Chapter XI: Part 11

"I began to suspect something the moment I came to London. Well, I put my suspicions to the test yesterday. Before going out I folded a pair of trousers in a very particular way and left them on a chair. When I came back they had been refolded in a slightly different way."

"Did you question your landlady?"

"Yes. Naturally she denied that any stranger had entered, but her confusion was obvious. I quickly suggested that my tailor might have called, and she as quickly agreed that this was so. When, an hour later, I interviewed the tailor and he confirmed me in my belief that he had not been near the house, the inference was clear. I was being watched. And, mark you, Smilo, I have reason to believe that the watcher is one of our own colleagues."

"Lord, no!"

"Judging from the awkward way the pockets were crumpled in the act of refolding the trousers, I have further reason to believe that the watcher is a woman."

"Impossible!"

"Nothing is impossible in this best of impossible worlds."

"It's a low-down shame, Mr. Pryor. But, after all, it can't hurt you. 'Sticks and stones may break my bones, etc.' You know the saying."

"My dear boy, being a detective you can't begin to realize that the knowledge that you are being carefully watched gives you a very jumpy feeling--especially when you know you're guilty."

"In heaven's name, guilty of what?"

"Of doing a good job in your own line; in my case, tracking down criminals."

"Surely you don't mean to imply that Headquarters would permit influences--"

"I imply nothing. I give you the benefit of the facts. But if you think it's a pleasure to surmise that your every movement has an unseen spectator--you don't know who, but you fear it's a young and beautiful woman--"

The sudden ring-a-ling of the telephone bell cut across the room.

Mark Pryor took up the instrument.

"Yes," he said. "It's Mr. Pryor speaking. A young woman? Indeed! Well, I'll see her up here."

He hung up the receiver.

"A young and beautiful woman," he repeated with a singularly straight face.

Young Smilo, whose way of life was still in the green, the callow leaf, was divided between admiration and bewilderment. In half a minute or so there was a knock at the door.

The young woman who came in was Janet Barr.

*II*

Smilo's parting look was one of stupefaction at the reception the visitor got, Pryor's enthusiasm being a startling abandonment of his neutral, self-contained manner.

Left to themselves, Janet informed Pryor of the troubles that had brought her to see him. The chief of these was Hutchins Burley.

Would Mr. Pryor advise her how to deal with him if he turned up again, as seemed highly probable?

There were other difficulties. She had nearly exhausted her funds. She didn't wish to return to the United States. Not at the moment, anyhow. Yet she couldn't get a position without a character.

This last she had learned recently, after several bitter experiences. Europeans seemed firmly persuaded that a character existed not in yourself but in the minds of other people, or rather in their handwriting. In the United States a good presence was worth a thousand good characters and your own opinion of yourself, expressed with imaginative brilliance, went much further than other people's opinion of you, expressed with dullness. In Europe, the reverse was true.

Would he make out a good character for her, and have it on tap within easy reach in case she referred employers to him?

She was sure that any testimonial coming from him--yes, from him--

"Oh, I know you're a mystery," she said, in answer to his deprecatory gesture. "But not an ordinary mystery. A mystery linked to the pink of propriety is a sublime mystery. Like Mrs. Grundy's husband, whom you remind me of. No one has ever identified that mysterious man. Yet who'd have the courage to turn down a character made out by Mr. Grundy?"

She told him of her break with Claude, of her situation as the companion of Henriette, and of her experience with M. St. Hilaire as a result of Burley's interference.

"I left Brussels the very next day."

"For Coblenz?"

"Via Coblenz, for Munich, to see you, if possible. It was a Munich address you gave me, on board the 'Baronia'."

"I left Munich some time ago."

"So I learned. You see, I followed you here. But how do you know I went to Coblenz?"

"On the seventh of October?"

"On the seventh of October. How _did_ you know it?"

"I didn't know it. The information just drifted my way."

"You are a detective then, Sherlock Holmes and M. Gaboriau rolled into one."

"Janet, disabuse yourself of that idea. If I _were_ a detective I'd be a very sorry one. Let me prove it to you. In the course of my duties (whatever they are), I had occasion to look up Mr. Burley. I located him in Brussels on the sixth of October. I had scarcely found him before he slipped through my fingers."

"Slipped through your fingers?"

"Yes. Slipped through my fingers. You see, I'm trying to live up to the detective role to oblige you. Well, I got on to Mr. Burley's movements again on the seventh of October, just in time to follow him to Coblenz. _Why Coblenz?_ I asked myself again and again. By the way, did you ever hear of a real, live detective asking _himself_ a question?"

"No. But what is the answer?"

"_You_ are the answer, of course. And I've only just discovered the fact. Fancy Sherlock Holmes following Hutchins Burley all the way from Brussels to Coblenz and from Coblenz to London and not discovering a quintessential answer, until the answer had crossed the Channel and stationed itself under his very nose."

"Do you mean to tell me that that odious Hutchins Burley is also in London at this very minute?"

"Don't be alarmed; I give you my word he sha'n't molest you again. I was about to res--I was about to transfer my valuable services to another sphere. What you have told me determines me to hang on a little longer, for the sole satisfaction of bringing Hutchins Burley to book."

"Oh, you mustn't injure your prospects on my account."

"No fear. There's pleasure in checkmating a fellow like Burley, and profit, too. You know, Janet, the real old-fashioned heavy-weight villains are deplorably scarce. Goodness, routine goodness, is so easy nowadays, it is so much in fashion, it is so thoroughly rammed down our throats by compulsory education, that very few people are inclined to be wicked and fewer still are energetic enough to carry out the inclination. Mr. Hutchins Burley is a rare beast. He does not identify his wickedness with our goodness. Not he. He believes in himself from top to bottom. Unlike the usual criminal of today, he doesn't suffer from the cowardice of his convictions."

