CHAPTER SEVENTEENIOn an afternoon late in May, Claude took Janet to see the boat race between Yale and Pennsylvania over the so-called American Henley course on the Schuylkill. Nature was in one of her soft and sober moods. The weather was mild, the sky lightly overcast, and the colors of the landscape as well as of the living things upon it were toned down to various shades of slate, dove or lavender, all blending into the serious beauty of a dominant pearl gray.After the race, while the crowds were melting away, the two lovers walked into the pathway along the river. Perhaps in response to the pallid coloring around, Claude became a prey to melancholy thoughts; and the day, the mood and the girl impelled him to confidences about the marriage with Marjorie Armstrong into which he felt himself being forced.Janet made an ideal confidante. The exercise of putting herself sympathetically into other people's shoes was a joy to her. Not only did she see herself as others saw her; she had the rarer gift of seeing others as she saw herself. In doing so, she could leave her own desires and feelings entirely out of the prospect. Thus, the story of Claude and Marjorie, like any other human drama, appealed to her judgment on its merits. Nor did she disturb Claude with the intrusion of any vulgar jealousy because the lover was her own lover and the woman was a rival woman.The narrative began with the tenderness Claude had conceived for Marjorie some two years before. He told Janet how the proud beauty had first encouraged him and then, with unexampled coolness, had allowed the Earl of Dunbar to displace him in her favor. Later the Earl in his turn had jilted Marjorie. Could he be asked to care for her after such an ill-starred episode?Unluckily, he was by now far the most desirable match among the young men whose names she consented to put on her list of eligibles. In this preference she had her father's hearty support. Naturally. For Mr. Armstrong was a slave of every wish she framed. Meanwhile, his own father had the most urgent private reasons for promoting the Armstrong project."You see my horrible position," he said. "I'm expected to marry a girl I don't love in order to get my father out of a bad box. It's like a story of the eighteenth century; only, in those happy days, it was the daughter, not the son, who had to pull the chestnuts out of the fire.""But surely, Claude, not all the king's horses nor all the king's men cancompelyou to marry if you don't want to.""No, but compulsion isn't the only form of coercion in the world, Janet. Nor even the worst. Can you think what it means to have everybody in your setexpectingyou to do a certain thing?""Expecting you?""Yes, it sounds fantastic. But it would sound real enough if once you had a taste of it. They show their expectations by word and deed, by sign and innuendo. They show it constantly, mercilessly, in a hundred small and super-subtle ways. I tell you, Janet, concerted expectation is the strongest form of pressure that can be brought to bear upon a man. It can bring about miracles. It can move mountains. Only a hero or a coward can resist it.""I suppose it's like the pressure of public opinion or of one's family," she said, her soft clarinet tones pouring balm on his feelings. "I know what family pressure means. I am so sorry for you, Claude, sorry from my heart.""I love you for saying that, Janet! I love you for your adorable pity. I love you for being so unlike Marjorie. She has her good points; but fellow feeling is not one of them. You see, her social ambition and the ease with which she can gratify her every wish have quite dried up the tender places in her heart. She has no pity left in her nature. And pity is always the essential thing in a woman's soul."They sat down on a grassy slope in a secluded corner of the park. In a lyrical mood, Claude pointed to the sun just then flaring out and splashing a thousand colors on the livid sky."Look, Janet," he said, "how the whole earth thrills to its warm radiance! Just as everyone thrills to your divine gift of sympathy."He was lying on the ground with his head in her lap, while her hand was gently stroking his curly hair."I am so happy to be in this spot with you, Claude, and to hear from your lips the things that only you can say. When you make love to me, I feel as though I were in some Enchanted Valley with a prince from theArabian Nights.""Yes, and he a miracle of discretion, too!""A miracle of indiscretion, rather!" said Janet, as he drew her head down to his, kissed her once and kissed her again.He soon became pensive, however. Pursuing his former train of thought, he declared that if he remained in New York, "public expectation" would certainly drive him into the dreaded marriage with Marjorie. There was only one avenue of escape. That was to go abroad and stay out of harm's way until Marjorie should choose some one else as in due time she was bound to do."But the force that holds me back," he said, "is far stronger than the one that bids me go. I can't live without you, Janet, darling.""Then I suppose you'll have to take me along," she said, bending low over him.Their lips met in a sustained and ardent kiss."No," he said. "I dare not assume a responsibility so great.""If I go with you," she said quietly, "I shall go on my own responsibility.""Janet, it would be too wonderful. Don't let me think of it, or my good resolutions will stand no firmer than a flag in a strong wind. But you are an angel to offer to come. You do love me then, very, very much?""What a question, Claude!""Well, you keep a pretty tight rein on your feelings, darling," he said, with the least trace of reproach. "Tender and true you are, I know," he added. "But you don't say any of the things that girls say when their hearts are in the grip of a wild, extravagant passion. Do you know that you have never even asked me once whether I really and truly and madly love you?""Whetheryouloveme?""Yes, that is the question girls ask their lovers over and over again.""Well, Claude, the important thing to me is thatIloveyou.""Do you mean to say, Janet, that you don't care whether I love you or not?""I don't mean that. But what I care about most is that you are the sort of man whomIcan love. That is the thing that makes me happy. It's delightful, of course, to know that you love me in return. Still, if you didn't love me, I don't think I should be in hopeless misery. If you turned out to be different from what I dreamed you were, so different that I could no longer love you, then I should be heart-broken."To Claude, this seemed a bitter-sweet reply. More sweet than bitter, however, and so he did not contest it.What a puzzling girl she was, he thought. So sensible and yet so imprudent. And totally devoid of the instinct that induces most women to exploit the amorous moment. Claude could not get over it. Any other girl would have made the most of his present mood, the mood in which he was ready to think the world well lost for love. When the blood is hot, the tongue is prodigal of vows. Claude, at all events, was willing to promise anything, especially as he was still in pursuit, and as his promises were not to mature until he was in possession.Yet Janet asked absolutely nothing! This surrender, as open-handed as it was confiding, moved him to compunction. He sat up and put his arms around her. Her head buried in his shoulder had the effect of seeking refuge there. And she looked so trusting, so helpless, so innocent, that a great love for her welled up in his heart. Ought he not to do the noble, the chivalrous thing?"Look here, Janet," he said, with the air of Sir Philip Sidney offering his last drink of water to another wounded soldier on the battle field, "why couldn't we be married? My father would get over it in time.""Yes, your father might. Butwemight not.""No, no, dearest. You mustn't say that. My love is not a thing of whims and fancies. I shall love you till life itself has passed away.""Then what difference does it make whether we get married or not," she said.With infinite tact, she refrained from accepting his lofty pledge of eternal constancy. She also refrained from a similar commitment of her own affections."Don't misunderstand me, Janet," he said, as sadly as if her disagreement cut him to the soul. "I merely felt in honor bound to offer to marry you. I know better than you do what an unconventional step means."All the more reason why I should learn by experience, then. No, Claude. If I married you, I'm sure I should soon stop loving you. The thought that you had a legal claim on my affection would be enough to kill it.""Oh, you mustn't take the law so seriously, darling. Nobody does, nowadays.""I know nothing about the law, Claude," she said, repudiating all jurisprudence with one of her eloquent gestures. "Do you want us to become a careworn, broken-spirited, isolated married couple, hating all the other careworn, broken-spirited, isolated married couples of the western world? Do you want me to grow to hate and despise you as my mother hates and despises my father, as so many wives appear secretly to hate and despise their husbands?""How can you say such monstrous things, Janet?""How can you pretend to believe that love should be free?" she retorted."Well," he replied, "I