid, and observant, while the excitement eddied and swirled around her. To all appearances she held the reins of her party with the masterly skill of the Borax man who drives the celebrated twenty mule team.
Robert would have it that Cornelia was neither the star nor the manager of the nightly performance in Number Fifteen. According to him, the only management she displayed was in the skill with which she focused attention upon herself. The cadenced laugh, the sugary stab, the artful question—these were not the subtle devices of a clever hostess; they were merely the centripetal pulls of an egomaniac against the centrifugal interests of her guests.
Janet dismissed this explanation lightly and begged Robert not to analyze every joy until its very essence had been probed—and destroyed. She laughed at his attempt to convince her that these gay evenings of Cornelia's were a kind of renaissance. His theory was that the light of Cornelia's splendor had been getting dim of late, as it had got dim on several previous occasions. But the impact of a new partner against her, like the impact of an astral visitor against a dying sun, now as always gave her a new lease of brilliance.
In short, Robert asserted that it was the replacement of Mazie by Janet which had caused a tremendous revival of interest in Cornelia's flat. Everybody in the inner ring of the Outlaws or in the outer ring of the tenements, everybody indeed, that had any shadow of a claim to an entree, had come trooping in to sun themselves in the restored glory of Number Fifteen.
To most of Robert's remarks, Janet paid little attention. But she carefully treasured up one of them.
This was that never before had Claude Fontaine been such a constant visitor.
II
Yet for a few days after the Outlaws' Ball, Claude had behaved as if his confession of love had never been made, or had merely been the expression of an impulse, for which he disclaimed responsibility. There had been no return to the intimacy that instantly abolishes all the formulas of mere politeness and all the prescriptions of mere etiquette; there had been no recurrence of that world-without-end moment at the ball or of that other moment in the limousine next day.
At the ball he had treated her as he would have treated any respectable middle-class girl who might take his fancy. That is, he had stretched the conventions as far as an impressionable young woman will usually allow a dashing young man to stretch them, but not further.
After she joined Cornelia, however, his attitude changed. He treated her with a certain wariness of manner by which he appeared to convey the following:
"I took you to be a girl who strictly observed the moral customs established and honored in Brooklyn, but long fallen into disuse in certain parts of Manhattan, and nowhere less respected than in Kips Bay. It amused me to tempt you to violate these customs, especially as I had little hope of meeting with success. But now that you have become a Lorillard girl, what spice is there in tempting you? Either you never were the girl I took you for; or, at any rate, you soon won't be.
"At all events I shall be on my guard. You are the first girl to work upon me so mightily with a single glance. But you are not the first girl who has looked as innocent as a dove and acted as subtly as a serpent. Be warned! Neither your innocent subtlety nor subtle innocence can make me forget that a Claude Fontaine is in the habit of forming but one sort of friendship with a girl in the Lorillard tenements."
Janet, always very sensitive to atmosphere, got the effect of this train of thought, and in consequence kept Claude at as great a distance as her naturally cordial nature would let her.
In one of the evening gatherings at Cornelia's the talk turned on marriage, and it came out that Janet had adopted Cornelia's views on the wickedness of marriage in its modern form. Claude, with the common failing of lovers, promptly referred her action to himself.
Was this Janet's way of announcing that she meant to make no greater demands on a rich man than any other girl in the Lorillard environment? At first, it seemed so to Claude, and he felt relieved. But, on second thoughts, another question occurred to him. Might not Janet's conversion to Cornelia's beliefs in free love be a mere blind? A pretended dislike of wedlock was a recognized bait for landing a man at the altar. Was her conversion of this type or was it of the franker type of Mazie Ross, who asked all that was due to a Lorillard tenement girl but asked no more?
On the whole, it seemed fairly safe to treat Janet on the Mazie Ross plane, and this he proceeded to do.
Mazie, by the way, had returned as a visitor to Number Fifteen within a week of her spectacular exit. Her doll-like face had recovered its pretty smile and her baby blue eyes gave no clue to whether she was seeking vengeance or merely currying favor again. No one asked or cared, hatred, like love, being a very fluctuating stock in the model tenements.
Janet had not failed to notice that Claude made little difference between his manner to her and his manner to Mazie. She did not like it, but she had to wait some time for the chance of showing how much she scorned his judgment.
III
The opportunity came at one of Cornelia's gayest parties given at the end of Janet's second week in Kips Bay. It was really a sort of "coming out" party for Janet. All the Outlaws, both of the inner and the outer ring turned out to hail the new favorite. Even Mark Pryor put in an appearance and actually remained on deck until the end, perhaps because the trio of Cornelia's friends who provided the music played Lehar, Straus, and more recent dance tunes without the customary sentimental whine.