They discussed Janet's plans. Ways and means, and how to get her off the rocks, were the first considerations.

"Do you know what?" said Pryor, reflectively; "your old friend Cornelia Covert could give you a lift."

"Oh, no; I can't go back to America--not yet, anyhow," said Janet resolutely.

"But she isn't in America. She's in Paris. You didn't know it? Then I've a big piece of news for you. She's married!"

"Cornelia married!"

"Yes. Benedick, the married man, isn't in it with Diana, the married woman."

"It's Harry Kelly, of course. Give me a moment to catch my breath. Mrs. Harry Kelly!"

"Not a bit of it."

"What do you mean?"

"You've heard of Paulette crepe, haven't you?"

"The crepe that's all the rage this year. Mr. Pryor, when I see a Paulette crepe blouse in a London shop, the cells of my great-great-grandmother rise enviously within me and turn the clock back to Noah."

"The curse of Eve," said Mr. Pryor, in his driest vein. "Well, everybody knows that Paulette crepe is named after Madame Paulette, one of the first dressmakers of Paris. Not everybody knows that Madame Paulette's real name is--"

"Cornelia!"

"Precisely."

Prior briefly narrated the curious story of Cornelia's migration to Paris, her marriage to Harry Kelly, her transformation into a fashionable dressmaker. Through a convergence of happy events, in which Pryor had had a hand, Cornelia had been able to enter the old and famous house of Paulette, then noticeably on the decline. Her artistic gifts and Kelly's industry had rejuvenated the management and revived the glories of the Paulette tradition. In a little less than a year Cornelia and Kelly had bought out the aged proprietors of the firm.

"No wonder I didn't hear from her," said Janet. "All my letters came back unopened. I began to think she had turned her back on me."

"Marriage has not changed her as much as that," said Pryor, smiling. "But I warn you that it has changed her a good deal."

"For the better or for the worse?"

"For the better _and_ for the worse. But wait and judge for yourself."

"Perhaps Cornelia will think me in the way, now that she has a husband to look after."

"Cornelia lose sleep over Harry? No, dear girl; don't worry on that score. And don't forget that she'll be glad to do me a favor as well as you. More than one tony customer has come to her shop at my instance. When I tell you that I brought Mrs. R. H. L. Jerome, the mother of the Duchess of Keswick, to her, you'll admit that I'm a crack barker."

"Mr. Pryor, you are my _deus ex machina_. I believe you are every one else's, too. It must be a hobby with you to help people out of difficulties."

"Quite the contrary. It's a hobby with me to get people into difficulties. The worst of it is, I rarely succeed. I rarely get anybody into difficulties except myself."

"Is that true?"

"Well, it's as true of me as it is of certain other people. Sensitive people. People like you, or Charlotte Beecher, or Robert Lloyd."

"Oh, Robert never gets himself into difficulties," said Janet, with a trace of bitterness. "He's too efficient, too perfect."

"You do him an injustice, I'm sure. Lloyd merely puts up an exceptionally good front. He stands the strain of existence with skill and courage. So do you, for that matter."

"Thanks. But I really haven't had much to stand."

"It seems ample to me."

"Not half what I expected. When I went away with Claude I thought the universe would be arrayed against me. I dare say that in the margin of my thoughts there was a dim picture of Janet flinging a glove in the face of a decadent, despotic world."

They both smiled.

"What happened?"

Janet went on, sub-ironically: "A geyser of slander and mockery that spurted up from the newspapers. Nothing else. Nothing diabolic on the world's side. Nothing heroic on mine."

"That's the rule in these cases, Janet. The Flatbush suburb idea that all the world loves a lover is about as true as the Greenwich Village or Kips Bay idea that all the world hates a free union."

"You think both ideas are fictions?"

"Not entirely. Modern society has its own way of giving a pat of approval to a regular marriage and a kick of disapproval to a free union. Apart from these casual demonstrations it doesn't get tremendously excited over what its men and women do as males and females, so long as they pay their rent regularly, refrain from incurring bad debts with tradesmen, and bow the knee (at least in public) to the seventh commandment."

"Yes, I soon found that out. Nobody cared a pin whether I was married or not, or whether I was more to be pitied than scorned, provided I wore the proper clothes and told the proper lies."

"Nobody?"

"Nobody, except Hutchins Burley."

"Ah, there's sure to be a Nemesis!"

"Yes. But why Hutchins Burley? What am I to Burley, or Burley to me? Why should that horrible wretch be commissioned to persecute me? Why was he destined to snap the bond of comradeship between Henriette and me? He isn't exactly one's notion of a social censor, is he?"

"A scavenger isn't a popular notion of a sweet and clean man. Yet he serves a public purpose."

"What an extraordinary analogy!"

"Not at all. You see, Janet, we moderns are too squeamish or too lazy to do our necessary dirty work ourselves, dirty work like punishment, for instance. The result is that when some one rashly assails the majesty of one of our institutions, we punish him by proxy. We kill by the hand of the public executioner. We get revenge by the hand of the judge. We dispense poetic justice by the hand of a Hutchins Burley."

"Well, Hutchins Burley as society's Nemesis is a brand new idea to me. I shall need time to let it sink in. But what have I done to deserve so mighty a thing as poetic justice? I haven't even stolen another woman's husband. Haven't I been my own worst enemy, as Laura Jean Libby used to say? Isn't that vice its own reward?"