admit there's a lot in what you say. I suppose," he added with a fine masculine irrelevance, "that we can always change our minds and get married later on if we choose to."He could not fully persuade himself that Janet really believed in free love. Nevertheless, he was hugely relieved to learn that, whatever her motive might be, she had no ulterior matrimonial designs on him. If only he could have suppressed a sneaking fear that he was "taking advantage" of Janet, as he called it, or satisfied himself that he was legitimately taking the good the gods provided, as the Outlaws boldly called a step of this sort!But Claude's Bohemianism was only skin-deep. Like a good many Bohemians, he discarded traditional forms, costly conventions and social restrictions, chiefly in order to extract from social intercourse and philandering, the greatest amount of pleasure with the smallest amount of risk. Being a Bohemian was merely a sybaritic pastime for him.In short, Claude lacked the courage of his experiments. The only morality he genuinely believed in was the current morality (and immorality) of his peers. Thus loose love could be allowed to have a certain place in the scheme of things, but free love, as an avowed principle, was incontestably wrong. Claude might humor the model tenementers to the extent of using their free-love propaganda for his own ends. At heart, however, he was profoundly shocked by Janet's stubborn contention that her views of marriage, though glaringly heterodox, were morally sound.As Claude had worked it out, there were two ways of getting past the limitations of a social institution. One was to support the institution while sneaking over the fences and enjoying the secret breach of law as a delightful bit of "living in sin." The other way was to defy the institution by boldly climbing over the fences and asserting the sin to be a virtue. Surely, the first was the pleasanter, the wiser, nay, the more ethical proceeding!Of course Claude did not reason the distinction out as clearly as this. But he felt its force and, for his part, was resolved to act upon it. However, he did not attempt to convert Janet to his way of thinking. That would have been fraught with peril to the smoothness of their future relations. Besides, a long didactic argument would have spoiled the tender passages in the journey home. And Claude never encouraged his conscience to make a martyr of him.IIWhen they got back to Kips Bay, they found Cornelia and her Hercules in Number Fifteen. Harry Kelly, silent and worshipful, was washing the accumulated dishes of the day, in a supreme exhibition of devotion. His inamorata, ensconced in state in her favorite armchair, was tacking a blue denim smock together with bits of fancy colored worsteds.She announced her intention of marching in the parade of the Overalls Economy Club, an organization recently formed to protest against the high cost of living.Robert, it appeared, had greeted this announcement with gibes and with an ironic contrast between her expenditure of time and her economy of money. Nor had he confined his sarcasm to her."What do you suppose Cato said when I told him about the parade?" Cornelia retailed vindictively. "He said, 'I suppose Claude will march, too? He will have no difficulty in getting the right kind of uniform. In the Times this morning, a Fifth Avenue store advertises overalls with solid gold buckles from fifty dollars up.'""There's a typical reformer for you," said Claude, bitterly. "Always shying bricks at the very people that want to build with them."Hereupon, Cornelia, in the role of a loyal though long-suffering friend of Robert's, undertook to extenuate his conduct. She observed that he had doubtless been made angry because his work was retarded by Janet's absences. The best proof of his state of mind was a threat he had made to engage another secretary."I wish he would," said Claude, compressing his lips, while Janet tried not to look conscience-stricken."Of course he doesn't in the least mean to part with Araminta," continued Cornelia, wallowing in the emotional effect of her news. "Not he. Cato knows a good thing when he sees it. But he doesn't approve of Janet's parties with you, Lothario. The principle is wrong, he claims.""The principle is wrong!" cried both Claude and Janet with very different inflections.Cornelia laughed musically up and down the scale."Just fancy what he said: 'A friendship which doesn't grow spontaneously out of joint partnership in work is built on quicksands.'""He's a fanatic," said Harry Kelly, breaking his silence and one of Cornelia's saucers in the violence of his feelings."Nonsense, Hercules," she said, in a tone that poured contempt on his vehemence. "He has simply let all the soft places grow in his head and all the hard places in his heart."Janet went into the next room to hang up her hat and coat. Claude followed her."I think Robert's ideas are getting more and more unbalanced," he said, dictatorially. "If I were you, Janet, I'd finish up my work with him at once.""It takes two to break a bargain, Claude.""Well, you might at least keep your relations with him on a strictly business footing—and as little of that as possible."He ignored her slight mutinous gesture."He's a difficult man to get along with," he went on. "Look how even Hutchins Burley had to fire him. And as if his dismissal from theChroniclewere not bad enough, he joins these Guildsmen people who are trying to wreck the very basis of modern society. That has just about dished him, as far as the Outlaws are concerned. They all cut him now."A new imperiousness crept into his voice as he added:"I wish that, for my sake, you would not be seen going about with him, ever."He accepted her silence as an evidence of tacit consent.IIIThe very next afternoon, before a full hour's writing and typing had been done, Robert amazed Janet by proposing that they suspend work and take a walk."I want particularly to talk to you," he said."About what?""About love," said Robert, gravely.What girl could resist an invitation like that? Despite Claude's stern admonition, Janet did not wait to be urged.They walked near the East River towards the gas-house district, and presently turned into a recreation pier which was almost deserted. Clearly, Robert was looking for a very private and sequestered corner.On the way, every topic was broached except the one that Robert had advanced as an excuse for truancy. Did suspense sharpen Janet's anticipation? No. Janet was curious, but not consumedly so. She had a marvelous power of attracting confidences and was quite used to having young men, who had known her only a few days, confide in her their love affairs, their religious or financial troubles, and indeed the whole history of their lives. True, Robert might be in love, not with another girl but with herself. Having no false modesty, Janet entertained the suspicion for a moment. Only for a moment, however. For the presumption against it seemed conclusive.Meanwhile, they walked happily along, until Robert found the spot that suited him. This was at the end of the pier farthest from the street. No watchman being in sight, they sat down on a great terminal beam and let their legs swing over the green and choppy water.The Janet who laughed and chatted with Robert was a very different girl from the Janet who was accustomed to hang romantically on Claude's lips. Nothing, of course, could equal the magnetism of Claude or match the fire and glory of their mutual passion. Still, in Claude's presence she seemed constantly to be playing up to some magnificent part; she felt like a cross between, say, the Lady of Shalott and the ecstatic lady in the Song of Songs. Without denying that it was a rapturous game, a game well worth the candle, she found it a trifle exhausting.With Robert, on the other hand, the high-tension, party-dress Janet could be put away (so to speak) and the simple, work-a-day, blouse-and-skirt Janet substituted. Now Janet was the kind of girl who always looked her worst in her best things and was most herself when least dressed up. Naturally, she did not apply this symbol to her two friendships. Being a young, rebellious, and infatuated young lady, how could she? Besides, had she done so, she might have reasoned the matter out to a disturbing conclusion."Well, Robert," she said, cheerily. "Begin, and tell me all that's in your heart of hearts.""It's not my heart I mean to talk about. It's yours.""Mine! What an idea! Why, my heart's in the pink of condition. Positively no inspection needed.'Oh my heart is a free and a fetterless thing,A wave of the ocean, a bird on the wing.'I don't mean to say that it's a flighty object, though," she added, with a smile."No, if it were, it would be much easier to talk to you about it," said Robert."What do you mean?""Well, a whole century separates the Janet I first knew—the Janet who hesitated to go to a picture play on the Sabbath—from the Janet who reads Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell, attends labor meetings on Sundays, and catches each newest whiff of radical opinion. The change takes one's breath away.""You admit it's a change for the better, don't you?""In every way but one.""Which one?""You have taken Cornelia too seriously. Her views on sex are morbid