VThat evening, just before the theatres opened, a tall, thin man in a taupe-colored flannel suit and a soft beaver hat came out of the Commodore Hotel walked westward along Forty-second Street, and took an uptown bus at Fifth Avenue.Mark Pryor, in a very unprofessional mood, had the air of one who is determined to be seen rather than to see. Considering the constant use he made of his knack of fading out of his surroundings to the point of almost total invisibility, this was not as easy for him as it sounds. Easy or not, it was his mood. Mr. Pryor, whose gift for self-effacement amounted to a miracle, needed a change. And he sought it by trying to make himself manifest, as other people seek it by trying to hide.He had not deserted Kips Bay. But the growing inquisitiveness of his neighbors, and particularly of the acquaintances he had struck up in flat Number Fifteen, had driven him to the expedient of running two domiciles and of dividing his time between them. The choice of a room in a first-class hotel had been dictated not by a craving for luxury but by a sense of domestic propriety. "There are two things I can't live without," he had once told Robert Lloyd. "One is an unfailing supply of hot water, the other is perfect freedom to come and go as I choose. A man can always get these treasures among the model poor or the unmodel rich, but never in a middle-class home."Robert had heartily endorsed this sentiment without any suspicion that Mr. Pryor—whom some of the Outlaws suspected of being a fugitive counterfeiter and others of being a shrinking novelist in search of local color—perambulated from an army cot in his Lorillard flat to a Circassian walnut bedstead in the Commodore Hotel. On the evening in question, Mr. Pryor decided to explore a section of Manhattan which he had hitherto neglected. Accordingly he boarded a cross-town bus going east and alighted at the corner of Second Avenue and Seventy-second Street.Between this point and East End Avenue, he took a zig-zag course along several side streets and main roads. Thus he sauntered past the Vanderbilt tenements—the aristocrats of their kind—and through the German and Czechoslovak colonies, which were remote enough from Times Square to have retained some of their European flavor.Presently he found himself in a very prettily lighted shopping section of First Avenue, a section which reminded him faintly of the chief street in some of the Teuto-Bohemian towns he had once traveled through. Reaching the Eighties, he strolled westward again, not without a sigh of regret as he noticed that the few quaint German or Slovak spots left on the East Side were fast being submerged in the uniform drabness which inevitably descends on all the quarters of an American city.The cross street into which he turned was dimly lighted and quite deserted except for one other pedestrian on the opposite footway. This was a man whose hippopotamine dimensions instantly chained Mr. Pryor's scrutiny.Surely there were not two people in New York with the aggressive waddle, the labored locomotion of Hutchins Burley? Pryor was in a holiday frame of mind; but here, as usual, was opportunity knocking at his door when he was in a mood to be "not at home.""What must be, must be," he murmured, resigning himself to his fate.He kept his eyes glued on Burley, and followed him slowly until he had watched him enter a cigar and stationery shop at the corner. Walking hurriedly past the shop window twice, he observed Burley, in a rather secretive manner, handing the proprietor a small bundle of letters.Then Pryor acted with lightning speed.In less time than it takes to tell, he had darted down the dark basement steps of the closed shop next to the tobacconist's and, after a brief disappearance, had emerged again.The man who came trudging up the steps, however, was not the agile, immaculate gentleman who had descended a few seconds before. At least, to outward view, it was a middle-aged man with stooping shoulders, a painful limp, clothes that looked trampish and untidy, and a round hat rammed Klondike fashion far down over his forehead.This ugly looking customer lurched past the tobacconist's shop a moment later, just brushing the sleeve of Hutchins Burley on his way out. Wholly absorbed in himself, Burley paid no attention to the incident or the cause of it. He plodded on up the street; but the man who had so nearly collided with him went into the shop, made a quick purchase—during which he took a good look at the shopkeeper—and then came back to the street again with a haste that was scarcely in keeping with his limp. By this time Burley had almost turned the corner of Third Avenue, and Mark Pryor was obliged to throw his limp to the winds and strike into a lively clip in order to keep his quarry within view.Eventually, he contrived to be a passenger on the bus that carried Hutchins Burley downtown, and got off with him at Seventeenth Street. There he watched his man waddle heavily towards Irving Place and enter a dingy old house in the middle of the block.Mark Pryor followed slowly. As soon as the coast was clear, he crept cautiously up the front stoop to look at the name plate on one side of the doorway. With the aid of a pocket flashlight, he read the words: "Japanese Consulate General.""What in thunder has the Mikado got to do with Hutchins Burley's smuggling adventures?" he asked himself, greatly perplexed.An hour or so later, he repeated this query to a brisk, florid-faced gentleman in the prime of life who was seated in what purported to be an actor's agency in the heart of Times Square. The florid gentleman, who looked much less like a theatrical agent than like a military man in mufti, offered no solution to the enigma."Major Blair, I think I'm on the trail of something big at last," volunteered Mr. Pryor, hopefully."Possibly, sir, possibly," replied the gentleman, briskly.But he paid only a languid attention to his visitor's spirited account of how he had gradually wormed himself into the confidence of Hutchins Burley. When Pryor finished, he said:"Somebody else will have to take up the trail of Burley. Orders came from headquarters this evening that you are to sail for France the day after tomorrow. You will report in Paris to Colonel Scott at the address in this letter.""Foiled again," exclaimed Pryor, veiling his real feelings with assumed good humor. "Whenever I'm on the point of nailing a case down, headquarters steps in and calls a halt, as if I were the villain in the piece."He added sardonically: "What is the use of information fairly breezing into my hands, so long as headquarters' notion of Secret Service is that the only conduct becoming an officer or a gentleman is to keep a secret dark.""Mr. Pryor, orders are orders! The first duty of an officer of the Secret Service is never to ask questions.""Quite so, sir," returned Pryor coolly. "And yet the first duty of a crack Secret Service officer is to ask questions all the time."Major Blair stared at this independent, gifted member of his staff. Nothing daunted, Mark Pryor took his sealed orders, saluted and left.PART IIIJANET ON HER OWNCHAPTER FIFTEENIEarlier in the same day, a special messenger from Claude had brought two notes of regret to the Lorillard tenements, one for Cornelia and one for Janet. A little before evening, these notes were followed by quantities of flowers and fruit, which were for Janet alone. But Cornelia went into ecstasies over the presents and caused the rooms of Number Fifteen to ring with herarpeggiolaughter.The note to Janet read:Darling Janet:Business interests and a promise made long ago make it imperative for me to go to Long Island today. The worst of it is, I shall be away for three days, and how unhappy this makes me, you can't conceive. Six days without you will have loitered by when next we meet! Six endless days away from the miracle of your soft voice and the wonder of your heavenly smile.I came back from Washington late last night, not knowing that I should be prevented from seeing you today. Even so, I had my car driven, far from its regular course, past the Lorillard houses. How I prayed that a light from your little corner room would invitingly tell me that you were still awake! But all was dark, and I had to be content to let my fancy play around a certain maze of curly bronze hair, two eyes as limpid gray as an Adirondack lake before dawn, and a pair of ruddy lips that smile divinely or talk with so much sense and charm.You are not like any other girl I have ever known, dearest Janet! I think of you as a rare and delicate flower whose perfume holds my senses as your spirit engrosses my soul.I want you to have a happy evening, dear girl, despite my absence. Only, every now and then, you are to give a passing thought to me—disconsolate, forlorn impatient to be with you again.Ever yourClaude.Of course, in Claude's absence the party was declared off, all but the supper in the pagoda.Cornelia read the letter over twice. The second time, she uttered some of the more lyrical passages aloud, rendering them with a faintly exaggerated stress or mock-heroic inflection as the case might be."Exquisite!" she carolled, handing the note back to Janet. "A perfect love letter! By what an expert hand!"Lydia Dyson came in just then and had to be told all about the disappointment. The author of "Brothers and Sisters," in an abbreviated accordion pleated frock, a necklace of jade beads, and very French shoes, looked as professionally Cleopatrish as ever."Janet," she said, knowingly, "Claude has gone to Huntington, to that Armstrong girl, Marjorie—the one that was hotfoot after the Earl of Dunbar. She didn't get the Earl, you know. Now they all say she'll marry Claude. I bet she will, too.""He doesn't love her," protested Janet."As if that made any difference! Every man needs a woman to represent him in social life and to advertise the dignity and solidity of his own rooftree. Any woman who can do these things satisfactorily qualifies as a suitable wife. Men, you see, are more conventional than women. Or perhaps I should say, more businesslike.""Businesslike!" Cornelia interposed. "Say disgusting, and you'll be much nearer the truth. Didn't I tell you, Janet," she continued, "that men think of women in only one way—and that a beastly one?""On the contrary, they think of women in two ways," contended Lydia in her drawling Southern tongue. "To a man, all womankind is divided into two groups: the woman who stands for his home, and all the others—the women who stand for his pleasure. The one woman is a necessity; all the others a luxury. Every man gets the first at any cost, and then bids for one or more of the second, if he has the price.""Don't be bizarre and crude, Lydia," said Cornelia, not relishing this analysis in Janet's presence."Crude?" said Lydia, repelling the charge as melodramatically as it was made. "It is not I who am crude. It is man. It is man who divides our whole sex crassly into these two groups. It is man who sees in every woman either a housekeeper or a wanton. It is man who fixes a trade price for affairs of the heart and rates marriages by their market value. Callthiscrude, if you like! Or call it an incurable blindness to the differing blend of vital forces that makes each woman unique. In this respect, how unlike men are to us, who see in every man a new, mystic union of protector, lover and father of our children!""The new trinity!" chanted Cornelia, with a significant laugh. "But I'm sure, dear Lydia, that