"Janet, your question is fair. But your voice and your eyes are not. Now I come to think of it, there may after all be a teeny weeny bit to say--no, not on Hutchins Burley's side--but on Monsieur Anton St. Hilaire's side."

"Mr. Pryor!"

"I don't mean a twentieth part of what I say. But let me say it. You are strong enough to take it straight. To begin with, the enigma of Hutchins Burley: answer me this. Didn't you of your own free will settle down amongst the Outlaws?"

"Yes."

"Well, you can't touch pitch without a little of it sticking to your fingers. But let us consider what you are to do next. It's a safer topic. We've talked unguardedly enough, considering that there's a dictagraph in the room, put there by no friends of mine."

"A dictagraph! Then you're not a great detective," said Janet, seriously disappointed. Hopefully, she added: "If you are not Sherlock Holmes, perhaps you are Raffles?"

"Well, it takes a thief to catch a thief," was the enigmatic reply.

He did not tell her that the hiding place of the dictagraph had been located and that Smilo had received instructions to tamper with the instrument as soon as the coast was clear.

*III*

They took a bus to Janet's lodgings.

Several plans were agreed upon. Chiefly, they were both to write to Cornelia asking her to find a position for Janet in the Paulette establishment.

Fashionable dressmaking was not precisely the work that Janet's heart was in. But she was prepared to take any position as a means to an end. Her real goal was active participation in the later phases of the women's movement. Recent happenings had revived in her the old longing to enter the thick of the battle, to pitch into the struggle for equal pay in every sort of occupation and for an equal title to legislative and administrative power.

"But I shall have to get an income of my own before I can be a factor in this struggle," she said.

"One must get an income of one's own before one can be a factor in any struggle," said Pryor, dryly.

"Yes, I've learned that, too. Feminists say that a woman must have an independent income in order to enter marriage with self-respect. They could go further and say that a woman must have an independent income in order to enter a free union with self-respect."

Pryor told her that he expected to return to the United States in a few weeks. Should he, in case he ran across Robert Lloyd, inform him of her altered views?

She said that Robert wouldn't thank him for any information about her.

"But you were such exceptionally good friends," expostulated Pryor. "Your little firm of Barr & Lloyd--what a pity you couldn't pick that thread up again, instead of joining Cornelia. If Robert weren't as poor as a church mouse, or if you both weren't too proud to borrow a little cash from me--"

Janet interrupted to veto all suggestions along that line. Pride had nothing to do with the question. It was true that she and Robert had been very good friends and excellent working partners. But Robert had emphatically said that he had no use for a woman who had damaged her social and businesss value by indulging in an adventure such as hers [Transcriber's note: several words missing from source book]

"Hm!" said Pryor. "When the shoe pinches his own foot, what astoundingly conservative exclamations even a radical fellow will make."

Janet went on to say that, although she had changed her views, she had every reason to believe that Robert had not changed his. Thus, he had taken no step whatever to communicate with her, despite the fact that she had indirectly, in her first letter to Cornelia, asked him to do so.

"Besides," she added, "didn't you know that he was about to marry Charlotte Beecher?"

"Oh, ho, so that's how the wind blows?"

Pryor, standing in front of Janet's house, gave the curb a sharp whack with his cane.

"That marriage has no place in the scheme of your _deus ex machina_," he said, with a quizzical frown. "We'll have to take it out on Burley--give the devil an extra twist of the tail to relieve our feelings."

"Yes, when you catch him. Meanwhile, what am I to do about him?"

"Forget him, forget him serenely for half a dozen weeks or so. Then you'll hear from him again."

"Hear from him again," she said, with a shade of alarm.

"Not _from_ him in person," corrected Pryor, straightening up till he looked like a hickory stick. "_About_ him, through me. Good news for us, bad news for him. Until then good-bye."

*PART V*

*HEARTS AND TREASURES*

*CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE*

*I*

On a cool February morning a private office in the Maison Paulette, Boulevard Houssman, was occupied by five persons of the feminine sex. Four of the five, gorgeous as to clothes and cosmetics, moved busily about in comet-like orbits that brought them periodically near the desk.

The fifth, seated at the desk itself, dominated the room. She was a striking blonde, whose handsome dull-green dress challenged the glint of gold alike in her pupils and her hair.

Seemingly occupied with a book of accounts, this lady was really engaged in inventing petty tasks for the four young women dancing attendance upon her. (_Mariette, ou est le livre bleu? Mon dieu, Gabrielle! les ciseaux; quelqu'un a enleve mes petites ciseaux. Toinette, apportez-moi le boite aux lettres. Tiens, Amelie! Prends ce mouchoir_, etc., etc.) These requests for service continued in a fairly steady stream, amidst much hurrying and scurrying, sharp cries of _tout de suite, Madame_, and a general atmosphere of sulky obsequiousness.

In the thick of the confusion the door was opened by a young woman in a soft suit of brown heather. She stood on the threshold for a moment and, as she looked questioningly towards the lady in command, a slight frown brought a bar of hazel brown over her beautiful gray eyes.

The lady at the desk, who saw everything, affected not to see the figure on the threshold and went on languidly issuing orders.

Thereupon the newcomer, in clear, agreeable English, called out:

"Evidently you don't want me, Cornelia. Good, I'll go back upstairs. I've stacks and stacks of work to do--"

"Araminta, wait! Of course I want you. I want you most particularly."

"You've got an army here, already. What do you want me for? If you keep on calling me away from the manikins whenever Harry is explaining matters, he'll never be able to train me into taking charge of them."