and totally unsuited for adoption by a healthy, inexperienced girl.""Now, Robert, please don't begin that over again. You've said it all before.""I shall say it and say it again until I've convinced you. Even you must admit that Cornelia has a chronic grudge against men.""Well, it isn't so unnatural, after her unhappy love affair, is it?""Precisely. As a result of that love affair, all her sex emotions are inverted. She sublimates her sex into acts of spite, usually unconscious acts. For instance, she is subtly encouraging you to run off with Claude as she ran off with Percival Houghton. Forgive me for mentioning it, Janet. But I can't bear to see you duped. Believe me, if you followed her example, with an equally unhappy result, she would like nothing better.""Claude is not in the least like Percival Houghton," said Janet coldly. "Whatever else he may be, he isn't a cad.""Of course he isn't," Robert hastened to say."Then stop making horrid comparisons. It is such an easy thing to do. Suppose I were to say that you are like an X-ray machine, finding out all that is bad in people, while Claude is like a magnet drawing out all that is good in them. What would you say to that comparison?""I should accept it," replied Robert, with a smile. "The superiority of the X-ray in point of social usefulness is, I think, beyond dispute.""Oh, with you social usefulness is everything, and personal happiness nothing!""Suppose Claude is a magnet," he went on, unheeding her exclamation. "Is that a good reason for flying into his arms, like a willless iron filing, onhisterms instead of on your own?""On my terms! What do you mean?""Janet, my friendship will be worse than useless to you unless I can tell you exactly what is in my mind. I either do that or hold my peace forever. Will you let me speak frankly?""Will I let the rain fall or the sun shine? I'd like to see the person who could stop you from speaking frankly. But please don't attack Claude.""Have no fear. I don't intend to play the part of the heroine's second friend confidentially warning her against the first. What I want to urge, with all the force I can, is this: if you mean to live with Claude, why not marry him?""Quite apart from my own preferences in the matter, Robert, how do you know that Claude wants to marry?""Oh, no doubt he doesn't want to. In the eyes of the modern man, marriages made in Heaven are as popular as canned beef made in America. But what of that? Claude is young, self-willed, accustomed to get his own way, and—he worships you. And you—well, I have no superlatives to do justice to the case. You are you. You could marry him in a twinkling if you played your cards right."Janet laughed."Oh, the heart is a free and a fetterless thing—" she sang, saucily."Stop coquetting like Cornelia," he remonstrated. "You are making it totally impossible for me to talk rationally. Are you a butterfly or a woman? Am I discussing your glorious voice or your precarious future? Be serious.""How can I be serious when you ask me to be a bargain hunter in hearts and coronets?""Now you're acting like one of Marie Corelli's heroines, Janet!""Thank you. Why are you so anxious to have me get married?""Because I think that your fine spirit of independence and your divine gift of imagination ought not lightly to be wasted. Because I think, in short, that you have a nobler purpose in the world than mere loving or being loved.""Than mere loving!""Yes. The world was not made for the gratification of our own feelings.""So you are fond of saying, Robert. But, as a matter of fact, I'm not trying to gratify my feelings. I'm trying to carry out my principles.""The world isn't a grindstone to sharpen our principles on, either," said Robert, with prompt conclusiveness."From watching you, I rather thought it was," said Janet, stung into sudden irony.There was a pause. He tried to take her hand, but she drew it sharply away, with difficulty repressing her tears. After a while, he began again, with impetuous candor:"Janet, don't go into this adventure with your eyes shut. Remember, you can't give yourself up to an experiment in free love without giving up everything else. That is the strongest argument against the step. All your gifts, all your energy, all your purpose will be consumed in explaining, defending, evading. Your whole life will be one long course of swallowing the consequences and warding off criticism. Do you wish to be a life-long martyr to free love, like Cornelia?""I've never posed as a martyr to anything—not even to drink," said Janet, recovering her good humor."Then why become one? Martyrdom is all very well for fanatics like your mother who enjoy it, or for idlers like Cornelia who have nothing better to do. But you are neither a fanatic nor an idler; you are a worker.""But when one believes that an institution has served its turn, isn't it one's duty to destroy it?""Institutions are never destroyed. They are sometimes transformed, as tadpoles are into frogs.""Are you sure? Cornelia says that every free union is a mine exploded beneath marriage. I think she's right.""A mine! Better call it a squib, Janet. And all the trouble you invite will be like laying a long and elaborate fuse to ignite the squib.""Oh, you have no ideals left!" she cried, revolted at this demolition of her romantic conceptions."I have a little common sense left," he answered. "We can't escape the customs or the institutions of our time, however much we may disbelieve in them. Flying in the face of a decadent institution does not destroy it. It only gives it a new lease of life by putting the props of public sympathy and traditional morality at the disposal of its defenders. Look at the case of George Eliot. Did her entirely justifiable free union help the cause of marriage reform? No. It actually turned her into a defender of the very institution she had set out to challenge.""What a very wise young man; this wise young man must be," she said, parodying a line of Gilbert's."No side-tracking! Promise me you'll turn the matter over in your mind.""In my mind? Yes. But what about my heart?" she said. And with dancing eyes she sang:"'Oh, the heart is a free and a fetterless thing,A wave of the ocean, a bird on the wing.'"Her voice turned his blood to paradisaical currents."If you sing that again, I shall kiss you on the spot, in public or out of it," said the tormented young man."Why, Robert, what abysses of passion lurk hidden in you!" she exclaimed mockingly. "I believe you said you'd always treat me just like a man. Do you talk like this to your male chums?" Then demurely: "We'd better go home at once."On the way home, she resumed the discussion. In a more earnest tone than before, she thanked him for taking so much trouble over her and promised to think about his point of view very carefully. She insisted, however, that his reasoning had not convinced her. She and Claude appeared very well suited to each other now, but who could tell what changes a few years might not bring forth?"True," said Robert. "But the future is dark to us in other matters besides marriage. As things stand now, Claude couldn't do better, and you might do worse. And if the very worst happened, you could get a divorce."She replied by reminding him that she and Claude were not the kind of people who lightly repudiated their ties or the responsibilities that grew out of them. Consequently, once married, they would probably remain so for life. In any event, if she changed her mind, it would be infinitely simpler to do so under the other plan."Say I grew tired of Claude, for instance, and quite suddenly wanted you," she said with a mischievous look."Well, it couldn't be done," said Robert, decisively, her complacent assumption jarring his pride."Oh, couldn't it?" She flashed him a challenging glance."Not in my case," he returned, in clipped tones. "Free love is the most expensive luxury in the world. Only the very rich or the unambitious can pay for it. As for me, I never can have anything to do either with free love or with a woman who has had a free lover. It would ruin all my plans."Janet replied with the faintest shrug, whereat all his self-assertion promptly went bang. Neither yielded a point; but they divined each other's feelings and, as they walked on, steered the conversation into lighter channels until they got back to the Lorillard tenements.Standing in the dark hallway at the foot of the stairs, Janet told him with a touch of impishness that his logic had been irresistible."Has it? It hasn't touched your heart," he said, somewhat dolefully."Ah, well, the heart is a free and a fetterless thing—"As Janet darted up the stairs, the door of an apartment opened overhead, and she fancied she heard Claude's voice.CHAPTER EIGHTEENIOn her own floor, she halted and, with Robert's kiss still burning on her lips, waited until he had turned into Kelly's flat. Then she opened the door of Number Fifteen.Sure enough, Claude was there, full of resentment at her absence on a jaunt with Robert. She thanked her stars that Robert's visible presence could not fan the flame. Even so, Claude acted badly enough. He was in a vertigo of jealousy, and at small pains to hide the fact.At first, Janet tried to carry the matter off lightly, and strove to mollify him by saying that Robert had asked