not every woman hasyourgift for discovering this mystic trinity in so many unique specimens of the other sex.""Dear Cornelia, you flatter me. My only advantage over other women lies in the prudence which caused me to get a husband before I set out to make the discoveries you allude to.""Don't let us talk about marriage as it exists today," said Cornelia, parrying the blow as best she could. "Marriage is so banal.""Yes, and so convenient," drawled Lydia, who reluctantly supported her husband in idleness and luxury. "Also, so expensive. Husbands now come dearer than ever before in the history of family life, while lovers never were cheaper.""Lydia is joking," said Janet, sending her clear, mollifying voice into the breach."No, I'm not joking," said Lydia, with the utmost gravity. She lit a cigarette, adding as she did so:"I'm making hay while the sun shines.""Does your husband agree with you on this point?" asked Janet, curiously."My dear, he's used to me. He takes my word for everything. Also my money. But I'm frank to say that I don't hold with Cornelia's notions about free love. They're too fantastic and impractical. I hold with the French system: Marry first and experiment afterwards. It's not logical, Janet, but it works well. If you experiment first, you are sure to be done out of marriage, and you may even be done out of love.""Really, Lydia," said Cornelia, now thoroughly incensed. "You must know that Janet believes, as I do, that love is a surrender, not a sale. She isn't offering her affections to the highest bidder."Janet, intervening, remarked that this was true; but, as she found Lydia's views very interesting, she begged Cornelia to let their visitor have her say."Oh, very well," said Cornelia, biting her lip."That's right, Janet," said Lydia Dyson, grateful for her support. "I'm sorry to disagree with Cornelia. But in this matter, she's all at sea. Believe it or not, in modern life, love is a commodity for sale, like any other commodity. What else can you expect? Do you know of any other gift in the possession of man, woman or child which is not sold to the highest bidder? Doesn't a playwright subdue his creative faculty to the requirements of the manager who offers the most royalties? Doesn't the novelist or the musician or the engineer do the same in his line? How indeed can they help it in a country where everything is bought and sold, where the greed and gluttony of men put everything under the hammer, from a glass of water to a draught of genius? Why marvel that women have to sell their bodies, when poets and artists have to sell their souls?""Take it from me, Lydia," Cornelia burst in, caustically, "when you apply the oratorical powers of Robert Lloyd to the moral principles of Mazie Ross, the product is hard to beat!""Cornelia, you wouldn't say spiteful things like that if you only knew the truth about sex relations. I forgive you because you don't.""IfIonly knew!" said Cornelia. She gave a florid operatic laugh. "Do you really suppose Idon'tknow?""No woman does who hasn't been married to a man. Not until she has been chained in wedlock for some time does she see the cloven hoof or feel the mark of the beast, or get her fanciful pictures about love put in a proper perspective. That's one thing marriage does for a woman.""By your own admission, then," remarked Janet, "Cornelia is right in thinking that the game isn't worth the candle, isn't she?""Dearie," said Lydia, with unction, "ask the most wretched wife on earth, and she'll answer: 'Tis better to have wed and lost, than never to have wed at all.'"IICornelia, observing that Janet took Claude's absence with surprising composure, wondered whether it was a case of still waters running deep. It was partly that, but there was another reason. The apparent ease with which Claude had yielded the preference to Marjorie's claim upon his time carried with it an unflattering implication as regards the value he set upon Janet's friendship. To be sure, there was the rapturous love letter. But fine words buttered no parsnips; they pleased the ear but they neither explained Claude's course nor justified it.Thus Janet was as much nettled as disappointed by her lover's absence. Yet it was not her way to stew in misery. And her control of her feelings was made easier by the pressure of some secretarial work for which she had just been engaged by Howard Madison Grey, the playwright.Immediately after supper, therefore, Janet left her friends in the Japanese pagoda on the roof, having arranged to spend the evening in Harry Kelly's office in flat Number Thirteen, where she proposed to practice on the athlete's typewriter.Her object was to "increase her speed" so that her most recent position might be made securer.Through the Collegiate Bureau, to which Cornelia had introduced her, she had already been given two opportunities in business offices downtown. She had lost them both within a week, her refinement and charm of manner having been voted poor substitutes for the experience that she still lacked.The fault was not wholly Janet's. Before she left home, she had taken a course in shorthand and typewriting (in the teeth of her mother's opposition) at an Evening High School. It was one of those carefully pasteurized courses for which the American educational system is famous; it was showy, time consuming, and totally useless. But how could Janet have known that high-school stenography was as pitiably inadequate to the practical needs of a modern mercantile office as high-school French or German to the practical needs of a tourist on the Continent?Not wanting to get into the bad books of the Collegiate Bureau, Janet was anxious to avert a third discharge. Moreover, her post with the playwright had the intrinsic merit of being more congenial, as well as more lucrative than any she had filled before.Janet was thankful that Cornelia would be occupied with the party, for her efforts to make herself more competent invariably excited her friend to derision. Cornelia, like a true-blue Kipsite, was no devotee of good workmanship. Endowed with the makings of success in any one of half a dozen professions, she had achieved failure in all of them, her inveterate lack of industry and application having botched a promising career in turn as an author, singer, painter, dancer, decorator and dress designer.A born worker, Janet stood in no danger of imitating Cornelia's business vagaries. She could not have afforded it, anyway. Unlike Cornelia, she had no private income, her only resources being a small bank deposit (a relative's bequest), which was dwindling with alarming rapidity. Thus, inclination and necessity were as one in spurring her on to making a success of her new post as typist and amanuensis for Howard Madison Grey.IIIThe keys of the typewriter were going at a merry gallop when Robert Lloyd, who had a desk in Kelly's office, came in."What do you mean by breaking the commandments of the Lorillard Tenements?" he said, putting a sheaf of papers on his desk and getting ready to attack them."Which commandments, Robert?""All ten. The first five prohibit any useful work in the daytime on penalty of loss of caste. The second five prohibit the same at night on penalty of excommunication, if not expulsion."She laughed and asked him why he hadn't joined Cornelia's supper party in the Japanese pagoda. He explained that he had been detained at a meeting of the Guildsmen's League, of which he was now the organizing secretary. He added that he had brought home a quantity of raw material to be hammered into a tract on Waste in Industry, a job which would take him all night.They each buckled to the task in hand. Janet liked to work in the same room with Robert, who knew when to be silent as well as when to talk. He treated her like a fellow worker of his own sex, paying her none of that exaggerated show of consideration which most men give to women outside their own family circle. Thus his presence stimulated her and in no wise interfered with the concentration demanded by her typewriting practice. When she reached a good stopping point, she offered to help him. He accepted the offer eagerly and dictated several letters to her."A good job," he said, after she had handed him the typed sheets to be signed, "and a quick one, too. You're improving by leaps and bounds. Indeed, you might develop into a 'speed demon,' but for your un-American weakness for accuracy.""I've got to be accurate. I do all sorts of work every morning, for Mr. Grey, the playwright.""Grey? The author of 'The Love that Lies' isn't he? The play that ran for two seasons. Is he very exacting?""No, but his wife is. She keeps an eagle eye on all the typing that's done for him.""Why?""Why? Well, she serves him as a sort of combination mother, nurse, watchdog, and general superintendent. Just as most wives do.""And just as most wives will continue to do, until they choose an independent living in preference.""Do you think that women are solely responsible for the social arrangement by which two distinct things like motherhood and housekeeping are tied indissolubly together?""No. And I don't believe that men are solely responsible, either.""Aren't they?""No. Remember, marriage was not always what it is today. In the middle ages, the home was also the place of business, and the wife was her husband's business associate as well as his mate. Later, when business went out of the door, slavery came in through the window. This was not exclusively man's doing. Men and women muddled things up together. Honors are very nearly even on that score.""Be fair, Robert! Hitherto, men have had all the power.""Yes, and women have had all the glory. They were every bit as well satisfied to belong to the fair, privileged, and law-evading sex, as men were satisfied to belong to the coarse, responsible, and law-making sex. As soon as the majority of women follow the lead of Lady Cicely in 'Captain Brassbound's Conversion,' that is, as fast as they 'scorn death, spurn fate, and set their hopes above happiness and love,' they will be able to cope with man's supremacy as successfully outside the home as they have already done within it. What is more, they will work their will in public much more openly and honorably than they have so far worked it in private.""Men are always declaring that women could easily get full independence if only they would go about it in the right way. Clearly, men know the right way and women don't. Cornelia says that if they are so very much cleverer than we are, it is a pity they don't set their wits to work so as to help instead of hindering us in the struggle for equality.""Never mind what Cornelia says," exclaimed Robert, energetically. "She is crazy on the subject of men; that is why she keeps forever harping on it. One way of doing this is to accuse men of everything evil under the sun, from the creation of God to the invention of the cardboard kitchenette flat. Please don't join her in the vulgar senseless game of pitting one sex against the other.""You do Cornelia an injustice. She doesn't maintain that all women are angels and all men devils. Nor do I. But suppose some men are angels. I shouldn't care to be a housekeeper for the archangel Gabriel."Robert hoped that any lady who consented to share Gabriel's bed and board would find the archangel up-to-date and gentlemanly enough to excuse her from washing dishes and scrubbing floors. Why should an archangelic or any other sort of gentleman shortsightedly insist that a talented