"My dear!" trilled Cornelia, bringing her most musical _arpeggio_ into play. "When you've been married as long as I have, you'll understand that no sensible woman ever interferes with her husband's work except for a positively overwhelming reason."

"Really, the reasons here in Paris are as bad as the seasons," said Janet with a smile. "I wish they'd calm down and not overwhelm us quite so often."

"Ah, Janet, you well may jest. Little do you know of the heavy responsibilities involved in managing both a business and a husband. If I had only myself to think of the worries and risks would be as a whisper in the wind. But I think of Hercules sharing my anxieties, working himself thin and gray--"

While she went on in this theatrical vein, Janet was thinking to herself: "She makes as great a virtue of being married as she formerly made of not being married. Whatever her condition, there's a terrible to-do about it."

Aloud she said:

"Look here, Cornelia, if you want to talk privately to me, hadn't we better get rid of this retinue?"

Without awaiting a reply, she calmly released Marie and the other manikins from service and sent them out of the room. This done, she took a chair opposite the desk where Cornelia sat staring at her in speechless indignation.

Cornelia cherished a sort of mental chromo of herself as the active ruler of the Paulette community, a ruler at once imperious, genial, and adored. In point of fact, her insatiable appetite for attention, reinforced by a sharp tongue, spread an atmosphere of dread and anxiety around her. Janet was the only person who had ever succeeded in weakening Cornelia's illusion about herself by bringing it into occasional juxtaposition with reality.

"You'll greatly oblige me, Janet, by not ordering my servants about under my very nose."

"Your manikins are not your servants, Cornelia. They're your employees. You slave-drive them outrageously. If you don't look out, you'll have a strike on your hands before long."

"With you as the strike leader, I dare say?"

"Why not? Your inability to respect other people's time is simply appalling. The moment some whim pops into your head, one of us is called upon to gratify it. You quite forget that when you arbitrarily take us from our jobs, bang goes continuity, a most important factor in good workmanship. Mazie, who came here grovelling in the dust, is now up in arms; the manikins are unitedly rebellious; Harry is almost a nervous wreck. This, with business simply deluging the establishment. I tell you, unless _you_ stop, we all will."

Cornelia quailed under these words, although she kept her face admirably. She was in some respects like a wrongly bound volume: half Becky Sharp and half Hedda Gabler. And it was the Hedda Gabler pages she always turned up to Janet.

"Well, what next?" she exclaimed, on the defensive in spite of her brave words. "I've rescued Mazie Ross out of the gutter where Hutchins Burley flung her; I've sacrificed my own creature comforts to make those of the manikins secure; I've given _you_ a very tidy berth and no questions asked; and I've worked myself to skin and bones for Harry's sake. Now you all turn on me and call me an interfering busybody, or worse. That's human gratitude."

Janet, giving the faintest ironical shrug, merely looked at her.

Cornelia smothered a sob of rage. After a pause, she informed Janet that Mrs. R. H. L. Jerome, her most valued customer, had made an appointment that morning to look at some frocks and gowns. This lady had a single hobby, clothes; and she spent an appreciable fraction of her untold millions ("she's divorced two multimillionaires, Araminta, and driven a third into the diplomatic service!") on this hobby. She had expressed profound dissatisfaction with Paulette's offerings on her last visit two weeks ago. It was therefore of prime importance to please her this time.

"I want you to be in the salon with me when she looks at the models," said Cornelia. "She's extremely susceptible to flattery. As the head of the house, I can't very well lay it on too thick, can I? I have a feeling that your presence will make the sales go smoothly."

"You'd better leave me out of it, Cornelia. I never sold a thing in my life. Why, I couldn't sell a sandwich to a starving man."

"_I'll_ do the _selling_, my dear. I simply ask you to be on hand. The fact is, you have a peculiar influence over people. When they get to talking with you, they suddenly forget about _things_--the earth-earthy things by which we are all so obsessed nowadays--they appear to forget about things and begin to occupy themselves with thoughts and dreams. In that condition, a man or woman will buy anything."

"Cornelia, you'll admit that I've done all sorts of odd jobs for you without a murmur. But I really don't like to bamboozle anybody into--"

"Bamboozle! Araminta! No one who buys a Paulette frock is bamboozled. Be quite clear about that."

She added, less belligerently, that Mrs. Jerome, though so very rich, had no taste in clothes. Or, more bluntly, had a most execrable taste. She went in for suffrage, feminism, woman's rights, and all that sort of thing. (Here Janet pricked up her ears.) So you might know what to expect. She was, in short, faddy and temperamental. Her purchases were made or not made, as the case might be, because the seller pleased or displeased her. The articles themselves were of quite secondary importance.

"Forgive my curiosity, Cornelia. But you have regiments of customers. Why are you so anxious about just this one?"

"What a question, you babe in the wood! Don't you know who Mrs. Jerome is?"

"I know she's rich and that Mr. Pryor had something to do with her coming here."

"That's not it, child. She's the American mother of the Duchess of Keswick. And the Duchess-- Well, it's Madge and Mary between her and the Queen of England. Think, Araminta, what a feather in our cap, if we get the patronage of the Duchess of Keswick, and a Paulette frock is worn at the Court of St. James! It's the chance of a lifetime. You won't disappoint me, dear?"

"No. We'll make it Madge and Paulette and Mary. When is this dowager Mrs. Jerome expected?"

"That's her carriage now, or I'm very much mistaken," said Cornelia, all agog. "She hardly ever uses a motor. It's _so_ ordinary."