her to consider a very serious problem. She was a little conscience-stricken over this fib, but believed it the best thing to say. She pointed out that while it was with Robert that she worked, it was with Claude, after all, that she played.At this Cornelia executed an unnecessarily tuneful laugh."There's nothing like a man's problem for disarranging a girl's hair," she observed, dropping the inevitable dress she was busy with. "Araminta, your hat's a sight! Do look at yourself in the glass."Naturally, Claude was more furious than ever. He sulked in silence whilst rebuffing the advances that Janet made. Finally, maddened by Cornelia's pin-prick innuendoes, he strode out, flashing a terrible look at Janet as he did so.IIWhen will the play of Othello be absolutely unintelligible? Perhaps five hundred years from now or, let us hope, sooner. Surely, at some distant date, the private ownership of a woman by a man or of a man by a woman will seem as barbarous as the rings our ancestors stuck through their noses or as unfashionable as the three hundred concubines of Solomon. And the jealous passions arising from this ownership will be classed with rage, hysteria and other forms of emotional disease or pathological bad manners.Indeed, do not the best people already look upon a pronounced fit of jealousy as an exhibition of arrested development or mental inferiority? If the jealous man is not destroyed, root and branch, by the refuse-reduction plant of ridicule, he will be rendered obsolete and perhaps extinct by the spread of the conviction that, after a human being has discharged his obligations to himself and his obligations to the community, he owes no other personal allegiance whatever.Herself singularly free from jealousy, Janet was in direct touch with three persons whom the malady afflicted sorely. Besides the case of Claude, she had on her hands the case of Mrs. Howard Madison Grey in business, and the case of Cornelia at home.Cornelia, who was no believer in keeping her emotions hermetically sealed, made her frame of mind patent to Janet on an unforgetable occasion. It was not the first, nor was it to be the last, of a series of blows, which were fast converting Janet to the belief that her own opinion of Cornelia was founded on an illusion, whilst Robert's opinion was the correct one.For some time past it had been Harry Kelly's practice to come into Number Fifteen before breakfast and put the two girls "through their paces," as he called the light drill he prescribed for them. Always on the lookout for some new outlet for his tremendous supply of energy, the physical culture expert had hit on the scheme of improving Cornelia's bad health by reforming her bodily habits. Cornelia, who considered early rising bad form and breathing exercises a superstition, was for a prompt veto of the scheme, but Janet's cordial support of it saved the day.So, early in the morning of the day after Claude's wrathful departure, Kelly, in gymnasium garb, made his entrance as usual. The athlete was not a man of many words. Words, after all, were not needed in his case, since, as he strode along with the nervous muscularity of a Rodin statue, his lithe, powerful body proclaimed his mission to all the world."Wake up, girls," he called out, "and fill your bellies with the good south wind."The unvarnished word always moved Cornelia to a protesting shriek and a well-trilled "How do you do!" Kelly enjoyed both immensely.After throwing the windows in the sitting room wide open, he paced the floor like a panther in his den. Janet was the first to appear. She was still drowsy, and her short dark hair, in tight somnolent curls, hung down her back. She wore a short-skirted bathing suit, a custom Kelly held in high regard for the business in hand.As she toddled sleepily towards the athlete, the energy pent up in his frame unbottled itself on the impulse of the moment. Catching her at the waist, he lifted her high up in the air and spun her around three times as if she were a featherweight. Then, clasping her lightly by shoulder and leg, he set her tenderly down again."Do it again, Hercules, do!" articulated Cornelia, coming in just at the close of this maneuver, whilst Janet, still laughing and protesting, was in the act of resuming control of her well-shaped limbs.But as there was that in Cornelia's eye which belied her command, Kelly was careful to make no move to execute it.Cornelia's golden hair was done up on her head in a makeshift coil, she herself being enveloped in a long kimono that trailed to the ground. Kelly looked at this garment without ecstasy, a fact that did not escape the wearer's observation."Hercules," she commanded peevishly, "you might close this window near me. I've got a very bad headache from too little sleep. Do you want me to catch my death of cold, too?"He complied with all haste, and then pitched into his calisthenics, Janet joining him with gusto. Cornelia followed suit, though in a very languid spirit; and soon she stopped altogether, on the pretext of unusual weakness.Her chilly aloofness cut the period short. It was now time to prepare breakfast, a task theoretically shared by all four, including Robert, who was unaccountably late this morning. Habitually, three of them did the actual work while Cornelia "directed," a process which, she firmly believed, enabled the others to save time. But, as Robert sardonically put it, "Cornelia's method of showing us a short cut is to send us round Robin Hood's barn."It was Kelly's special business to convert a part of the kitchen into a dining room, and thereafter to make the toast. He had just reached this stage, when Cornelia took another hand in the proceedings."Go down and get the letters for me, Hercules," she said suddenly, relieving him of the toaster."Why, what's the hurry? Rob always gets them after breakfast.""Oh, do let Harry make the toast," said Janet, chiming in with him. She, too, had thought of the letters, and was in no hurry to bid the devil good morning. "Nobody can eat toast the way you make it, Cornelia. And Robert is sure to—""No doubt Robert will do exactly asyoutell him," said Cornelia, interrupting her sweetly. "Please let Harry do asItell him. Hercules, gonow, please. I have a notion there'll be some famous news for me this morning."Kelly, having been her devoted (and despised) slave since the day he ejected Hutchins Burley, obeyed submissively by mere force of habit. He ran down the three flights of stairs and in a very short time came back again with a single letter.It was for Janet from Claude, and sarcasm was its prevailing tone.The writer began by deploring his fatuous inability to remain away from her side. He pointed out that, as his chance visits might take her by surprise or catch her off guard, not to say worry her into thinking of promises she had no mind to keep, he should take steps to rid her of his manifestly superfluous attentions. He had accordingly arranged to spend some time with his friends the Armstrongs, in Huntington. By doing so he should at least please his father, which was better than nothing, certainly better than not pleasing either himself or her.In short, it was just such a petulant note as a spoiled woman's darling like Claude might be expected to write. Having always received complete submission from women, he regarded the least opposition to his self-indulgence as outrageous and even wicked or perhaps blasphemous.The depth and passion of Janet's nature were not easily stirred, but this letter startled her out of her usual lightheartedness. She sat down in a chair by the window and looked out fixedly, in an effort to repress her feelings. Kelly, sympathetic and bewildered, gave vent to sundry heartening murmurs and exclamations; and, as these accomplished little, he moved dishes attractively and hopefully around Janet's empty place.From her point of vantage at the table, Cornelia surveyed her handiwork with a pious simulation of sadness, surveyed it, and found that it was not so bad.Janet blue and still, Kelly heavily anxious, Cornelia sweetly sanctimonious, such was the curious tableau that Robert saw when he came in, his slender frame and vigorous movements forming a direct contrast to the static spectacle before him."Now, see what you've done, Cato!" declaimed Cornelia, in one of those complacent greetings which only she could make sublime.She fluttered Claude's note aloft and called out the sender's name for Robert's information.Ignoring her, but grasping the import of the scene, Robert went over to Janet's side and asked her in all simplicity whether he could be of any service whatever.But she, to hide her tears, turned decisively away from him. Robert gave her movement a totally different interpretation, drew back, and walked quickly out of the room.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I
On an afternoon late in May, Claude took Janet to see the boat race between Yale and Pennsylvania over the so-called American Henley course on the Schuylkill. Nature was in one of her soft and sober moods. The weather was mild, the sky lightly overcast, and the colors of the landscape as well as of the living things upon it were toned down to various shades of slate, dove or lavender, all blending into the serious beauty of a dominant pearl gray.