bride on her way to becoming an excellent banker, merchant, or politician, should transform herself into a mediocre woman-of-all-work? Why should he consider his own bargain bettered by such a questionable transformation?"On the other hand, Janet," he added boldly, "why should an up-to-date young lady jump from the devil of housekeeping into the deep sea of free love, as I fear you will end by doing if you follow Cornelia's suggestions?"She knew that he had Claude in mind. But she was unable to take offence at his uncandid candor and his disinterested interest."Robert, what a tantalizing mixture of the liberal and the conservative you are!" she exclaimed, refusing to take up his challenge."I am merely the child of my age, Janet. I was born with reactionary habits and nursed on radical ideas. All logic counsels me to become an enemy of existing institutions; all instinct drives me to conduct operations within the enemy's camp. I betray under two flags.""You can't make me believe that. If you were all kinds of a traitor, you wouldn't be such a jolly companion to work with or to talk to. Do you know the most delightful thing about you, Robert?""Modesty forbids me to say—but not to hear. Tell me.""It is the fact that you can behave towards a woman friend as frankly and decently and unsentimentally as you would towards a man friend. You can't imagine what a relief it is to a girl to know one man who'll always treat her man-to-man fashion.""Will I? Janet, if you were perfectly sure of my future conduct you'd find me an insufferable bore. Besides, no fascinating woman ever wanted to be treated like a man—at least not for long at a time. You won't be the first exception.""Don't be silly, Robert. If ever I should get married—which Heaven forbid!—it will be to a man like you, one who can work with me without constantly remembering my sex.""Oh almost any man will be able to do that, as soon as being your husband loses its novelty for him. Still, I'm grateful to you for your well-meant opinion, Janet. I shall try to deserve it by offering you a small business partnership."He rapidly sketched the plan he had in mind, pointing out that, as only her mornings were engaged by the playwright, Grey, she might help him afternoons with the Guild League's work. He was hard pressed for assistance; the League could just afford a part-time worker; there was a good deal of editing and typewriting which he was sure she could undertake.Janet begged to be taken on trial. The bargain was struck amid the sounds of merrymaking that came, none too faintly, through the walls of flat Number Fifteen. She remarked that Cornelia's party appeared to have been a huge success after all."Yes, it has given birth to the firm of Barr and Lloyd," said Robert, jestingly.He was aware of the conflict in Janet between the temptations of the love chase and the attraction of the force that moves the sun and the stars. And he fondly believed that this conflict no longer existed in himself. The love of man for woman against the love of life! He had made his decision, she had not.Two questions remained uppermost in his mind. One was: "Could he capture Janet's great natural talents for his own side, the side, not of the fires of sensuous gratification but of the flame that burns at the heart of the world?" The other was: "Did Janet really want him to act towards her precisely as towards a man?"Curiously enough, the irrelevance of the second question to the first, did not strike him.CHAPTER SIXTEENIIn the days that followed, Janet's morning duty as Mr. Grey's secretary and her afternoon employment as assistant to Robert left her with very little leisure. Such time as remained on her hands she spent chiefly with Cornelia or with Claude.Neither of these friends exhibited much enthusiasm over Janet's determined effort to earn her own living. Cornelia looked with ill-concealed disfavor on an exhibition of diligence which, besides being foreign to the atmosphere of Kips Bay, used up so much of her protegee's time that the burden of housekeeping in flat Number Fifteen was inevitably shifted to Cornelia's own shoulders. As for Claude, his reaction, equally cool, was governed partly by the scarcity value which now attached itself to Janet's leisure hours, partly also by another reason which he hardly dared to face.Somewhat daunted by the lukewarm attitude of her friends, Janet nevertheless kept courageously on with the task of making her independence secure.Howard Madison Grey, the playwright, was then composing his fourth play, "Cleopatra's Needle." His practise was to dictate rapidly to Janet for an hour and a half, after which she was expected to typewrite the sketchy dialogue, changes in grammar and syntax and even in diction being left, as time went on, more and more to her discretion. As the work appealed to her interest as well as to her skill, she despatched it with zest.Bit by bit, two drawbacks emerged, however. One was Janet's liability to mistakes because of an absorption in the plot, an absorption so deep as to interfere seriously with quick mechanical transcription. The other was Mrs. Howard Madison Grey.This lady had opened a correspondence with her future husband during the short run of his first play, "The Spice of Life," for the hero of which (a masterful but incorrigible polygamist) she had conceived an unbounded admiration. The correspondence ripened into matrimony, Mrs. Grey bringing her spouse the money and influence that lifted him swiftly to a solid place in the theatrical world.When his second play, "The Love that Lies," financed by her father, scored a big hit, she noticed that he became the gratified recipient of a good deal of feminine attention. Mindful of the polygamous experiments of his two masterful heroes, she remembered that precaution is the better part of safety. Marriage had considerably modified her point of view, and she now had a conviction that there should be a yawning gulf between the pluralistic imaginings of the dramatist and the monogamic behavior of the husband.To give this conviction shape, she enframed him in a watchful chaperonage. Chaperonage was not the name she used. She called it, "being a helpmeet."The helpmeet's first official act was to place Mr. Grey's communications with the world beyond-the-home under a strict censorship. She looked after his correspondence, registered his engagements, and kept in telephonic touch with him when he went to a club or directed a rehearsal. Let the enemy idolaters capture him (if they could) through the barbed-wire entanglements of her devotion!In the same spirit, she threw cold water on his business-like proposal to do his writing in an office building. Such an environment, she said, would kill the soul of his art. Her substitute was a study, comfortably fitted up in his own home; and there, accordingly, he and Janet were obliged to work.Mrs. Howard Madison Grey was a woman of fixed opinions. She was firm in the belief that a transcendent artistic talent was lodged in her husband; she was equally firm in the belief that a transcendent executive talent was lodged in herself. On the principle that it pays to specialize she held it to be no more than right that any power or glory acquired by the name of Howard Madison Grey should be exercised by the executive branch of the family. About this opinion she was entirely frank."I've made him," she said to Janet, one day. "Why should I let others enjoy the fruit of my labors?"This was said as much in warning as in confidence. Janet was greatly amused, inasmuch as her feelings toward her employer were unsentimental to the point of prosiness.None the less, Mrs. Grey's never ending readiness to suspect Janet of a design on her vested interest in Mr. Grey soon became a great bore. It was also somewhat trying to the nerves. At the most unexpected moments, the good lady would shoot in upon her husband and his assistant like a cartridge from a noiseless gun, and explode into embarrassing explanations.Until, at length, Mr. Grey's perfectly correct and unemotional attitude towards Janet underwent a dangerous change.IIBy the time Claude returned from his visit to Huntington, Janet had already settled down to her new routine. Claude did not seriously object to her morning engagement with Howard Madison Grey, but her afternoon work in Kelly's study—the work she did for Robert's league—this he viewed as an intolerable encroachment on his privileges.Out of regard for Janet's warm espousal of the cause of woman's independence, he concealed his feelings as best he could. But he used his prodigal gifts without scruple to lay siege to Janet's hours of employment, especially to her afternoons. Four or five days out of seven, on one excuse or another, his imposing car would draw up to the Lorillard tenements, and its owner, handsome, dashing, persuasive, would tempt Janet away from laborious tasks to the delights of an excursion.In vain did Janet upbraid herself each time she yielded, or school herself diligently against the next occasion. When the next occasion came, she found, as likely as not, that she was as helpless as ever to resist his thrilling voice, his ardent eye, and his magnetic wooing.In Cornelia, Claude had a subtle and insidious agent on his side. If Janet gave a crushing refusal to one of Claude's incitements to truancy, Cornelia would flash a reason in his favor as unanswerable as a sword. Or if Janet, persuaded, but not convinced, gave signs of an uneasy conscience, Cornelia was always ready to annihilate doubt with some apt quotation (or misquotation) such as "Work no further, pretty sweeting—youth's a stuff will not endure."Naturally, this spasmodic holiday making was the cause of frequent delays in the performance of the work for the Guildsmen's League. Janet tried to make up for lost time by working late at night, a practice that drew upon her the reproaches of Cornelia who alleged that it interfered with her sleep. Needless to say, Cornelia exhibited no compunction for the serious inconvenience that all this caused Robert. Far from it. She appeared to get a lively satisfaction from seeing his partnership bedeviled and his remonstrances ignored.As a fact, she feared that Robert's influence over Janet was quietly undermining her own ascendancy. But what was there to justify this fear? Janet's enthusiasm for the free life of the model tenements had not yet abated and her admiration for Cornelia's talents was still very strong. But a straw showed Cornelia which way the wind was blowing.Janet was gradually but steadily cutting down the amount of housework she did in Flat Number Fifteen!The terms on which Cornelia chummed up with her successive companions always included an agreement to have the housework done, share and share alike. In practice, the adoring friend took over most of Cornelia's share, at least while the friendship was in its early stages. As time went on and illusions were shattered, the unequal burden was slowly whittled away by the active partner until Cornelia's shoulders stood in grave danger of having a full half of the cleaning and marketing thrust upon them. At this point, she generally unearthed a new adorer as well as excellent reasons for breaking with the old one; and then she started the whole cycle afresh.Like her predecessor, Janet had begun by doing far more errands, dishes and cooking, than a strictly fair division called for. At first, the respective proportions had stood at about three-quarters for Janet and one-quarter for Cornelia. After a few days of this arrangement, however, Janet had begun so to manipulate matters that her allotment fell rapidly to one-half. And the pendulum had swung gaily on. In fine, within a few months of her arrival, this new convert to modernity had reversed the original proportions so that they now stood at about three-quarters for Cornelia and one-quarter for Janet.If this was feminism—Cornelia confided to Hercules ("among the faithless, faithful only he")—it was feminism with a vengeance!The situation was without precedent in the history of the Outlaws of Kips Bay. Even more unprecedented was Cornelia's acceptance of the situation. But this compliance of hers was in no wise dictated by generosity or affection, as some innocents conjectured. Cornelia was simply shrewd enough to see that Janet was the magnet which had drawn back to Number Fifteen its departed splendor and had restored to herself the position of the first lady of the Lorillard tenements, a position she greatly prized.One question that Cornelia put to Hercules was: Had Janet's repugnance for housework merely kept pace with her growing appetite for women's rights, or was Robert Lloyd at the bottom of all the mischief? How should the mute and glorious Hercules reply to a purely rhetorical query?