In some amazement Janet watched her old friend going out to do the honors in the reception room. What a transformation a short year had effected in the Cornelia of the Lorillard tenements! Bohemianism, outlawry, and the one-piece dresses of Kips Bay seemed remoter than Mars. Cornelia was attired in the height of fashion, her cheeks were delicately touched up, her hair was elaborately coiffured.

Even her congenital languor had evaporated, for the moment, as the thrills of social snobbery electrified her.

*II*

Entering the salon, Janet saw that Mrs. Jerome was a podgy little tub of a woman, the symbol of the fortune which her father, Theodore Casey, had made in wash-tubs. She took a chair beside the visitor, who sleepily watched the crack Paulette manikins whilst they exhibited a variety of frocks and Cornelia nervously courted the favor of her outspoken customer.

Mrs. Jerome examined one of the manikins at close quarters.

"I don't think much of your dresses today," she said bluntly. "The lines are all wrong."

"Pardon me, Mrs. Jerome," said Cornelia with dignity. "But they ought to be at that angle. A Paulette frock is a work of art. It is designed to produce a definite effect from a definite point of view. The lines are like those of a Phidias statue, perfectly right at the proper distance."

"I don't care if they _do_ look like a Fiddlesticks statue. Look at that charmeuse gown there. Can't anybody tell that girl a mile away for what she is?"

"I fear I don't understand."

"Well, if the gown don't hide the fact that she's a manikin, it won't hide the fact that my figure's no Fiddlesticks statue, or whatever you call it."

This opinion, delivered in an unmistakable New York voice and accent, made Janet laugh. Not disrespectfully. She discerned at once that Mrs. Jerome, like Shakespeare, had far more native wit than college learning. Her judgment was confirmed when the visitor, turning abruptly towards her, said:

"What do you think of these Paulette dresses, young lady. I don't expect you to say that they're pretty rotten. But do they satisfy the eye?"

"I think, Mrs. Jerome, that if they don't _satisfy_ the eye, they'll at least astound it."

Mrs. Jerome brightened up at once.

"Well, child," she said, "when I want to astound people, I'll do it on less money than a Paulette gown costs. I'll walk around Columbus Circle in my bathing suit."

"Oh, I'll bet you do it, too," said Janet, at the top of her exuberance.

"Do what?" said Mrs. Jerome, now totally oblivious of the manikins on exhibition and of Cornelia on pins and needles.

"Wear a bathing suit around the house. I used to, regularly. In the tenements in Kips Bay I always did the dishes in my bathing suit. Annette Kellerman tights, a skirt to the knees, no sleeves, no stockings. A dandy rig-out for quick action."

"Permit me to say, Janet--" began Cornelia, in frigid, authoritative tones.

Mrs. Jerome impatiently waved her away, an indignity so astounding that Madame Paulette could scarcely trust her eyes. Janet, fearing she had been indiscreet, hastened to add:

"Of course, Cornelia--Madame Paulette--doesn't allow it in Paris. She requires us to be perfectly proper here."

"She would!" said Mrs. Jerome significantly, her back still turned to Cornelia. "But what good does it do you? Nine-tenths of the people in Paris are perfectly proper; but they don't look it. The other tenth are perfectly improper; but they, as often as not, don't look it either."

The manikins received another inning. A brief one, though, for Mrs. Jerome inspected and dismissed them in quick succession.

"Well, well," she said, half aloud, "to think that you came from the tenements."

She gave Janet a quick, sceptical glance.

"I can scarcely believe it."

"I can scarcely believe it myself," said Janet, with a perfectly straight face.

Cornelia bit her lips and, flashing an angry look at her friend, went out of the salon, unable to trust her feelings any longer.

"If the Duchess got wind of it," Mrs. Jerome mused on, "that would finish Paulette's for me. She don't think a shop is a classy shop unless the proprietor has a classy pedigree."

"Oh, our pedigree will seem classy enough to the Duchess," said Janet, "if you don't give us away. And you can't do that, you know. I only told you in the strictest confidence."

"Don't you go shifting your responsibilities on me, young woman. If you want your secrets kept, you just keep them to yourself. I'm no safe deposit vault for anyone else's hidden thoughts. For your comfort I'll tell you this, though. I've never given my daughter food or information that I knew she couldn't digest. I'm too old to begin doing it now."

"You're quite right, Mrs. Jerome. Things slip off my tongue that oughtn't to. Personally, I don't care a straw. But other people--"

"Don't worry about other people, my dear," said Mrs. Jerome, who had enjoyed the tit-for-tat immensely. "I'm not likely to desert Madame Paulette. At least not while she keeps anyone with your healthy face and fascinating eyes here to talk to me. Mind, I'm not gone on these Paulette frocks. I guess the Madame knows that pretty well. But this establishment is run by a woman, a woman from my own country. That means a good deal to me. For although our sex is coming into its own, the pace isn't a dizzy one. The men see to that. And so I say, this is a time for all good women to stand by one another."

The little lady sank back in her seat and, as though exhausted by her long speech, closed her eyes. When she opened them again, Cornelia had returned and the parade of the manikins was resumed.

This spectacle always started Janet on a series of curious reflections. As a result of the training in rhythmics which the girls received at the hands of Harry Kelly, they were free from those grotesque mannerisms of gait, posture, and demeanor which manikins cultivated and which were accepted by the trade as superlative expressions of esthetic correctness. Yet Harry's talent yoked to the service of fashion seemed as wasteful a thing as an artist's genius drafted in the service of futility. It reminded Janet of the story of the Medici prince who compelled Michelangelo to mould a statue out of snow.