Contemptuous of the fitness of things, Claude did his best to monopolize Janet. When the gayety was at its highest and the music at its most intoxicating, he danced her into a room which, for the moment, proved to be nearly but not quite empty.
Pushed out of the way against a corner stood a screen. Behind this he whirled her, and then swiftly took her in his arms and kissed her passionately. As swiftly, she pushed him away with an expression of extreme distaste.
"I don't like my friends to imitate Hutchins Burley," she said, her voice quiet and cool, her gray eyes full of life and scorn.
The others in the room laughed in mockery or applause. For an instant, Claude's all-conquering look was replaced by a crestfallen one. But he quickly regained his poise and spirits.
"Just a kiss to try," he said jauntily, as he attempted to recapture her arm.
"It's much too trying for gentle Janet," blithely chirped Mazie, who had danced into the room and taken in the situation, as Janet again turned away from Claude.
AS a matter of fact, it was Janet's sense of propriety in public that was offended more than anything else. As for Claude, he was only less mortified by the affront to his vanity than by the haunting fear that Janet's rebuff came from genuine dislike.
No girl had ever given the brilliant, impetuous Claude Fontaine a glance of undisguised repugnance.
Janet spent the rest of the evening chiefly in conversation with Robert Lloyd and Mark Pryor. Meanwhile, Claude affected a complete indifference to her actions. He threw himself into the party with a mad abandon, and whipped up the conviviality with a riotous, headstrong wildness until everybody voted it the merriest evening in years. Amongst the other sex, he exploited to the utmost his patrician graces and masculine daring, and was so much the center of the occasion that the party might have been his rather than Janet's.
The women thought him magnificent, graceful, cruel—in a word, irresistible; the men laughed at his impudence, and envied or admired his readiness, effrontery and ease.
And yet, as he showed his fine points triumphantly now to this adoring girl and now to that, his voice vibrated towards Janet.
Janet took it all in, and continued talking to Robert with undisturbed satisfaction. She saw Claude pass recklessly from one favorite to another, and guessed easily that none of these was his real aim.
When the party broke up, Claude induced Janet to listen to him alone for a moment. He was suddenly all contrition. To his whispered plea for forgiveness, she said, in a not unkindly tone:
"Forgiveness for what? For advertising your emotions?"
"For the kiss," he said, his voice full of sensuous charm. And he added, on a more audacious note: "I wish I could take it back."
"Oh, do you? You'd better begin with the publicity."
"Please forgive the kissandthe publicity, Janet."
"I'll forgive the second when I forget the first," she replied, much more gaily than she intended, thus proving that Claude was not the only one in the grip of a resistless passion.
Claude went home, satisfied that his daring had once again enabled him to snatch victory out of the arms of defeat.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I
And so it had. None the less, the experience had taught Claude a lesson which, for once, he took to heart. He never again supposed that Janet's friendship was to be had on the same terms as Mazie's or even Cornelia's.
True, he remained in the dark as to what precisely her idea of self-respect was. Conflicting and irreconcilable inferences were the only ones he could draw from the conduct of a girl who lived in the Lorillard tenements, moved in the Outlaws' circle, professed to be hostile to marriage, yet stood on her dignity withal, in quite a traditional womanly way.
But Claude was not the man to waste time on psychological conundrums. Besides, he was too happy to be critical. He was back in the good graces of Janet, or rather, as he soon paraphrased the case, she was back in his. He flattered himself that he was the dominant influence over a girl who was a piquant, if puzzling, amalgam of Brooklyn and Bohemia.
In the next two weeks, his position as Janet's particular friend was established beyond dispute. Few afternoons passed in which his motor car did not drive up to the Lorillard and whirl her away to a place of gayety or recreation. The chief rival claimant upon her time was Robert Lloyd. But as Claude, in point of social advantages and personal graces, far outdistanced him, this rivalry was not taken seriously by any of the three persons concerned, least of all by Claude.
One day, to Cornelia's astonishment, Janet announced that she had planned to spend the afternoon, not with Claude, but with Robert. She made the announcement from a tuffet on which she sat soberly, while reading a book by Mrs. Beatrice Webb.
"Is this your pensive day?" asked Cornelia, ironically.
"Yes," replied Janet. "Robert complains that I'm neglecting him, and consequently my education. I think I ought to give him a chance to prove both assertions. So I've asked him to come here this afternoon. I can't spend all my days in sky-larking, can I?"
"My dear, 'youth's a stuff will not endure.' If you choose Mrs. Sidney Webb and Robert Lloyd rather than Claude Fontaine, the choice is your own. Of course, Robert is very entertaining. He pledges you with facts and figures. But when I was a rosebud like you, Araminta, I preferred a man who drank to me only with his eyes."