—Cornelia favored the second explanation, a fact which boded Robert no good.IIIAlthough Robert had in no sense entered the lists as one of Janet's suitors, Cornelia instituted comparisons between him and Claude, never to the former's advantage. She took occasion to contrast Claude's noble bearing and look of sovereign strength with Robert's simpler and frailer appearance. She dwelt on the cosmopolitan aura that clung to Claude, his subtle atmosphere of wealth, breeding and high social origin, the amalgam of gorgeous qualities that offered so much more than Robert's radical connections and straitened financial circumstances. Her trump card was to call attention to Claude's free and easy response to the Lorillard conception of the rights of women and to offset this picture with an allusion to Robert's prudent reservations on the same subject.If these comparisons were of an offhand and haphazard sort, nothing was thereby lost in effectiveness. Far from it. They glorified Claude by what was carelessly said: they damaged Robert by what was carefully left unsaid.Although unaware of the Machiavellian promptings of which she was the innocent cause, Janet became dimly conscious of the conflict already sensed by Robert, the conflict between her work (which was bound up with Robert) and her love affair (which was somehow bound up with Cornelia as well as with Claude). She felt the tug of Robert one way and the tug of Claude and Cornelia the other way, without fully grasping the difference in the two directions or the final significance of either goal.It was Claude, however, and not Cornelia, that gave Janet's friendship with Robert an importance that none of those concerned attached to it. Claude simply could not understand why Janet should refuse to neglect Robert's League, whenever the work of the League stood in the way of their outings together. Economic independence, the reason advanced by Janet, was a reason he laughed at. The words meant hardly anything to one who from birth had been glutted with the thing itself. Surely a few beggarly dollars, more or less, did not adequately account for Janet's readiness to cloister herself in Kelly's bare and sunless study! Yet what other motive could there be, if not one of tender feeling on Robert's part, or soft pity on hers?Still, the rivalry that actually sprang up between the two young men was not a rivalry in love, at least not in Robert's sense of the word.For Robert was no fool. He was soon convinced that Claude and Janet had surrendered unconditionally to a mutual infatuation which he was in no position to challenge. Yet he had a magnetism of his own, a magnetism of the spirit rather than of the flesh. To this magnetism Janet responded. Why should he not claim the same title to Janet's response in the one sphere that Claude laid claim to in the other?At all events, he meant to fight for what he considered his rights, regardless of Claude's frowns or vanishing friendship.Between the two, Janet had a hard time of it. Claude professed to accept free love as a new and improved social principle, and praised her for holding it; yet he grew unmanageable the moment she gave the least hint of exercising this freedom in connection with any other man than himself. On the other hand, Robert rejected free love as a pernicious Greenwich Village or Lorillard tenement eccentricity, and even severely scolded her for entertaining it; yet his actions showed that she might love as many different men as madly as she pleased, without causing his friendship for her to undergo any really radical change.To cap the oddity of this contrast, she found that Robert's unlimited tolerance, though socially much the more agreeable attitude, was not without its suggestion of tepidity of sentiment, a suggestion which piqued her not a little.The rivalry, such as it was, followed a very human course. Robert, as an outgrowth of his work with Janet took to promoting her education in contemporary thought and political theory. Claude, not to be behindhand, made the most of his special knowledge of art as well as of his wide first-hand acquaintance with the men and events that figured picturesquely in the ruling social and political rings of Washington and New York. In the matter of books, Claude generally took the cue from Robert. The latter would lend her works by Shaw, Wells, Bennett, Galsworthy, Bertrand Russell, Anatole France, Barbusse, Romaine Rolland; Claude would follow suit with the latest fiction by Robert W. Chambers or Rupert Hughes, his authors ranging as high as Rudyard Kipling, Maeterlinck or Barrie. One would take her to a symphony concert in Carnegie Hall, the other to a Sunday Pop in the Hippodrome. Robert held out invitations to a Theater Guild's play by Masefield or Andreyev, Claude would counter with an evening at a revival of Florodora or San Toy. If Janet accompanied Robert to a Labor Mass Meeting at Cooper Union or to a radical Cameraderie at the Civic Club, she was sure, soon after, to be escorted by Claude to a Titta Ruffo recital in Aeolian Hall or to a midnight cabaret in Moloch's Den off Sheridan Square.To Janet, who had broken with the Barrs of Brooklyn and who was as much on pleasure as on emancipation bent, it was not Robert's offer that usually seemed the happier one.Not the least of Claude's advantages was the fact that he moved in Kips Bay as a representative of the great forces of finance and fashion. He reflected the high lights of that glittering social system of which he was a favorite child. Direct and intimate was his contact with the celebrities of the day—the bankers and politicians, the diplomats and society leaders, the cabinet set in Washington, and the inner opera box set in New York. These were his real people; the Lorillarders were merely the people among whom he was sowing his radical wild oats.In short, Claude was one of the persons "in the know." He knew a good deal more about the personages whose names were on everybody's tongues than the public knew or the newspapers thought fit to print. He could tell about the opera soprano of the first magnitude whose attacks of hysterical jealousy would cause the curtain to be held down between the acts for forty minutes, while the poor director tore his hair in desperation. He could laugh at the "mystery" of the appointment of a certain mediocre woman teacher to a superintendency in the city's schools, the mystery vanishing upon his inside story of how the lady in question "had been good" to Big Jim Connolly, a local political boss. And he could explain the connection between the failure to float a certain foreign loan and the omission of a well-known financier's wife from the group of guests invited to meet the Prince of Wales.Thus Claude Fontaine, whose handsome face and dashing airs would have made him an idol in almost any society, enchanted his fellow Outlaws with the aroma clinging to him from the world of fashion and the glimpses he afforded into the secret workings of the world of power. Small wonder that to Janet, as to the others, Claude was bathed in a romantic glamor.By contrast with Claude, Robert seemed to lead a decidedly work-a-day or humdrum life. Especially so, since his newspaper employment had been cut off and his active time given up to the League of Guildsmen. As far as Janet could see, Robert's entire thought and energy were absorbed by an overwhelming interest in the Labor movement. For though he had plenty of esthetic diversions, she noticed that the books he read, the music he delighted in, and the pictures he admired were all in some way expressive of souls in bondage, aspiring to freedom.Now for the time being, Janet wanted to forget about the lowly and the oppressed. She had the same feeling towards "causes" and "reforms" that a released convict has towards societies for Improving the Condition of Prisoners on Parole.It must not be supposed that Janet took an unsympathetic view of the movements for human freedom which were convulsing society after the Great War. She was a sincere convert to the principle of woman's equality and she made an honest effort to be open-minded to the theories that Robert expounded. But her heart was not in theories. Her pulse refused to quicken when Robert told her of the new social cleavage which was fast ranging the useful active people on one side, and the parasitic profiteering people on the other. In common with a great many of her contemporaries, she sat heedlessly on a volcano, enchanted by the twinkle of the stars.What if Robertdidprove up to the hilt that the world was in the birth throes of a new social order! Youth must have its glamor. And there is no glamor about birth throes, not even about the birth throes of a new world.Besides, the old social alignment in which princes of the purple and masters of the gold ruled in pomp or circumstance over the toilers of the factory, the office and the soil—this old alignment was much more familiar to poor Janet (and to everybody else) than the new one predicted. Literature and legend, the school room, the pulpit and the press—all the regular organs of education, in fact—had mesmerized her into viewing the practical politics and the dominant economics of the day as splendors and glories without parallel. Was the psychology of a lifetime to be uprooted or transformed by a few weeks of unconventional conduct in a Kips Bay tenement, or even by a brief high-tension course of reading in the works of Samuel Butler, Bernard Shaw, Romaine Rolland and other prophets of the life to come?Clearly not. And so when Claude came with his many-colored news from the seats of the mighty, he found it easy to engross and transport Janet. But when Robert talked to her of strikes, trade unions and labor congresses, he left her bewildered or mystified, though seldom cold. In short, the rivalry even for the mind of Janet was a rather one-sided affair, Claude, the darling of the gods, holding an immense initial advantage over Robert, the advocate of rebel causes.
V
That evening, just before the theatres opened, a tall, thin man in a taupe-colored flannel suit and a soft beaver hat came out of the Commodore Hotel walked westward along Forty-second Street, and took an uptown bus at Fifth Avenue.