But to Mrs. Jerome the Paulette manikins were a sight to see. She made Janet sit on the lounge beside her and coaxed her to give an opinion on every frock subsequently shown. She purchased all those that Janet praised and several that she made fun of.

It was one of the best day's work that the sales department of Paulette's had ever done.

In spite of which, Madame Paulette considered it her duty to take Mrs. Jerome to one side and apologize for Janet and her artless indiscretions.

"She means well, Mrs. Jerome," said Cornelia, deferentially. "She's--well, I might say, she's naive, incredibly naive in matters of social position. It's only lack of training, I assure you."

"Is that all?"

"Yes, she's absolutely ignorant of distinctions of rank. Absolutely. Why, she would talk to a Duchess with no more ceremony than to a scrubwoman."

"Then I'll bring the Duchess here to be talked to. It might do her good."

"Oh, do bring the Duchess. I shall be charmed to display for her inspection the best that the Maison has."

"No doubt. But let me give you a tip. Don't waste your time training that dear little Janet girl. She'll learn the deceitful ways of the world fast enough, and no correspondence course needed either."

Janet came up to them as they reached the outer door.

"My dear," said Mrs. Jerome, putting her arm around Janet's waist, "you've given me the best quarter of an hour I've had in Paris these two months. It's been a treat, a royal treat."

As Cornelia beheld these two, standing there intertwined, a strange expression formed on her face, an expression that bespoke an agonizing doubt of the sanity of the universe.

Unheeding her, Mrs. Jerome continued to say to Janet:

"The people I meet everywhere! In Europe they pick my pockets while they lick my boots; in America they rifle my purse with barefaced assurance. You are the first one I've met in a very long time who has talked to me as though I were a human being and not a walking cash box."

*III*

The conquest of Mrs. R. H. L. Jerome produced a sensation in the Paulette establishment. It also gave an element of security to Janet's precarious tenure of office there.

Janet knew full well that Madame Paulette had received her in the Boulevard Haussman with nothing like the enthusiasm that Cornelia had welcomed her in the Lorillard tenements. In the interval between these events the two friends had burned several bridges behind them.

It was obvious that Cornelia was now glutted with hands to wait on her, ears to pay heed to her, and tongues to flatter her. Her natural taste for dependents being completely gratified, she felt less need than ever for friends of an independent turn of mind like Janet.

Moreover, in a year and a half of compact adventure, Janet had matured more rapidly than many young people do in ten years of tame drifting. Time, which had whittled away some of her imprudence, had robbed her of none of her daring; it had left her with her almost naive freedom of utterance intact. Her candor was a trait to which Cornelia had formerly been much drawn. But that was in the days of her first arrival in Kips Bay, the days when the young girl had all but worshipped the experienced woman. Now that blind devotion had given way to challenging criticism, Janet's candor seemed far less attractive.

That is, far less attractive to Cornelia. As regards Paulette's in general, Janet was a great favorite. Her official duties were chiefly those of an assistant to Harry Kelly in the physical training of the manikins, (a branch of their professional instruction on which Kelly laid great stress). She bore somewhat the same relation to her chief that the concert master of an orchestra does to the conductor. This arrangement was Cornelia's doing. In one and the same bold stroke she had thought to cut down the time that Kelly spent with the manikins (this being the time in which his heart lay most); and to shift to Janet's shoulders the odium that frequently devolves on the deputy chief (who exercises authority without possessing power).

But Cornelia's spirit of negation, active as ever, accomplished only one-half of its object.

Janet discharged her duties with so much vivacity and with such invincible good-will that she was idolized by everybody in the Paulette firm from Kelly and the manikins down to the work girls and the magnificent porter who daily consented to guard the street door.

In short, she was the life of the house; than which, Cornelia could have brought no stronger indictment against her of unimaginable _lese majeste_.

The two had a long private conversation in Cornelia's office the day after Mrs. Jerome's visit.

"Araminta, you've certainly made a hit with the old lady. Just as I predicted. It's a fine thing for us both. Paulette's prestige will go up and up. And it should mean a great deal to you."

"How, I wonder?"

"You can make her friendship a stepping stone."

"Easy stepping stones for little feet--so to speak?"

"You know quite well what I mean. Some day you'll go back to America--"

"Is this a hint or a prediction, or both--"

"Don't be silly, Janet. I'm thinking of your future. Your future in your own country, naturally. Mrs. Jerome is a woman of enormous influence. You know how it is over there. Much gold will wash all guilt away."

"You mean my chequered past?" asked Janet, with a smile.

"Yes," said Cornelia, adding handsomely, "although your affair with Claude Fontaine will probably be quite forgotten by that time. Nobody will remember it."

"Robert Lloyd will!"

Cornelia was up in arms at once. She always was, when Janet mentioned Robert's name.

"What difference does that make? You aren't going to marry _him_, I suppose?"

"I suppose not. He's too poor, for one thing. He isn't going to ask me, for another."

"One would imagine you wanted him to," said Cornelia, with concise sarcasm.

"We got along splendidly as partners."

"Partners! What has that to do with marriage?"

"What has anything to do with marriage? I understood your reasons when you believed that marriage was a prison. I confess I don't understand your reasons now that you believe marriage to be a haven of bliss. Mind, I don't say it is a prison, and I don't say that it _isn't_ a haven of bliss."

Janet tried to check her sub-ironical impulses: they were irrepressible.

"I feel too much in the dark about the whole thing," she went on, "to be as cocksure as I used to be. But if one isn't to marry a man because one has found him to be a splendid companion in the wear and tear of working together, why is one to marry him?"