After the race, while the crowds were melting away, the two lovers walked into the pathway along the river. Perhaps in response to the pallid coloring around, Claude became a prey to melancholy thoughts; and the day, the mood and the girl impelled him to confidences about the marriage with Marjorie Armstrong into which he felt himself being forced.
Janet made an ideal confidante. The exercise of putting herself sympathetically into other people's shoes was a joy to her. Not only did she see herself as others saw her; she had the rarer gift of seeing others as she saw herself. In doing so, she could leave her own desires and feelings entirely out of the prospect. Thus, the story of Claude and Marjorie, like any other human drama, appealed to her judgment on its merits. Nor did she disturb Claude with the intrusion of any vulgar jealousy because the lover was her own lover and the woman was a rival woman.
The narrative began with the tenderness Claude had conceived for Marjorie some two years before. He told Janet how the proud beauty had first encouraged him and then, with unexampled coolness, had allowed the Earl of Dunbar to displace him in her favor. Later the Earl in his turn had jilted Marjorie. Could he be asked to care for her after such an ill-starred episode?
Unluckily, he was by now far the most desirable match among the young men whose names she consented to put on her list of eligibles. In this preference she had her father's hearty support. Naturally. For Mr. Armstrong was a slave of every wish she framed. Meanwhile, his own father had the most urgent private reasons for promoting the Armstrong project.
"You see my horrible position," he said. "I'm expected to marry a girl I don't love in order to get my father out of a bad box. It's like a story of the eighteenth century; only, in those happy days, it was the daughter, not the son, who had to pull the chestnuts out of the fire."
"But surely, Claude, not all the king's horses nor all the king's men cancompelyou to marry if you don't want to."
"No, but compulsion isn't the only form of coercion in the world, Janet. Nor even the worst. Can you think what it means to have everybody in your setexpectingyou to do a certain thing?"
"Expecting you?"
"Yes, it sounds fantastic. But it would sound real enough if once you had a taste of it. They show their expectations by word and deed, by sign and innuendo. They show it constantly, mercilessly, in a hundred small and super-subtle ways. I tell you, Janet, concerted expectation is the strongest form of pressure that can be brought to bear upon a man. It can bring about miracles. It can move mountains. Only a hero or a coward can resist it."
"I suppose it's like the pressure of public opinion or of one's family," she said, her soft clarinet tones pouring balm on his feelings. "I know what family pressure means. I am so sorry for you, Claude, sorry from my heart."
"I love you for saying that, Janet! I love you for your adorable pity. I love you for being so unlike Marjorie. She has her good points; but fellow feeling is not one of them. You see, her social ambition and the ease with which she can gratify her every wish have quite dried up the tender places in her heart. She has no pity left in her nature. And pity is always the essential thing in a woman's soul."
They sat down on a grassy slope in a secluded corner of the park. In a lyrical mood, Claude pointed to the sun just then flaring out and splashing a thousand colors on the livid sky.
"Look, Janet," he said, "how the whole earth thrills to its warm radiance! Just as everyone thrills to your divine gift of sympathy."
He was lying on the ground with his head in her lap, while her hand was gently stroking his curly hair.
"I am so happy to be in this spot with you, Claude, and to hear from your lips the things that only you can say. When you make love to me, I feel as though I were in some Enchanted Valley with a prince from theArabian Nights."
"Yes, and he a miracle of discretion, too!"
"A miracle of indiscretion, rather!" said Janet, as he drew her head down to his, kissed her once and kissed her again.
He soon became pensive, however. Pursuing his former train of thought, he declared that if he remained in New York, "public expectation" would certainly drive him into the dreaded marriage with Marjorie. There was only one avenue of escape. That was to go abroad and stay out of harm's way until Marjorie should choose some one else as in due time she was bound to do.
"But the force that holds me back," he said, "is far stronger than the one that bids me go. I can't live without you, Janet, darling."
"Then I suppose you'll have to take me along," she said, bending low over him.
Their lips met in a sustained and ardent kiss.
"No," he said. "I dare not assume a responsibility so great."
"If I go with you," she said quietly, "I shall go on my own responsibility."
"Janet, it would be too wonderful. Don't let me think of it, or my good resolutions will stand no firmer than a flag in a strong wind. But you are an angel to offer to come. You do love me then, very, very much?"
"What a question, Claude!"
"Well, you keep a pretty tight rein on your feelings, darling," he said, with the least trace of reproach. "Tender and true you are, I know," he added. "But you don't say any of the things that girls say when their hearts are in the grip of a wild, extravagant passion. Do you know that you have never even asked me once whether I really and truly and madly love you?"
"Whetheryouloveme?"
"Yes, that is the question girls ask their lovers over and over again."
"Well, Claude, the important thing to me is thatIloveyou."
"Do you mean to say, Janet, that you don't care whether I love you or not?"
"I don't mean that. But what I care about most is that you are the sort of man whomIcan love. That is the thing that makes me happy. It's delightful, of course, to know that you love me in return. Still, if you didn't love me, I don't think I should be in hopeless misery. If you turned out to be different from what I dreamed you were, so different that I could no longer love you, then I should be heart-broken."
To Claude, this seemed a bitter-sweet reply. More sweet than bitter, however, and so he did not contest it.
What a puzzling girl she was, he thought. So sensible and yet so imprudent. And totally devoid of the instinct that induces most women to exploit the amorous moment. Claude could not get over it. Any other girl would have made the most of his present mood, the mood in which he was ready to think the world well lost for love. When the blood is hot, the tongue is prodigal of vows. Claude, at all events, was willing to promise anything, especially as he was still in pursuit, and as his promises were not to mature until he was in possession.
Yet Janet asked absolutely nothing! This surrender, as open-handed as it was confiding, moved him to compunction. He sat up and put his arms around her. Her head buried in his shoulder had the effect of seeking refuge there. And she looked so trusting, so helpless, so innocent, that a great love for her welled up in his heart. Ought he not to do the noble, the chivalrous thing?
"Look here, Janet," he said, with the air of Sir Philip Sidney offering his last drink of water to another wounded soldier on the battle field, "why couldn't we be married? My father would get over it in time."
"Yes, your father might. Butwemight not."
"No, no, dearest. You mustn't say that. My love is not a thing of whims and fancies. I shall love you till life itself has passed away."
"Then what difference does it make whether we get married or not," she said.
With infinite tact, she refrained from accepting his lofty pledge of eternal constancy. She also refrained from a similar commitment of her own affections.
"Don't misunderstand me, Janet," he said, as sadly as if her disagreement cut him to the soul. "I merely felt in honor bound to offer to marry you. I know better than you do what an unconventional step means.
"All the more reason why I should learn by experience, then. No, Claude. If I married you, I'm sure I should soon stop loving you. The thought that you had a legal claim on my affection would be enough to kill it."
"Oh, you mustn't take the law so seriously, darling. Nobody does, nowadays."
"I know nothing about the law, Claude," she said, repudiating all jurisprudence with one of her eloquent gestures. "Do you want us to become a careworn, broken-spirited, isolated married couple, hating all the other careworn, broken-spirited, isolated married couples of the western world? Do you want me to grow to hate and despise you as my mother hates and despises my father, as so many wives appear secretly to hate and despise their husbands?"
"How can you say such monstrous things, Janet?"
"How can you pretend to believe that love should be free?" she retorted.
"Well," he replied, "I admit there's a lot in what you say. I suppose," he added with a fine masculine irrelevance, "that we can always change our minds and get married later on if we choose to."
He could not fully persuade himself that Janet really believed in free love. Nevertheless, he was hugely relieved to learn that, whatever her motive might be, she had no ulterior matrimonial designs on him. If only he could have suppressed a sneaking fear that he was "taking advantage" of Janet, as he called it, or satisfied himself that he was legitimately taking the good the gods provided, as the Outlaws boldly called a step of this sort!