Mark Pryor, in a very unprofessional mood, had the air of one who is determined to be seen rather than to see. Considering the constant use he made of his knack of fading out of his surroundings to the point of almost total invisibility, this was not as easy for him as it sounds. Easy or not, it was his mood. Mr. Pryor, whose gift for self-effacement amounted to a miracle, needed a change. And he sought it by trying to make himself manifest, as other people seek it by trying to hide.
He had not deserted Kips Bay. But the growing inquisitiveness of his neighbors, and particularly of the acquaintances he had struck up in flat Number Fifteen, had driven him to the expedient of running two domiciles and of dividing his time between them. The choice of a room in a first-class hotel had been dictated not by a craving for luxury but by a sense of domestic propriety. "There are two things I can't live without," he had once told Robert Lloyd. "One is an unfailing supply of hot water, the other is perfect freedom to come and go as I choose. A man can always get these treasures among the model poor or the unmodel rich, but never in a middle-class home."
Robert had heartily endorsed this sentiment without any suspicion that Mr. Pryor—whom some of the Outlaws suspected of being a fugitive counterfeiter and others of being a shrinking novelist in search of local color—perambulated from an army cot in his Lorillard flat to a Circassian walnut bedstead in the Commodore Hotel. On the evening in question, Mr. Pryor decided to explore a section of Manhattan which he had hitherto neglected. Accordingly he boarded a cross-town bus going east and alighted at the corner of Second Avenue and Seventy-second Street.
Between this point and East End Avenue, he took a zig-zag course along several side streets and main roads. Thus he sauntered past the Vanderbilt tenements—the aristocrats of their kind—and through the German and Czechoslovak colonies, which were remote enough from Times Square to have retained some of their European flavor.
Presently he found himself in a very prettily lighted shopping section of First Avenue, a section which reminded him faintly of the chief street in some of the Teuto-Bohemian towns he had once traveled through. Reaching the Eighties, he strolled westward again, not without a sigh of regret as he noticed that the few quaint German or Slovak spots left on the East Side were fast being submerged in the uniform drabness which inevitably descends on all the quarters of an American city.
The cross street into which he turned was dimly lighted and quite deserted except for one other pedestrian on the opposite footway. This was a man whose hippopotamine dimensions instantly chained Mr. Pryor's scrutiny.
Surely there were not two people in New York with the aggressive waddle, the labored locomotion of Hutchins Burley? Pryor was in a holiday frame of mind; but here, as usual, was opportunity knocking at his door when he was in a mood to be "not at home."
"What must be, must be," he murmured, resigning himself to his fate.
He kept his eyes glued on Burley, and followed him slowly until he had watched him enter a cigar and stationery shop at the corner. Walking hurriedly past the shop window twice, he observed Burley, in a rather secretive manner, handing the proprietor a small bundle of letters.
Then Pryor acted with lightning speed.
In less time than it takes to tell, he had darted down the dark basement steps of the closed shop next to the tobacconist's and, after a brief disappearance, had emerged again.
The man who came trudging up the steps, however, was not the agile, immaculate gentleman who had descended a few seconds before. At least, to outward view, it was a middle-aged man with stooping shoulders, a painful limp, clothes that looked trampish and untidy, and a round hat rammed Klondike fashion far down over his forehead.
This ugly looking customer lurched past the tobacconist's shop a moment later, just brushing the sleeve of Hutchins Burley on his way out. Wholly absorbed in himself, Burley paid no attention to the incident or the cause of it. He plodded on up the street; but the man who had so nearly collided with him went into the shop, made a quick purchase—during which he took a good look at the shopkeeper—and then came back to the street again with a haste that was scarcely in keeping with his limp. By this time Burley had almost turned the corner of Third Avenue, and Mark Pryor was obliged to throw his limp to the winds and strike into a lively clip in order to keep his quarry within view.
Eventually, he contrived to be a passenger on the bus that carried Hutchins Burley downtown, and got off with him at Seventeenth Street. There he watched his man waddle heavily towards Irving Place and enter a dingy old house in the middle of the block.
Mark Pryor followed slowly. As soon as the coast was clear, he crept cautiously up the front stoop to look at the name plate on one side of the doorway. With the aid of a pocket flashlight, he read the words: "Japanese Consulate General."
"What in thunder has the Mikado got to do with Hutchins Burley's smuggling adventures?" he asked himself, greatly perplexed.
An hour or so later, he repeated this query to a brisk, florid-faced gentleman in the prime of life who was seated in what purported to be an actor's agency in the heart of Times Square. The florid gentleman, who looked much less like a theatrical agent than like a military man in mufti, offered no solution to the enigma.
"Major Blair, I think I'm on the trail of something big at last," volunteered Mr. Pryor, hopefully.
"Possibly, sir, possibly," replied the gentleman, briskly.
But he paid only a languid attention to his visitor's spirited account of how he had gradually wormed himself into the confidence of Hutchins Burley. When Pryor finished, he said:
"Somebody else will have to take up the trail of Burley. Orders came from headquarters this evening that you are to sail for France the day after tomorrow. You will report in Paris to Colonel Scott at the address in this letter."
"Foiled again," exclaimed Pryor, veiling his real feelings with assumed good humor. "Whenever I'm on the point of nailing a case down, headquarters steps in and calls a halt, as if I were the villain in the piece."
He added sardonically: "What is the use of information fairly breezing into my hands, so long as headquarters' notion of Secret Service is that the only conduct becoming an officer or a gentleman is to keep a secret dark."
"Mr. Pryor, orders are orders! The first duty of an officer of the Secret Service is never to ask questions."
"Quite so, sir," returned Pryor coolly. "And yet the first duty of a crack Secret Service officer is to ask questions all the time."
Major Blair stared at this independent, gifted member of his staff. Nothing daunted, Mark Pryor took his sealed orders, saluted and left.
PART III
JANET ON HER OWN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
I
Earlier in the same day, a special messenger from Claude had brought two notes of regret to the Lorillard tenements, one for Cornelia and one for Janet. A little before evening, these notes were followed by quantities of flowers and fruit, which were for Janet alone. But Cornelia went into ecstasies over the presents and caused the rooms of Number Fifteen to ring with herarpeggiolaughter.
The note to Janet read:
Darling Janet:
Business interests and a promise made long ago make it imperative for me to go to Long Island today. The worst of it is, I shall be away for three days, and how unhappy this makes me, you can't conceive. Six days without you will have loitered by when next we meet! Six endless days away from the miracle of your soft voice and the wonder of your heavenly smile.
I came back from Washington late last night, not knowing that I should be prevented from seeing you today. Even so, I had my car driven, far from its regular course, past the Lorillard houses. How I prayed that a light from your little corner room would invitingly tell me that you were still awake! But all was dark, and I had to be content to let my fancy play around a certain maze of curly bronze hair, two eyes as limpid gray as an Adirondack lake before dawn, and a pair of ruddy lips that smile divinely or talk with so much sense and charm.
You are not like any other girl I have ever known, dearest Janet! I think of you as a rare and delicate flower whose perfume holds my senses as your spirit engrosses my soul.
I want you to have a happy evening, dear girl, despite my absence. Only, every now and then, you are to give a passing thought to me—disconsolate, forlorn impatient to be with you again.
Claude.
Of course, in Claude's absence the party was declared off, all but the supper in the pagoda.
Cornelia read the letter over twice. The second time, she uttered some of the more lyrical passages aloud, rendering them with a faintly exaggerated stress or mock-heroic inflection as the case might be.
"Exquisite!" she carolled, handing the note back to Janet. "A perfect love letter! By what an expert hand!"
Lydia Dyson came in just then and had to be told all about the disappointment. The author of "Brothers and Sisters," in an abbreviated accordion pleated frock, a necklace of jade beads, and very French shoes, looked as professionally Cleopatrish as ever.
"Janet," she said, knowingly, "Claude has gone to Huntington, to that Armstrong girl, Marjorie—the one that was hotfoot after the Earl of Dunbar. She didn't get the Earl, you know. Now they all say she'll marry Claude. I bet she will, too."
"He doesn't love her," protested Janet.
"As if that made any difference! Every man needs a woman to represent him in social life and to advertise the dignity and solidity of his own rooftree. Any woman who can do these things satisfactorily qualifies as a suitable wife. Men, you see, are more conventional than women. Or perhaps I should say, more businesslike."
"Businesslike!" Cornelia interposed. "Say disgusting, and you'll be much nearer the truth. Didn't I tell you, Janet," she continued, "that men think of women in only one way—and that a beastly one?"
"On the contrary, they think of women in two ways," contended Lydia in her drawling Southern tongue. "To a man, all womankind is divided into two groups: the woman who stands for his home, and all the others—the women who stand for his pleasure. The one woman is a necessity; all the others a luxury. Every man gets the first at any cost, and then bids for one or more of the second, if he has the price."
"Don't be bizarre and crude, Lydia," said Cornelia, not relishing this analysis in Janet's presence.
"Crude?" said Lydia, repelling the charge as melodramatically as it was made. "It is not I who am crude. It is man. It is man who divides our whole sex crassly into these two groups. It is man who sees in every woman either a housekeeper or a wanton. It is man who fixes a trade price for affairs of the heart and rates marriages by their market value. Callthiscrude, if you like! Or call it an incurable blindness to the differing blend of vital forces that makes each woman unique. In this respect, how unlike men are to us, who see in every man a new, mystic union of protector, lover and father of our children!"