"How you do run on, Araminta! Prisons and hells, Paradises and havens of bliss--you jump from one extreme to the other. Who mentioned these things? My dear, one marries a man because he calls to what is deepest and truest in one. Because he responds to--"

"The mating instinct?"

"How can you sit there and say such vulgar things?"

"Vulgar! Well, you _are_ going it! Isn't the mating instinct as deep and true as any of them?"

"It isn't a reason for marriage," said Cornelia, in staccato accents. "And you know perfectly well I never said or thought it was. Quite the reverse. I opposed marriage because the sex instinct, which is what induces most people to marry, is a good ground for a temporary union but not a good ground for a permanent one."

"Then there _are_ good reasons for a permanent union?"

"Yes. And they absorb the sex reason a million times over."

"It's easy for you to talk like that, Cornelia, with Harry thinking that the sun rises in one of your eyes and sets in the other. But where shall _I_ find a Harry to be absorbed in me a million times over like that?"

"If you go on making nasty sarcastic replies to all my well-meant suggestions, I shall wash my hands of you," said Cornelia, rising with frigid haughtiness.

She added, on a superior note:

"You'd better see a little less of poor, bedraggled Mazie Ross, if it's on _her_ level that you're being tempted to think."

*IV*

Janet hastened after her in a complete change of mood.

"Come back, Cornelia," she called out, remorsefully. "I had no right to be sarcastic. Forgive me, and I'll eat all the humble pie you like."

Cornelia sat down again.

"This is a new tack for you to take," she said, making the most of an advantage Janet seldom gave her.

"The fact is, Cornelia, I'm--my feelings were ploughed up today, ploughed up from top to bottom. The postman brought me an offer of marriage this morning."

"An offer of marriage!"

"From Monsieur St. Hilaire."

Cornelia had of course heard the facts of the whole St. Hilaire episode. She also knew that Janet still corresponded with Henriette, and that all the recent letters of the girl's father had been sent back unopened.

"I thought you never read his letters?"

"This one was folded up in Henriette's note. I'm sure the child wasn't a party to the trick. Here it is. Will you read it?"

Cornelia did so.

"Well, I must say I'm surprised," she said, returning the letter. "He writes in a very decent, manly strain. Altogether different from what I expected. The devil doesn't seem to be nearly as black as he's painted."

"Oh, he's not a professional satyr, if that's what you mean. I never implied that he was."

Cornelia pondered the matter for a minute. She recalled forgotten particulars about M. St. Hilaire, amongst others, the account of his generous income.

"So he's in Paris with Henriette," she mused. "I notice that he says he's coming here tomorrow to get his answer in person. What will you do about it, dear?"

"I wish I knew. I want to see Henriette again, tremendously. But I don't want to see her father. Do give me your advice, Cornelia. What do you think I ought to do?"

"Well, why not give him another chance? He's made you a perfectly straight and honorable offer this time. As I recall the whole story, he wasn't really repugnant to you, except at that one time."

"No. But am I lightly to forget that he--that he touched me without my consent, presuming to think that, because I had loved one man, my body was at the free disposal of all men?"

"It was a wretched mistake to make--"

"A mistake! It was a monstrous piece of stupidity and impudence."

"Quite so, my dear. I'm not standing up for him. Still, don't let us forget that men are not built like women."

"That's a truth that cuts both ways, isn't it?" said Janet.

She had given up being astonished at Cornelia's peculiar mixture of the old and the new in the matter of theories about men and women. She merely wondered to what weird angle Cornelia meant to shift her outlook now.

"The point is," continued Cornelia serenely, "that a woman's sex emotion is generally excited by something that takes her fancy; a man's, by something that stirs his blood. The mind plays the bigger part in the one case, the body in the other. That's why, in the duel of sex, the psychological moment is so important to the woman, the physiological moment to the man.

"These acute distinctions are quite beyond me. A man has as much gray matter as a woman, or even more. Then why should he let his mental processes suffer paralysis whenever a nice woman looks at him?"

"Well, that's one of the mysteries that marriage helps us to understand, Araminta. In the life of a man there come these physiological moments, these sex storms, different from anything in the experience of a woman. I don't mean to say that men have more physical passion than women. But there are occasions when their physical passion takes a more violently concentrated form. Mazie, in her vulgar little way, isn't so far wrong when she says: 'Scratch a fine gentleman, and you'll find a cave man.'"

"Do you mean to tell me that there are absolutely no men who feel about love as we do?"

"I've never met one. Have you?"

Janet was thinking: "Surely Robert isn't like that!" Aloud she said nothing. There was a dangerous glint in her friend's eyes. Cornelia had an uncanny way of penetrating one's thoughts when Robert was the object of them. Had she accomplished this feat of divination again? At all events, an acrid note entered her voice as she continued:

"Is it really only Monsieur St. Hilaire that you can't make up your mind about? If so, take my advice. Come down off your high horse and make the most of your good fortune."

"My good fortune!"

"Let's be perfectly frank with each other, my dear. Here's a man who wants to marry you. He's well-born, cultivated, rich. His one child is a girl who adores you and whom you adore. The only thing against him is that he once committed a serious breach of decorum--"

"And that I don't love him--" interpolated Janet.

Cornelia blandly ignored the interruption.

"His letter shows," she went on, "that he is willing to make the most handsome amends, the only amends a man can make in a matter of this sort. What more do you ask?"

"I'm not asking him for amends. I simply want to be let alone."