But Claude's Bohemianism was only skin-deep. Like a good many Bohemians, he discarded traditional forms, costly conventions and social restrictions, chiefly in order to extract from social intercourse and philandering, the greatest amount of pleasure with the smallest amount of risk. Being a Bohemian was merely a sybaritic pastime for him.
In short, Claude lacked the courage of his experiments. The only morality he genuinely believed in was the current morality (and immorality) of his peers. Thus loose love could be allowed to have a certain place in the scheme of things, but free love, as an avowed principle, was incontestably wrong. Claude might humor the model tenementers to the extent of using their free-love propaganda for his own ends. At heart, however, he was profoundly shocked by Janet's stubborn contention that her views of marriage, though glaringly heterodox, were morally sound.
As Claude had worked it out, there were two ways of getting past the limitations of a social institution. One was to support the institution while sneaking over the fences and enjoying the secret breach of law as a delightful bit of "living in sin." The other way was to defy the institution by boldly climbing over the fences and asserting the sin to be a virtue. Surely, the first was the pleasanter, the wiser, nay, the more ethical proceeding!
Of course Claude did not reason the distinction out as clearly as this. But he felt its force and, for his part, was resolved to act upon it. However, he did not attempt to convert Janet to his way of thinking. That would have been fraught with peril to the smoothness of their future relations. Besides, a long didactic argument would have spoiled the tender passages in the journey home. And Claude never encouraged his conscience to make a martyr of him.
II
When they got back to Kips Bay, they found Cornelia and her Hercules in Number Fifteen. Harry Kelly, silent and worshipful, was washing the accumulated dishes of the day, in a supreme exhibition of devotion. His inamorata, ensconced in state in her favorite armchair, was tacking a blue denim smock together with bits of fancy colored worsteds.
She announced her intention of marching in the parade of the Overalls Economy Club, an organization recently formed to protest against the high cost of living.
Robert, it appeared, had greeted this announcement with gibes and with an ironic contrast between her expenditure of time and her economy of money. Nor had he confined his sarcasm to her.
"What do you suppose Cato said when I told him about the parade?" Cornelia retailed vindictively. "He said, 'I suppose Claude will march, too? He will have no difficulty in getting the right kind of uniform. In the Times this morning, a Fifth Avenue store advertises overalls with solid gold buckles from fifty dollars up.'"
"There's a typical reformer for you," said Claude, bitterly. "Always shying bricks at the very people that want to build with them."
Hereupon, Cornelia, in the role of a loyal though long-suffering friend of Robert's, undertook to extenuate his conduct. She observed that he had doubtless been made angry because his work was retarded by Janet's absences. The best proof of his state of mind was a threat he had made to engage another secretary.
"I wish he would," said Claude, compressing his lips, while Janet tried not to look conscience-stricken.
"Of course he doesn't in the least mean to part with Araminta," continued Cornelia, wallowing in the emotional effect of her news. "Not he. Cato knows a good thing when he sees it. But he doesn't approve of Janet's parties with you, Lothario. The principle is wrong, he claims."
"The principle is wrong!" cried both Claude and Janet with very different inflections.
Cornelia laughed musically up and down the scale.
"Just fancy what he said: 'A friendship which doesn't grow spontaneously out of joint partnership in work is built on quicksands.'"
"He's a fanatic," said Harry Kelly, breaking his silence and one of Cornelia's saucers in the violence of his feelings.
"Nonsense, Hercules," she said, in a tone that poured contempt on his vehemence. "He has simply let all the soft places grow in his head and all the hard places in his heart."
Janet went into the next room to hang up her hat and coat. Claude followed her.
"I think Robert's ideas are getting more and more unbalanced," he said, dictatorially. "If I were you, Janet, I'd finish up my work with him at once."
"It takes two to break a bargain, Claude."
"Well, you might at least keep your relations with him on a strictly business footing—and as little of that as possible."
He ignored her slight mutinous gesture.
"He's a difficult man to get along with," he went on. "Look how even Hutchins Burley had to fire him. And as if his dismissal from theChroniclewere not bad enough, he joins these Guildsmen people who are trying to wreck the very basis of modern society. That has just about dished him, as far as the Outlaws are concerned. They all cut him now."
A new imperiousness crept into his voice as he added:
"I wish that, for my sake, you would not be seen going about with him, ever."
He accepted her silence as an evidence of tacit consent.
III
The very next afternoon, before a full hour's writing and typing had been done, Robert amazed Janet by proposing that they suspend work and take a walk.
"I want particularly to talk to you," he said.
"About what?"
"About love," said Robert, gravely.
What girl could resist an invitation like that? Despite Claude's stern admonition, Janet did not wait to be urged.
They walked near the East River towards the gas-house district, and presently turned into a recreation pier which was almost deserted. Clearly, Robert was looking for a very private and sequestered corner.
On the way, every topic was broached except the one that Robert had advanced as an excuse for truancy. Did suspense sharpen Janet's anticipation? No. Janet was curious, but not consumedly so. She had a marvelous power of attracting confidences and was quite used to having young men, who had known her only a few days, confide in her their love affairs, their religious or financial troubles, and indeed the whole history of their lives. True, Robert might be in love, not with another girl but with herself. Having no false modesty, Janet entertained the suspicion for a moment. Only for a moment, however. For the presumption against it seemed conclusive.
Meanwhile, they walked happily along, until Robert found the spot that suited him. This was at the end of the pier farthest from the street. No watchman being in sight, they sat down on a great terminal beam and let their legs swing over the green and choppy water.
The Janet who laughed and chatted with Robert was a very different girl from the Janet who was accustomed to hang romantically on Claude's lips. Nothing, of course, could equal the magnetism of Claude or match the fire and glory of their mutual passion. Still, in Claude's presence she seemed constantly to be playing up to some magnificent part; she felt like a cross between, say, the Lady of Shalott and the ecstatic lady in the Song of Songs. Without denying that it was a rapturous game, a game well worth the candle, she found it a trifle exhausting.
With Robert, on the other hand, the high-tension, party-dress Janet could be put away (so to speak) and the simple, work-a-day, blouse-and-skirt Janet substituted. Now Janet was the kind of girl who always looked her worst in her best things and was most herself when least dressed up. Naturally, she did not apply this symbol to her two friendships. Being a young, rebellious, and infatuated young lady, how could she? Besides, had she done so, she might have reasoned the matter out to a disturbing conclusion.
"Well, Robert," she said, cheerily. "Begin, and tell me all that's in your heart of hearts."
"It's not my heart I mean to talk about. It's yours."
"Mine! What an idea! Why, my heart's in the pink of condition. Positively no inspection needed.
'Oh my heart is a free and a fetterless thing,A wave of the ocean, a bird on the wing.'
'Oh my heart is a free and a fetterless thing,A wave of the ocean, a bird on the wing.'
'Oh my heart is a free and a fetterless thing,
A wave of the ocean, a bird on the wing.'
I don't mean to say that it's a flighty object, though," she added, with a smile.
"No, if it were, it would be much easier to talk to you about it," said Robert.
"What do you mean?"
"Well, a whole century separates the Janet I first knew—the Janet who hesitated to go to a picture play on the Sabbath—from the Janet who reads Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell, attends labor meetings on Sundays, and catches each newest whiff of radical opinion. The change takes one's breath away."
"You admit it's a change for the better, don't you?"
"In every way but one."
"Which one?"
"You have taken Cornelia too seriously. Her views on sex are morbid and totally unsuited for adoption by a healthy, inexperienced girl."
"Now, Robert, please don't begin that over again. You've said it all before."