"The new trinity!" chanted Cornelia, with a significant laugh. "But I'm sure, dear Lydia, that not every woman hasyourgift for discovering this mystic trinity in so many unique specimens of the other sex."
"Dear Cornelia, you flatter me. My only advantage over other women lies in the prudence which caused me to get a husband before I set out to make the discoveries you allude to."
"Don't let us talk about marriage as it exists today," said Cornelia, parrying the blow as best she could. "Marriage is so banal."
"Yes, and so convenient," drawled Lydia, who reluctantly supported her husband in idleness and luxury. "Also, so expensive. Husbands now come dearer than ever before in the history of family life, while lovers never were cheaper."
"Lydia is joking," said Janet, sending her clear, mollifying voice into the breach.
"No, I'm not joking," said Lydia, with the utmost gravity. She lit a cigarette, adding as she did so:
"I'm making hay while the sun shines."
"Does your husband agree with you on this point?" asked Janet, curiously.
"My dear, he's used to me. He takes my word for everything. Also my money. But I'm frank to say that I don't hold with Cornelia's notions about free love. They're too fantastic and impractical. I hold with the French system: Marry first and experiment afterwards. It's not logical, Janet, but it works well. If you experiment first, you are sure to be done out of marriage, and you may even be done out of love."
"Really, Lydia," said Cornelia, now thoroughly incensed. "You must know that Janet believes, as I do, that love is a surrender, not a sale. She isn't offering her affections to the highest bidder."
Janet, intervening, remarked that this was true; but, as she found Lydia's views very interesting, she begged Cornelia to let their visitor have her say.
"Oh, very well," said Cornelia, biting her lip.
"That's right, Janet," said Lydia Dyson, grateful for her support. "I'm sorry to disagree with Cornelia. But in this matter, she's all at sea. Believe it or not, in modern life, love is a commodity for sale, like any other commodity. What else can you expect? Do you know of any other gift in the possession of man, woman or child which is not sold to the highest bidder? Doesn't a playwright subdue his creative faculty to the requirements of the manager who offers the most royalties? Doesn't the novelist or the musician or the engineer do the same in his line? How indeed can they help it in a country where everything is bought and sold, where the greed and gluttony of men put everything under the hammer, from a glass of water to a draught of genius? Why marvel that women have to sell their bodies, when poets and artists have to sell their souls?"
"Take it from me, Lydia," Cornelia burst in, caustically, "when you apply the oratorical powers of Robert Lloyd to the moral principles of Mazie Ross, the product is hard to beat!"
"Cornelia, you wouldn't say spiteful things like that if you only knew the truth about sex relations. I forgive you because you don't."
"IfIonly knew!" said Cornelia. She gave a florid operatic laugh. "Do you really suppose Idon'tknow?"
"No woman does who hasn't been married to a man. Not until she has been chained in wedlock for some time does she see the cloven hoof or feel the mark of the beast, or get her fanciful pictures about love put in a proper perspective. That's one thing marriage does for a woman."
"By your own admission, then," remarked Janet, "Cornelia is right in thinking that the game isn't worth the candle, isn't she?"
"Dearie," said Lydia, with unction, "ask the most wretched wife on earth, and she'll answer: 'Tis better to have wed and lost, than never to have wed at all.'"
II
Cornelia, observing that Janet took Claude's absence with surprising composure, wondered whether it was a case of still waters running deep. It was partly that, but there was another reason. The apparent ease with which Claude had yielded the preference to Marjorie's claim upon his time carried with it an unflattering implication as regards the value he set upon Janet's friendship. To be sure, there was the rapturous love letter. But fine words buttered no parsnips; they pleased the ear but they neither explained Claude's course nor justified it.
Thus Janet was as much nettled as disappointed by her lover's absence. Yet it was not her way to stew in misery. And her control of her feelings was made easier by the pressure of some secretarial work for which she had just been engaged by Howard Madison Grey, the playwright.
Immediately after supper, therefore, Janet left her friends in the Japanese pagoda on the roof, having arranged to spend the evening in Harry Kelly's office in flat Number Thirteen, where she proposed to practice on the athlete's typewriter.
Her object was to "increase her speed" so that her most recent position might be made securer.
Through the Collegiate Bureau, to which Cornelia had introduced her, she had already been given two opportunities in business offices downtown. She had lost them both within a week, her refinement and charm of manner having been voted poor substitutes for the experience that she still lacked.
The fault was not wholly Janet's. Before she left home, she had taken a course in shorthand and typewriting (in the teeth of her mother's opposition) at an Evening High School. It was one of those carefully pasteurized courses for which the American educational system is famous; it was showy, time consuming, and totally useless. But how could Janet have known that high-school stenography was as pitiably inadequate to the practical needs of a modern mercantile office as high-school French or German to the practical needs of a tourist on the Continent?
Not wanting to get into the bad books of the Collegiate Bureau, Janet was anxious to avert a third discharge. Moreover, her post with the playwright had the intrinsic merit of being more congenial, as well as more lucrative than any she had filled before.
Janet was thankful that Cornelia would be occupied with the party, for her efforts to make herself more competent invariably excited her friend to derision. Cornelia, like a true-blue Kipsite, was no devotee of good workmanship. Endowed with the makings of success in any one of half a dozen professions, she had achieved failure in all of them, her inveterate lack of industry and application having botched a promising career in turn as an author, singer, painter, dancer, decorator and dress designer.
A born worker, Janet stood in no danger of imitating Cornelia's business vagaries. She could not have afforded it, anyway. Unlike Cornelia, she had no private income, her only resources being a small bank deposit (a relative's bequest), which was dwindling with alarming rapidity. Thus, inclination and necessity were as one in spurring her on to making a success of her new post as typist and amanuensis for Howard Madison Grey.
III
The keys of the typewriter were going at a merry gallop when Robert Lloyd, who had a desk in Kelly's office, came in.
"What do you mean by breaking the commandments of the Lorillard Tenements?" he said, putting a sheaf of papers on his desk and getting ready to attack them.
"Which commandments, Robert?"
"All ten. The first five prohibit any useful work in the daytime on penalty of loss of caste. The second five prohibit the same at night on penalty of excommunication, if not expulsion."
She laughed and asked him why he hadn't joined Cornelia's supper party in the Japanese pagoda. He explained that he had been detained at a meeting of the Guildsmen's League, of which he was now the organizing secretary. He added that he had brought home a quantity of raw material to be hammered into a tract on Waste in Industry, a job which would take him all night.
They each buckled to the task in hand. Janet liked to work in the same room with Robert, who knew when to be silent as well as when to talk. He treated her like a fellow worker of his own sex, paying her none of that exaggerated show of consideration which most men give to women outside their own family circle. Thus his presence stimulated her and in no wise interfered with the concentration demanded by her typewriting practice. When she reached a good stopping point, she offered to help him. He accepted the offer eagerly and dictated several letters to her.
"A good job," he said, after she had handed him the typed sheets to be signed, "and a quick one, too. You're improving by leaps and bounds. Indeed, you might develop into a 'speed demon,' but for your un-American weakness for accuracy."
"I've got to be accurate. I do all sorts of work every morning, for Mr. Grey, the playwright."
"Grey? The author of 'The Love that Lies' isn't he? The play that ran for two seasons. Is he very exacting?"
"No, but his wife is. She keeps an eagle eye on all the typing that's done for him."
"Why?"
"Why? Well, she serves him as a sort of combination mother, nurse, watchdog, and general superintendent. Just as most wives do."
"And just as most wives will continue to do, until they choose an independent living in preference."
"Do you think that women are solely responsible for the social arrangement by which two distinct things like motherhood and housekeeping are tied indissolubly together?"
"No. And I don't believe that men are solely responsible, either."
"Aren't they?"
"No. Remember, marriage was not always what it is today. In the middle ages, the home was also the place of business, and the wife was her husband's business associate as well as his mate. Later, when business went out of the door, slavery came in through the window. This was not exclusively man's doing. Men and women muddled things up together. Honors are very nearly even on that score."
"Be fair, Robert! Hitherto, men have had all the power."
"Yes, and women have had all the glory. They were every bit as well satisfied to belong to the fair, privileged, and law-evading sex, as men were satisfied to belong to the coarse, responsible, and law-making sex. As soon as the majority of women follow the lead of Lady Cicely in 'Captain Brassbound's Conversion,' that is, as fast as they 'scorn death, spurn fate, and set their hopes above happiness and love,' they will be able to cope with man's supremacy as successfully outside the home as they have already done within it. What is more, they will work their will in public much more openly and honorably than they have so far worked it in private."
"Men are always declaring that women could easily get full independence if only they would go about it in the right way. Clearly, men know the right way and women don't. Cornelia says that if they are so very much cleverer than we are, it is a pity they don't set their wits to work so as to help instead of hindering us in the struggle for equality."
"Never mind what Cornelia says," exclaimed Robert, energetically. "She is crazy on the subject of men; that is why she keeps forever harping on it. One way of doing this is to accuse men of everything evil under the sun, from the creation of God to the invention of the cardboard kitchenette flat. Please don't join her in the vulgar senseless game of pitting one sex against the other."
"You do Cornelia an injustice. She doesn't maintain that all women are angels and all men devils. Nor do I. But suppose some men are angels. I shouldn't care to be a housekeeper for the archangel Gabriel."