"Cornelia, I adore being made love to; yet I get horribly tired of it—even of Claude's love making—when it's kept up too long. And I hate facts and figures; yet Robert's never bore me."
"What a morbid symptom, my dear!"
"Oh, don't say that. I feel sure it's quite a natural condition, in my case. But perhaps there's a quality left out of me, a quality that other women possess."
Janet was clearly eager to carry on her self-analysis, but Cornelia gave no sign of sharing this eagerness.
Cornelia, in fact, was far from pleased. Her unconscious game was to keep Robert revolving in an orbit around herself. He was such an excellent drawing card! For had he not the rare power of raising the value of any object or person he admired? Not that people ever credited him with unusual discernment or insight. Yet the fact remained that Robert had only to praise a human being or a work of art hitherto undervalued or overlooked, and presto, the article or the person instantly became subject to an urgent popular demand. This was one of the reasons why Cornelia (who felt that she had been handsome enough in surrendering Claude without a murmur) did not wish Robert as well to gravitate from her stellar system to Janet's.
But, seeing no way of cancelling Robert's visit, she determined not to be a spectator of it.
"I must run in next door, Janet," she said, "and ask the Gorilla to do an errand for me."
She left, omitting her customary lyrical phrases of affection. Janet did not suspect the jealousy behind this omission. But she was undeniably disappointed because Cornelia had not encouraged her to discuss her friendships with Claude and Robert about whom her heart and her thoughts were brimful.
Thus quickly did Cornelia damp down the fire of intimacy by treating the exchange of self-revelation as a strictly one-sided transaction. She had (so it struck Janet) a very low opinion of all confidences—other than her own.
II
When the bell rang, Janet opened the door wondering why Robert had come an hour before the appointed time.
But it was Claude who entered! He came in, like the god of the glorious spring without, in his gayest, most engaging mood.
"What luck, to find you in!" he cried. "Janet, I've come in an open car on the chance of taking you for a spin to Mineola to see the start of the great Cross-Continental airplane race."
"Oh, Claude, how nice of you. But—I'm afraid I can't go."
"Why not?"
"Well—you see—I've promised to go out with Robert this afternoon."
His face clouded.
"And you never told me!" escaped from him.
"You are not my diarist," she said, faintly ironical.
"Please forgive me, Janet," he said, dropping his possessive tone, as he reminded himself how touchy she was about her independence. "But I'm disappointed, bitterly disappointed. I planned the excursion as a surprise for you. And how I've counted on it!"
"Not more than I long to go, Claude. But what can I do?"
He took her hands in his, and said eagerly:
"Mustyou keep the engagement? Can't you think of some excuse? Where on earth was he going to take you to?"
"To the Japanese Industrial Exhibition at the Grand Central Palace."
He made a contemptuous grimace.
"A stuffy exhibition!" he exclaimed. "Good Heavens, Janet, why hesitate to change your plans? It isn't as if Robert wanted you for himself, as I do. He'll understand."
Janet wondered whether Claude would understand if she confessed that she was actually more interested in the Japanese Exhibition than in the cross-continent air race. But though she kept silent on this point, because she really wanted greatly to go with Claude, she was rather troubled. It was not easy for her to gratify a private desire at the expense of a social obligation.
"I don't like to hurt Robert's feelings," she said, turning away in her indecision.
"Oh, very well, if you don't wish to come with me!"
He flung himself sulkily into a chair.
Janet was astonished at his complete change of mood. She might have felt hurt, had she not had a woman's instinctive weakness for spoiling the man she was fond of.
She sat down irresolutely, and reflected that this would be the second time she had broken an engagement with Robert.
"It's idiotic," he said, rising, with a sense of deep injury. "Here is the most sensational race in a century, on a perfectly glorious day. And I'm mad to be with you."
"Perhaps Robert is, too," she said, a merry light dancing in her eyes.
"Of course, he's no fool. He'd rather be with a wonderful girl than an ordinary one. But what he wants more even than a wonderful girl is a chopping-block, any chopping-block, for his sociological theories. Why on earth did you leave your home, if all you crave is more instruction, and if the only freedom you want is the freedom to stand on more ceremony than before?"
"That has nothing to do with the matter, Claude," said Janet, refusing to ignore the truth simply because it was disagreeable. "Robert may not be offended at finding me away, but he is sure to be offended at finding me rude."
"It seems to me that you are far more concerned with Robert's feelings than with mine," said Claude, changing to a tone of melancholy reproach.
"But I really haven't a good excuse, Claude," she said, troubled, but still indecisive.
"I know girls who wouldn't take two minutes to find an excellent one," he said, with a return of his superior authoritative air.
Janet's temptation was great; greater yet when Claude, in his most handsome and daring manner, drew her out of the chair and put an arm around her waist.