"I shall say it and say it again until I've convinced you. Even you must admit that Cornelia has a chronic grudge against men."
"Well, it isn't so unnatural, after her unhappy love affair, is it?"
"Precisely. As a result of that love affair, all her sex emotions are inverted. She sublimates her sex into acts of spite, usually unconscious acts. For instance, she is subtly encouraging you to run off with Claude as she ran off with Percival Houghton. Forgive me for mentioning it, Janet. But I can't bear to see you duped. Believe me, if you followed her example, with an equally unhappy result, she would like nothing better."
"Claude is not in the least like Percival Houghton," said Janet coldly. "Whatever else he may be, he isn't a cad."
"Of course he isn't," Robert hastened to say.
"Then stop making horrid comparisons. It is such an easy thing to do. Suppose I were to say that you are like an X-ray machine, finding out all that is bad in people, while Claude is like a magnet drawing out all that is good in them. What would you say to that comparison?"
"I should accept it," replied Robert, with a smile. "The superiority of the X-ray in point of social usefulness is, I think, beyond dispute."
"Oh, with you social usefulness is everything, and personal happiness nothing!"
"Suppose Claude is a magnet," he went on, unheeding her exclamation. "Is that a good reason for flying into his arms, like a willless iron filing, onhisterms instead of on your own?"
"On my terms! What do you mean?"
"Janet, my friendship will be worse than useless to you unless I can tell you exactly what is in my mind. I either do that or hold my peace forever. Will you let me speak frankly?"
"Will I let the rain fall or the sun shine? I'd like to see the person who could stop you from speaking frankly. But please don't attack Claude."
"Have no fear. I don't intend to play the part of the heroine's second friend confidentially warning her against the first. What I want to urge, with all the force I can, is this: if you mean to live with Claude, why not marry him?"
"Quite apart from my own preferences in the matter, Robert, how do you know that Claude wants to marry?"
"Oh, no doubt he doesn't want to. In the eyes of the modern man, marriages made in Heaven are as popular as canned beef made in America. But what of that? Claude is young, self-willed, accustomed to get his own way, and—he worships you. And you—well, I have no superlatives to do justice to the case. You are you. You could marry him in a twinkling if you played your cards right."
Janet laughed.
"Oh, the heart is a free and a fetterless thing—" she sang, saucily.
"Stop coquetting like Cornelia," he remonstrated. "You are making it totally impossible for me to talk rationally. Are you a butterfly or a woman? Am I discussing your glorious voice or your precarious future? Be serious."
"How can I be serious when you ask me to be a bargain hunter in hearts and coronets?"
"Now you're acting like one of Marie Corelli's heroines, Janet!"
"Thank you. Why are you so anxious to have me get married?"
"Because I think that your fine spirit of independence and your divine gift of imagination ought not lightly to be wasted. Because I think, in short, that you have a nobler purpose in the world than mere loving or being loved."
"Than mere loving!"
"Yes. The world was not made for the gratification of our own feelings."
"So you are fond of saying, Robert. But, as a matter of fact, I'm not trying to gratify my feelings. I'm trying to carry out my principles."
"The world isn't a grindstone to sharpen our principles on, either," said Robert, with prompt conclusiveness.
"From watching you, I rather thought it was," said Janet, stung into sudden irony.
There was a pause. He tried to take her hand, but she drew it sharply away, with difficulty repressing her tears. After a while, he began again, with impetuous candor:
"Janet, don't go into this adventure with your eyes shut. Remember, you can't give yourself up to an experiment in free love without giving up everything else. That is the strongest argument against the step. All your gifts, all your energy, all your purpose will be consumed in explaining, defending, evading. Your whole life will be one long course of swallowing the consequences and warding off criticism. Do you wish to be a life-long martyr to free love, like Cornelia?"
"I've never posed as a martyr to anything—not even to drink," said Janet, recovering her good humor.
"Then why become one? Martyrdom is all very well for fanatics like your mother who enjoy it, or for idlers like Cornelia who have nothing better to do. But you are neither a fanatic nor an idler; you are a worker."
"But when one believes that an institution has served its turn, isn't it one's duty to destroy it?"
"Institutions are never destroyed. They are sometimes transformed, as tadpoles are into frogs."
"Are you sure? Cornelia says that every free union is a mine exploded beneath marriage. I think she's right."
"A mine! Better call it a squib, Janet. And all the trouble you invite will be like laying a long and elaborate fuse to ignite the squib."
"Oh, you have no ideals left!" she cried, revolted at this demolition of her romantic conceptions.
"I have a little common sense left," he answered. "We can't escape the customs or the institutions of our time, however much we may disbelieve in them. Flying in the face of a decadent institution does not destroy it. It only gives it a new lease of life by putting the props of public sympathy and traditional morality at the disposal of its defenders. Look at the case of George Eliot. Did her entirely justifiable free union help the cause of marriage reform? No. It actually turned her into a defender of the very institution she had set out to challenge."
"What a very wise young man; this wise young man must be," she said, parodying a line of Gilbert's.
"No side-tracking! Promise me you'll turn the matter over in your mind."
"In my mind? Yes. But what about my heart?" she said. And with dancing eyes she sang:
"'Oh, the heart is a free and a fetterless thing,A wave of the ocean, a bird on the wing.'"
"'Oh, the heart is a free and a fetterless thing,A wave of the ocean, a bird on the wing.'"
"'Oh, the heart is a free and a fetterless thing,
A wave of the ocean, a bird on the wing.'"
Her voice turned his blood to paradisaical currents.
"If you sing that again, I shall kiss you on the spot, in public or out of it," said the tormented young man.
"Why, Robert, what abysses of passion lurk hidden in you!" she exclaimed mockingly. "I believe you said you'd always treat me just like a man. Do you talk like this to your male chums?" Then demurely: "We'd better go home at once."
On the way home, she resumed the discussion. In a more earnest tone than before, she thanked him for taking so much trouble over her and promised to think about his point of view very carefully. She insisted, however, that his reasoning had not convinced her. She and Claude appeared very well suited to each other now, but who could tell what changes a few years might not bring forth?
"True," said Robert. "But the future is dark to us in other matters besides marriage. As things stand now, Claude couldn't do better, and you might do worse. And if the very worst happened, you could get a divorce."
She replied by reminding him that she and Claude were not the kind of people who lightly repudiated their ties or the responsibilities that grew out of them. Consequently, once married, they would probably remain so for life. In any event, if she changed her mind, it would be infinitely simpler to do so under the other plan.
"Say I grew tired of Claude, for instance, and quite suddenly wanted you," she said with a mischievous look.
"Well, it couldn't be done," said Robert, decisively, her complacent assumption jarring his pride.
"Oh, couldn't it?" She flashed him a challenging glance.
"Not in my case," he returned, in clipped tones. "Free love is the most expensive luxury in the world. Only the very rich or the unambitious can pay for it. As for me, I never can have anything to do either with free love or with a woman who has had a free lover. It would ruin all my plans."
Janet replied with the faintest shrug, whereat all his self-assertion promptly went bang. Neither yielded a point; but they divined each other's feelings and, as they walked on, steered the conversation into lighter channels until they got back to the Lorillard tenements.
Standing in the dark hallway at the foot of the stairs, Janet told him with a touch of impishness that his logic had been irresistible.
"Has it? It hasn't touched your heart," he said, somewhat dolefully.
"Ah, well, the heart is a free and a fetterless thing—"
As Janet darted up the stairs, the door of an apartment opened overhead, and she fancied she heard Claude's voice.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
I
On her own floor, she halted and, with Robert's kiss still burning on her lips, waited until he had turned into Kelly's flat. Then she opened the door of Number Fifteen.