Robert hoped that any lady who consented to share Gabriel's bed and board would find the archangel up-to-date and gentlemanly enough to excuse her from washing dishes and scrubbing floors. Why should an archangelic or any other sort of gentleman shortsightedly insist that a talented bride on her way to becoming an excellent banker, merchant, or politician, should transform herself into a mediocre woman-of-all-work? Why should he consider his own bargain bettered by such a questionable transformation?
"On the other hand, Janet," he added boldly, "why should an up-to-date young lady jump from the devil of housekeeping into the deep sea of free love, as I fear you will end by doing if you follow Cornelia's suggestions?"
She knew that he had Claude in mind. But she was unable to take offence at his uncandid candor and his disinterested interest.
"Robert, what a tantalizing mixture of the liberal and the conservative you are!" she exclaimed, refusing to take up his challenge.
"I am merely the child of my age, Janet. I was born with reactionary habits and nursed on radical ideas. All logic counsels me to become an enemy of existing institutions; all instinct drives me to conduct operations within the enemy's camp. I betray under two flags."
"You can't make me believe that. If you were all kinds of a traitor, you wouldn't be such a jolly companion to work with or to talk to. Do you know the most delightful thing about you, Robert?"
"Modesty forbids me to say—but not to hear. Tell me."
"It is the fact that you can behave towards a woman friend as frankly and decently and unsentimentally as you would towards a man friend. You can't imagine what a relief it is to a girl to know one man who'll always treat her man-to-man fashion."
"Will I? Janet, if you were perfectly sure of my future conduct you'd find me an insufferable bore. Besides, no fascinating woman ever wanted to be treated like a man—at least not for long at a time. You won't be the first exception."
"Don't be silly, Robert. If ever I should get married—which Heaven forbid!—it will be to a man like you, one who can work with me without constantly remembering my sex."
"Oh almost any man will be able to do that, as soon as being your husband loses its novelty for him. Still, I'm grateful to you for your well-meant opinion, Janet. I shall try to deserve it by offering you a small business partnership."
He rapidly sketched the plan he had in mind, pointing out that, as only her mornings were engaged by the playwright, Grey, she might help him afternoons with the Guild League's work. He was hard pressed for assistance; the League could just afford a part-time worker; there was a good deal of editing and typewriting which he was sure she could undertake.
Janet begged to be taken on trial. The bargain was struck amid the sounds of merrymaking that came, none too faintly, through the walls of flat Number Fifteen. She remarked that Cornelia's party appeared to have been a huge success after all.
"Yes, it has given birth to the firm of Barr and Lloyd," said Robert, jestingly.
He was aware of the conflict in Janet between the temptations of the love chase and the attraction of the force that moves the sun and the stars. And he fondly believed that this conflict no longer existed in himself. The love of man for woman against the love of life! He had made his decision, she had not.
Two questions remained uppermost in his mind. One was: "Could he capture Janet's great natural talents for his own side, the side, not of the fires of sensuous gratification but of the flame that burns at the heart of the world?" The other was: "Did Janet really want him to act towards her precisely as towards a man?"
Curiously enough, the irrelevance of the second question to the first, did not strike him.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
I
In the days that followed, Janet's morning duty as Mr. Grey's secretary and her afternoon employment as assistant to Robert left her with very little leisure. Such time as remained on her hands she spent chiefly with Cornelia or with Claude.
Neither of these friends exhibited much enthusiasm over Janet's determined effort to earn her own living. Cornelia looked with ill-concealed disfavor on an exhibition of diligence which, besides being foreign to the atmosphere of Kips Bay, used up so much of her protegee's time that the burden of housekeeping in flat Number Fifteen was inevitably shifted to Cornelia's own shoulders. As for Claude, his reaction, equally cool, was governed partly by the scarcity value which now attached itself to Janet's leisure hours, partly also by another reason which he hardly dared to face.
Somewhat daunted by the lukewarm attitude of her friends, Janet nevertheless kept courageously on with the task of making her independence secure.
Howard Madison Grey, the playwright, was then composing his fourth play, "Cleopatra's Needle." His practise was to dictate rapidly to Janet for an hour and a half, after which she was expected to typewrite the sketchy dialogue, changes in grammar and syntax and even in diction being left, as time went on, more and more to her discretion. As the work appealed to her interest as well as to her skill, she despatched it with zest.
Bit by bit, two drawbacks emerged, however. One was Janet's liability to mistakes because of an absorption in the plot, an absorption so deep as to interfere seriously with quick mechanical transcription. The other was Mrs. Howard Madison Grey.
This lady had opened a correspondence with her future husband during the short run of his first play, "The Spice of Life," for the hero of which (a masterful but incorrigible polygamist) she had conceived an unbounded admiration. The correspondence ripened into matrimony, Mrs. Grey bringing her spouse the money and influence that lifted him swiftly to a solid place in the theatrical world.
When his second play, "The Love that Lies," financed by her father, scored a big hit, she noticed that he became the gratified recipient of a good deal of feminine attention. Mindful of the polygamous experiments of his two masterful heroes, she remembered that precaution is the better part of safety. Marriage had considerably modified her point of view, and she now had a conviction that there should be a yawning gulf between the pluralistic imaginings of the dramatist and the monogamic behavior of the husband.
To give this conviction shape, she enframed him in a watchful chaperonage. Chaperonage was not the name she used. She called it, "being a helpmeet."
The helpmeet's first official act was to place Mr. Grey's communications with the world beyond-the-home under a strict censorship. She looked after his correspondence, registered his engagements, and kept in telephonic touch with him when he went to a club or directed a rehearsal. Let the enemy idolaters capture him (if they could) through the barbed-wire entanglements of her devotion!
In the same spirit, she threw cold water on his business-like proposal to do his writing in an office building. Such an environment, she said, would kill the soul of his art. Her substitute was a study, comfortably fitted up in his own home; and there, accordingly, he and Janet were obliged to work.
Mrs. Howard Madison Grey was a woman of fixed opinions. She was firm in the belief that a transcendent artistic talent was lodged in her husband; she was equally firm in the belief that a transcendent executive talent was lodged in herself. On the principle that it pays to specialize she held it to be no more than right that any power or glory acquired by the name of Howard Madison Grey should be exercised by the executive branch of the family. About this opinion she was entirely frank.
"I've made him," she said to Janet, one day. "Why should I let others enjoy the fruit of my labors?"
This was said as much in warning as in confidence. Janet was greatly amused, inasmuch as her feelings toward her employer were unsentimental to the point of prosiness.
None the less, Mrs. Grey's never ending readiness to suspect Janet of a design on her vested interest in Mr. Grey soon became a great bore. It was also somewhat trying to the nerves. At the most unexpected moments, the good lady would shoot in upon her husband and his assistant like a cartridge from a noiseless gun, and explode into embarrassing explanations.
Until, at length, Mr. Grey's perfectly correct and unemotional attitude towards Janet underwent a dangerous change.
II
By the time Claude returned from his visit to Huntington, Janet had already settled down to her new routine. Claude did not seriously object to her morning engagement with Howard Madison Grey, but her afternoon work in Kelly's study—the work she did for Robert's league—this he viewed as an intolerable encroachment on his privileges.
Out of regard for Janet's warm espousal of the cause of woman's independence, he concealed his feelings as best he could. But he used his prodigal gifts without scruple to lay siege to Janet's hours of employment, especially to her afternoons. Four or five days out of seven, on one excuse or another, his imposing car would draw up to the Lorillard tenements, and its owner, handsome, dashing, persuasive, would tempt Janet away from laborious tasks to the delights of an excursion.
In vain did Janet upbraid herself each time she yielded, or school herself diligently against the next occasion. When the next occasion came, she found, as likely as not, that she was as helpless as ever to resist his thrilling voice, his ardent eye, and his magnetic wooing.
In Cornelia, Claude had a subtle and insidious agent on his side. If Janet gave a crushing refusal to one of Claude's incitements to truancy, Cornelia would flash a reason in his favor as unanswerable as a sword. Or if Janet, persuaded, but not convinced, gave signs of an uneasy conscience, Cornelia was always ready to annihilate doubt with some apt quotation (or misquotation) such as "Work no further, pretty sweeting—youth's a stuff will not endure."
Naturally, this spasmodic holiday making was the cause of frequent delays in the performance of the work for the Guildsmen's League. Janet tried to make up for lost time by working late at night, a practice that drew upon her the reproaches of Cornelia who alleged that it interfered with her sleep. Needless to say, Cornelia exhibited no compunction for the serious inconvenience that all this caused Robert. Far from it. She appeared to get a lively satisfaction from seeing his partnership bedeviled and his remonstrances ignored.
As a fact, she feared that Robert's influence over Janet was quietly undermining her own ascendancy. But what was there to justify this fear? Janet's enthusiasm for the free life of the model tenements had not yet abated and her admiration for Cornelia's talents was still very strong. But a straw showed Cornelia which way the wind was blowing.
Janet was gradually but steadily cutting down the amount of housework she did in Flat Number Fifteen!
The terms on which Cornelia chummed up with her successive companions always included an agreement to have the housework done, share and share alike. In practice, the adoring friend took over most of Cornelia's share, at least while the friendship was in its early stages. As time went on and illusions were shattered, the unequal burden was slowly whittled away by the active partner until Cornelia's shoulders stood in grave danger of having a full half of the cleaning and marketing thrust upon them. At this point, she generally unearthed a new adorer as well as excellent reasons for breaking with the old one; and then she started the whole cycle afresh.