"It's an occasion in a million, Janet. I've set my heart on this ride with you. What does it matter what Robert may think, or what anyone may think, as long as we two want so much to be together? You must come. I shall believe you don't care a straw for me, if you don't."
His flawless form and vibrant voice annihilated argument. With a happy heart but a guilty conscience, Janet dismissed her scruples.
On the way out, she stopped in at Number Thirteen to beg Cornelia to smooth matters over with Robert.
Cornelia, serene and all smiles again, promised to do her best.
III
Robert came home soon after and, getting no response from Number Fifteen, went to his own room in Kelly's suite next door.
He got all the news from Cornelia, who politely tried not to gloat over his disappointment. She professed to see no reason for finding fault with Janet's easy submission to the force of an irresistible attraction.
As it was fairly plain that Robert would have preferred to be alone, Cornelia perversely lost no time in proposing that he carry out his original intention of visiting the Japanese Industrial Exhibition, she, of course, to take Janet's place as his companion.
She had another reason for inviting herself out with Robert. This reason was the Harlem Gorilla. He, though almost superstitiously devoted to her, sometimes had to be "managed," in accordance with Cornelia's view that love makes the most constant of men uncertain, coy, and hard to please. Luckily, the treatment that Harry Kelly's case required was not a subtle one, and so it was Cornelia's practice to alternate a little encouraging discouragement, with a little discouraging encouragement. On this occasion, by accompanying Robert who didn't want her, and deserting Kelly who wanted her very much, she neatly killed two birds with the same stone.
On the way to the exhibition, Robert gave Cornelia an account of his latest occupation. He had been made organizing secretary of a body called the League of Guildsmen. Was this a fanciful name for another set of Outlaws? No, the Guildsmen were servers of the community, the Outlaws were spongers on it.
"You have golden opinions of us," said Cornelia, theatrically. "I marvel that you soil your garments by staying in our midst."
"It's nothing to marvel at, Cornelia. I had to learn what Kips Bay and its slum population were at first hand before I could desire in earnest to destroy them, root and branch. Familiarity, which sometimes breeds contempt, often breeds homicidal mania. Do you recollect how Caesar spent a short vacation among a band of desperate pirates and how the experience filled him with a conviction that it was his duty to exterminate them? Well, I am filled with the same conviction about Kips Bay."
"What a passion you have for reforming everybody and everything, Cato! I am sure it is a very noble passion, though it does include poor me in its program of extermination. Still, I wonder whether reform, like charity, oughtn't to begin at home?"
"I used to think so," replied Robert, unmoved by her sarcasm. "In my schooldays, my elders obliged me to hack my way through obsolete French tragedies or the differential calculus instead of allowing me to gain a working knowledge of current English plays or of modern political economy. And when I made a fearful hash of their instruction, they voted me a miserable failure. Whereupon, I determined to reform myself in order that I might reform the world. I am wiser now. I know that I must reform the world before I can hope to reform myself."
"Cato, you are a perfectly gorgeous mixture of building air castles and of seeing things upside down! One can never tell whether your head is in the clouds or on the ground."
Robert indulgently proceeded to say that the Guildsmen were young people of like sentiments with his own. In a general way, their aim was to advance the idea that the producers and servers of society, being the rightful possessors of the earth, must eliminate the profiteers and the parasites who have usurped possession.
"If that is your aim, Robert, I predict that your league and your secretaryship will have a short life and a merry one."
Robert laughed and admitted that he did not expect a long tenure of office. The Guild plan was a European idea for which America was by no means ripe.
"I fancy we are as progressive in industrial matters as the Europeans are," said Cornelia, on her mettle.
"Oh, more so," replied Robert, drily. "Our giant industries lead the world in maximizing the production of things of a mediocre quality and the creation of human life of a contemptible quality. Yes, in crude capacity, we are ahead of our European competitors. But in political capacity, we still lag far behind. Hence the difficulty of transplanting to our soil a high-class social policy like that of the Guildsmen."
"But when this Guild plan dies a natural death, what forlorn hope will you champion next?"
"I fear there'll be nothing left but to throw myself on the mercy of a rich uncle."
"What, an uncle in a fairy tale?"
"No, an uncle in California, a real live one."
Cornelia evinced little more than a languid interest in Robert's information. Fabulously rich relatives—who were cast for the parts ofDeus ex machina, but who never materialized in flesh or cash—made a golden splash in the 'scutcheon of too many veteran Lorillard inhabitants. She preferred a conversation dealing with more tangible personages. Truth to tell, she rather hoped that Robert would try to undo the painful impression he had made on her by his recent criticism of her affair with Percival Houghton.
All the greater was her chagrin when he brought the talk around to the subject of Janet.