Sure enough, Claude was there, full of resentment at her absence on a jaunt with Robert. She thanked her stars that Robert's visible presence could not fan the flame. Even so, Claude acted badly enough. He was in a vertigo of jealousy, and at small pains to hide the fact.
At first, Janet tried to carry the matter off lightly, and strove to mollify him by saying that Robert had asked her to consider a very serious problem. She was a little conscience-stricken over this fib, but believed it the best thing to say. She pointed out that while it was with Robert that she worked, it was with Claude, after all, that she played.
At this Cornelia executed an unnecessarily tuneful laugh.
"There's nothing like a man's problem for disarranging a girl's hair," she observed, dropping the inevitable dress she was busy with. "Araminta, your hat's a sight! Do look at yourself in the glass."
Naturally, Claude was more furious than ever. He sulked in silence whilst rebuffing the advances that Janet made. Finally, maddened by Cornelia's pin-prick innuendoes, he strode out, flashing a terrible look at Janet as he did so.
II
When will the play of Othello be absolutely unintelligible? Perhaps five hundred years from now or, let us hope, sooner. Surely, at some distant date, the private ownership of a woman by a man or of a man by a woman will seem as barbarous as the rings our ancestors stuck through their noses or as unfashionable as the three hundred concubines of Solomon. And the jealous passions arising from this ownership will be classed with rage, hysteria and other forms of emotional disease or pathological bad manners.
Indeed, do not the best people already look upon a pronounced fit of jealousy as an exhibition of arrested development or mental inferiority? If the jealous man is not destroyed, root and branch, by the refuse-reduction plant of ridicule, he will be rendered obsolete and perhaps extinct by the spread of the conviction that, after a human being has discharged his obligations to himself and his obligations to the community, he owes no other personal allegiance whatever.
Herself singularly free from jealousy, Janet was in direct touch with three persons whom the malady afflicted sorely. Besides the case of Claude, she had on her hands the case of Mrs. Howard Madison Grey in business, and the case of Cornelia at home.
Cornelia, who was no believer in keeping her emotions hermetically sealed, made her frame of mind patent to Janet on an unforgetable occasion. It was not the first, nor was it to be the last, of a series of blows, which were fast converting Janet to the belief that her own opinion of Cornelia was founded on an illusion, whilst Robert's opinion was the correct one.
For some time past it had been Harry Kelly's practice to come into Number Fifteen before breakfast and put the two girls "through their paces," as he called the light drill he prescribed for them. Always on the lookout for some new outlet for his tremendous supply of energy, the physical culture expert had hit on the scheme of improving Cornelia's bad health by reforming her bodily habits. Cornelia, who considered early rising bad form and breathing exercises a superstition, was for a prompt veto of the scheme, but Janet's cordial support of it saved the day.
So, early in the morning of the day after Claude's wrathful departure, Kelly, in gymnasium garb, made his entrance as usual. The athlete was not a man of many words. Words, after all, were not needed in his case, since, as he strode along with the nervous muscularity of a Rodin statue, his lithe, powerful body proclaimed his mission to all the world.
"Wake up, girls," he called out, "and fill your bellies with the good south wind."
The unvarnished word always moved Cornelia to a protesting shriek and a well-trilled "How do you do!" Kelly enjoyed both immensely.
After throwing the windows in the sitting room wide open, he paced the floor like a panther in his den. Janet was the first to appear. She was still drowsy, and her short dark hair, in tight somnolent curls, hung down her back. She wore a short-skirted bathing suit, a custom Kelly held in high regard for the business in hand.
As she toddled sleepily towards the athlete, the energy pent up in his frame unbottled itself on the impulse of the moment. Catching her at the waist, he lifted her high up in the air and spun her around three times as if she were a featherweight. Then, clasping her lightly by shoulder and leg, he set her tenderly down again.
"Do it again, Hercules, do!" articulated Cornelia, coming in just at the close of this maneuver, whilst Janet, still laughing and protesting, was in the act of resuming control of her well-shaped limbs.
But as there was that in Cornelia's eye which belied her command, Kelly was careful to make no move to execute it.
Cornelia's golden hair was done up on her head in a makeshift coil, she herself being enveloped in a long kimono that trailed to the ground. Kelly looked at this garment without ecstasy, a fact that did not escape the wearer's observation.
"Hercules," she commanded peevishly, "you might close this window near me. I've got a very bad headache from too little sleep. Do you want me to catch my death of cold, too?"
He complied with all haste, and then pitched into his calisthenics, Janet joining him with gusto. Cornelia followed suit, though in a very languid spirit; and soon she stopped altogether, on the pretext of unusual weakness.
Her chilly aloofness cut the period short. It was now time to prepare breakfast, a task theoretically shared by all four, including Robert, who was unaccountably late this morning. Habitually, three of them did the actual work while Cornelia "directed," a process which, she firmly believed, enabled the others to save time. But, as Robert sardonically put it, "Cornelia's method of showing us a short cut is to send us round Robin Hood's barn."
It was Kelly's special business to convert a part of the kitchen into a dining room, and thereafter to make the toast. He had just reached this stage, when Cornelia took another hand in the proceedings.
"Go down and get the letters for me, Hercules," she said suddenly, relieving him of the toaster.
"Why, what's the hurry? Rob always gets them after breakfast."
"Oh, do let Harry make the toast," said Janet, chiming in with him. She, too, had thought of the letters, and was in no hurry to bid the devil good morning. "Nobody can eat toast the way you make it, Cornelia. And Robert is sure to—"
"No doubt Robert will do exactly asyoutell him," said Cornelia, interrupting her sweetly. "Please let Harry do asItell him. Hercules, gonow, please. I have a notion there'll be some famous news for me this morning."
Kelly, having been her devoted (and despised) slave since the day he ejected Hutchins Burley, obeyed submissively by mere force of habit. He ran down the three flights of stairs and in a very short time came back again with a single letter.
It was for Janet from Claude, and sarcasm was its prevailing tone.
The writer began by deploring his fatuous inability to remain away from her side. He pointed out that, as his chance visits might take her by surprise or catch her off guard, not to say worry her into thinking of promises she had no mind to keep, he should take steps to rid her of his manifestly superfluous attentions. He had accordingly arranged to spend some time with his friends the Armstrongs, in Huntington. By doing so he should at least please his father, which was better than nothing, certainly better than not pleasing either himself or her.
In short, it was just such a petulant note as a spoiled woman's darling like Claude might be expected to write. Having always received complete submission from women, he regarded the least opposition to his self-indulgence as outrageous and even wicked or perhaps blasphemous.
The depth and passion of Janet's nature were not easily stirred, but this letter startled her out of her usual lightheartedness. She sat down in a chair by the window and looked out fixedly, in an effort to repress her feelings. Kelly, sympathetic and bewildered, gave vent to sundry heartening murmurs and exclamations; and, as these accomplished little, he moved dishes attractively and hopefully around Janet's empty place.
From her point of vantage at the table, Cornelia surveyed her handiwork with a pious simulation of sadness, surveyed it, and found that it was not so bad.
Janet blue and still, Kelly heavily anxious, Cornelia sweetly sanctimonious, such was the curious tableau that Robert saw when he came in, his slender frame and vigorous movements forming a direct contrast to the static spectacle before him.
"Now, see what you've done, Cato!" declaimed Cornelia, in one of those complacent greetings which only she could make sublime.
She fluttered Claude's note aloft and called out the sender's name for Robert's information.
Ignoring her, but grasping the import of the scene, Robert went over to Janet's side and asked her in all simplicity whether he could be of any service whatever.
But she, to hide her tears, turned decisively away from him. Robert gave her movement a totally different interpretation, drew back, and walked quickly out of the room.