Like her predecessor, Janet had begun by doing far more errands, dishes and cooking, than a strictly fair division called for. At first, the respective proportions had stood at about three-quarters for Janet and one-quarter for Cornelia. After a few days of this arrangement, however, Janet had begun so to manipulate matters that her allotment fell rapidly to one-half. And the pendulum had swung gaily on. In fine, within a few months of her arrival, this new convert to modernity had reversed the original proportions so that they now stood at about three-quarters for Cornelia and one-quarter for Janet.
If this was feminism—Cornelia confided to Hercules ("among the faithless, faithful only he")—it was feminism with a vengeance!
The situation was without precedent in the history of the Outlaws of Kips Bay. Even more unprecedented was Cornelia's acceptance of the situation. But this compliance of hers was in no wise dictated by generosity or affection, as some innocents conjectured. Cornelia was simply shrewd enough to see that Janet was the magnet which had drawn back to Number Fifteen its departed splendor and had restored to herself the position of the first lady of the Lorillard tenements, a position she greatly prized.
One question that Cornelia put to Hercules was: Had Janet's repugnance for housework merely kept pace with her growing appetite for women's rights, or was Robert Lloyd at the bottom of all the mischief? How should the mute and glorious Hercules reply to a purely rhetorical query?—Cornelia favored the second explanation, a fact which boded Robert no good.
III
Although Robert had in no sense entered the lists as one of Janet's suitors, Cornelia instituted comparisons between him and Claude, never to the former's advantage. She took occasion to contrast Claude's noble bearing and look of sovereign strength with Robert's simpler and frailer appearance. She dwelt on the cosmopolitan aura that clung to Claude, his subtle atmosphere of wealth, breeding and high social origin, the amalgam of gorgeous qualities that offered so much more than Robert's radical connections and straitened financial circumstances. Her trump card was to call attention to Claude's free and easy response to the Lorillard conception of the rights of women and to offset this picture with an allusion to Robert's prudent reservations on the same subject.
If these comparisons were of an offhand and haphazard sort, nothing was thereby lost in effectiveness. Far from it. They glorified Claude by what was carelessly said: they damaged Robert by what was carefully left unsaid.
Although unaware of the Machiavellian promptings of which she was the innocent cause, Janet became dimly conscious of the conflict already sensed by Robert, the conflict between her work (which was bound up with Robert) and her love affair (which was somehow bound up with Cornelia as well as with Claude). She felt the tug of Robert one way and the tug of Claude and Cornelia the other way, without fully grasping the difference in the two directions or the final significance of either goal.
It was Claude, however, and not Cornelia, that gave Janet's friendship with Robert an importance that none of those concerned attached to it. Claude simply could not understand why Janet should refuse to neglect Robert's League, whenever the work of the League stood in the way of their outings together. Economic independence, the reason advanced by Janet, was a reason he laughed at. The words meant hardly anything to one who from birth had been glutted with the thing itself. Surely a few beggarly dollars, more or less, did not adequately account for Janet's readiness to cloister herself in Kelly's bare and sunless study! Yet what other motive could there be, if not one of tender feeling on Robert's part, or soft pity on hers?
Still, the rivalry that actually sprang up between the two young men was not a rivalry in love, at least not in Robert's sense of the word.
For Robert was no fool. He was soon convinced that Claude and Janet had surrendered unconditionally to a mutual infatuation which he was in no position to challenge. Yet he had a magnetism of his own, a magnetism of the spirit rather than of the flesh. To this magnetism Janet responded. Why should he not claim the same title to Janet's response in the one sphere that Claude laid claim to in the other?
At all events, he meant to fight for what he considered his rights, regardless of Claude's frowns or vanishing friendship.
Between the two, Janet had a hard time of it. Claude professed to accept free love as a new and improved social principle, and praised her for holding it; yet he grew unmanageable the moment she gave the least hint of exercising this freedom in connection with any other man than himself. On the other hand, Robert rejected free love as a pernicious Greenwich Village or Lorillard tenement eccentricity, and even severely scolded her for entertaining it; yet his actions showed that she might love as many different men as madly as she pleased, without causing his friendship for her to undergo any really radical change.
To cap the oddity of this contrast, she found that Robert's unlimited tolerance, though socially much the more agreeable attitude, was not without its suggestion of tepidity of sentiment, a suggestion which piqued her not a little.
The rivalry, such as it was, followed a very human course. Robert, as an outgrowth of his work with Janet took to promoting her education in contemporary thought and political theory. Claude, not to be behindhand, made the most of his special knowledge of art as well as of his wide first-hand acquaintance with the men and events that figured picturesquely in the ruling social and political rings of Washington and New York. In the matter of books, Claude generally took the cue from Robert. The latter would lend her works by Shaw, Wells, Bennett, Galsworthy, Bertrand Russell, Anatole France, Barbusse, Romaine Rolland; Claude would follow suit with the latest fiction by Robert W. Chambers or Rupert Hughes, his authors ranging as high as Rudyard Kipling, Maeterlinck or Barrie. One would take her to a symphony concert in Carnegie Hall, the other to a Sunday Pop in the Hippodrome. Robert held out invitations to a Theater Guild's play by Masefield or Andreyev, Claude would counter with an evening at a revival of Florodora or San Toy. If Janet accompanied Robert to a Labor Mass Meeting at Cooper Union or to a radical Cameraderie at the Civic Club, she was sure, soon after, to be escorted by Claude to a Titta Ruffo recital in Aeolian Hall or to a midnight cabaret in Moloch's Den off Sheridan Square.
To Janet, who had broken with the Barrs of Brooklyn and who was as much on pleasure as on emancipation bent, it was not Robert's offer that usually seemed the happier one.
Not the least of Claude's advantages was the fact that he moved in Kips Bay as a representative of the great forces of finance and fashion. He reflected the high lights of that glittering social system of which he was a favorite child. Direct and intimate was his contact with the celebrities of the day—the bankers and politicians, the diplomats and society leaders, the cabinet set in Washington, and the inner opera box set in New York. These were his real people; the Lorillarders were merely the people among whom he was sowing his radical wild oats.
In short, Claude was one of the persons "in the know." He knew a good deal more about the personages whose names were on everybody's tongues than the public knew or the newspapers thought fit to print. He could tell about the opera soprano of the first magnitude whose attacks of hysterical jealousy would cause the curtain to be held down between the acts for forty minutes, while the poor director tore his hair in desperation. He could laugh at the "mystery" of the appointment of a certain mediocre woman teacher to a superintendency in the city's schools, the mystery vanishing upon his inside story of how the lady in question "had been good" to Big Jim Connolly, a local political boss. And he could explain the connection between the failure to float a certain foreign loan and the omission of a well-known financier's wife from the group of guests invited to meet the Prince of Wales.
Thus Claude Fontaine, whose handsome face and dashing airs would have made him an idol in almost any society, enchanted his fellow Outlaws with the aroma clinging to him from the world of fashion and the glimpses he afforded into the secret workings of the world of power. Small wonder that to Janet, as to the others, Claude was bathed in a romantic glamor.
By contrast with Claude, Robert seemed to lead a decidedly work-a-day or humdrum life. Especially so, since his newspaper employment had been cut off and his active time given up to the League of Guildsmen. As far as Janet could see, Robert's entire thought and energy were absorbed by an overwhelming interest in the Labor movement. For though he had plenty of esthetic diversions, she noticed that the books he read, the music he delighted in, and the pictures he admired were all in some way expressive of souls in bondage, aspiring to freedom.
Now for the time being, Janet wanted to forget about the lowly and the oppressed. She had the same feeling towards "causes" and "reforms" that a released convict has towards societies for Improving the Condition of Prisoners on Parole.
It must not be supposed that Janet took an unsympathetic view of the movements for human freedom which were convulsing society after the Great War. She was a sincere convert to the principle of woman's equality and she made an honest effort to be open-minded to the theories that Robert expounded. But her heart was not in theories. Her pulse refused to quicken when Robert told her of the new social cleavage which was fast ranging the useful active people on one side, and the parasitic profiteering people on the other. In common with a great many of her contemporaries, she sat heedlessly on a volcano, enchanted by the twinkle of the stars.
What if Robertdidprove up to the hilt that the world was in the birth throes of a new social order! Youth must have its glamor. And there is no glamor about birth throes, not even about the birth throes of a new world.
Besides, the old social alignment in which princes of the purple and masters of the gold ruled in pomp or circumstance over the toilers of the factory, the office and the soil—this old alignment was much more familiar to poor Janet (and to everybody else) than the new one predicted. Literature and legend, the school room, the pulpit and the press—all the regular organs of education, in fact—had mesmerized her into viewing the practical politics and the dominant economics of the day as splendors and glories without parallel. Was the psychology of a lifetime to be uprooted or transformed by a few weeks of unconventional conduct in a Kips Bay tenement, or even by a brief high-tension course of reading in the works of Samuel Butler, Bernard Shaw, Romaine Rolland and other prophets of the life to come?
Clearly not. And so when Claude came with his many-colored news from the seats of the mighty, he found it easy to engross and transport Janet. But when Robert talked to her of strikes, trade unions and labor congresses, he left her bewildered or mystified, though seldom cold. In short, the rivalry even for the mind of Janet was a rather one-sided affair, Claude, the darling of the gods, holding an immense initial advantage over Robert, the advocate of rebel causes.