"Araminta, let me beg you not to deceive yourself about the changing moral values we hear so much of nowadays. Has the price of virginity really gone down? Judged by the conversation of radicals and Outlaws, yes. Judged by the ticker of the matrimonial exchange, it is still pretty high. Bear that in mind, and remember that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush."

"Do you mean to say," exclaimed Janet, in great astonishment, "that you, of all people, advise me to _accept_ this offer?"

Her tone irritated Cornelia.

"Beggars can't be choosers," she began.

"They can remain beggars," replied Janet tersely.

"If that's the way you feel about it, you needn't ask my advice again. We're wasting each other's time."

Saying which, Cornelia rose and left the office.

*CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX*

*I*

The Paulette manikins, famed throughout the world of fashion for their grace in attitude and correctness in position and movement, owed their prestige to a system of hygienic training conceived and carried out by Harry Kelly himself. Yet these young ladies took their distinction so seriously that they held it beneath them to assist their chief in straightening out the classroom disorder when the period of instruction was over.

"Here's a mess!" called out Mazie Ross, walking into the Paulette gymnasium, immediately after the dismissal of a small class of manikins. "You might think they'd been on a grand jamboree."

"Anything up?" said Harry, shortly.

"Janet asked me to help you this morning."

"What for?"

"She went out for a horseback ride with the St. Hilaires."

"This morning. Why, as it is, she goes almost every afternoon. She went yesterday afternoon. A fine way to do business, I'll say."

Mazie sulkily began to pick up stray articles.

"You needn't pitch into me, Harry," she said. "You're not half so sorry as I am that your gentle Janet isn't here to do this rotten job. Is it my fault?"

"Does Cornelia know she's away?" said Kelly, fuming.

"Can a cat miaow within a mile of these precincts without Corny being on to it?"

"Why don't they keep me posted then? I never hear of a blessed thing that goes on in my own home until it's all over."

"Say, do you want to start a row? Then take a tip from me and land into a certain party in the main office. If you'd knock her down and then jump on her with both feet, you'd be doing something. What's the use of picking on a dead bird like me?"

"Don't talk that way about Cornelia," said Harry, fumbling amongst the papers on the desk, and trying vainly to be stern. "I've told you before I won't have it. Where's your gratitude?"

She made a face at him behind his back.

"Gratitude!" she said. "What's the good of me wasting gratitude on Cornelia when she reminds herself and everybody in Paulette's daily that she picked me up out of the gutter that Hutch left me in?"

"Lock up the wardrobe and clear out, will you?" said Kelly, frigidly. "I can do the rest myself."

"Here's your hat, what's your hurry," she muttered to herself. But she stayed and continued to put things to rights.

Mazie had changed greatly since the palmy days of the Lorillard tenements. She looked ill and haggard, a mere shadow of the jaunty "Follies" girl of old. Her willowy posture had degenerated into an undisguised slouch, her hair was frowsy, and her dress was slung together.

But her tongue had not lost its stab.

She closed the wardrobe door with an unintentional slam that caused Harry Kelly to jump up in his seat.

"Damn!" he said, in that mild voice of his.

It was as if Vesuvius had emitted a puff of tobacco smoke.

The metamorphosis of the "Harlem Gorilla" into the husband of Madame Paulette was astoundingly complete. Harry Kelly's Van Dyke beard and fashionably tailored clothes alone would have effected a radical change in his appearance. Kelly was transformed not only physically but psychically. His muscles were still the muscles of a Titan, but his nerves had become the nerves of a fanciful man or a delicate woman.

Mazie, who was no student of spiritual transformations, went up to the desk at which Kelly sat and began to tidy it. She whisked away stray papers and envelopes that lay near his hands with much the same air that a waiter lashes the crumbs off a table to speed the lingering guest.

He grew more and more fidgety, but she showed him no mercy.

"Janet didn't know those St. Hilaires were coming this morning," she finally volunteered. "But you can gamble on it that Cornelia knew. When my fine gentleman got off his prancing horse and marched into the reception room clanking spurs and all, Corny was right there on the job in her softest, sweetest tone. My! butter wouldn't melt in her mouth. And all the time Janet hangs in the background, saying she's too busy to go out, and looking as stubborn as a mule. When gentle Janet gets that stubborn expression, it means: You can move the Woolworth Building, but you can't move me!"

"Then why in thunder did she go?"

"Because that St. Hilaire kid got busy with her. A pretty little kid, a regular father's darling, the kind that coos away like a turtledove till she gets everything she wants and a tidy slice of the moon extra. Well, she draped herself pathetically around Janet--all that heartstring stuff--and Janet, like any fool of a man, fell for the pathos."

"You can't persuade me that Janet didn't want to go," said Kelly, gloomily.

"I won't try to, then. Just the same, she didn't. That's the weird part of it."

"What's weird about it?"

"Why, she doesn't want to marry that millionaire and he's crazy to get her. Gee, some people have all the luck."

"If she doesn't want him, where's the luck?" said Kelly, with the logic of simplicity.

"Harry, don't be a nut. Here's the ABC of it. All my love affairs were on the q.t., though I say it that shouldn't. Everything respectable and under cover. Nobody rattled my adventures in the ears of the public, did they? Yet, from the way everybody points the finger of scorn at me, you'd think I produced the whole Venusburg show and ran it single-handed. Now look at Janet. She hops off with young Claude Fontaine right under the eyes of the moving-picture brigade. The front pages of all the leading papers give her a full week's publicity. She boards with Claude for a month or two, carefully omitting even the formality of a fake wedding ring. She lives in sin! But everybody shies at using 'them crooel woids.' And what are the wages of sin? A couple of millionaires pining away on her doorstep and Sousa's band a-playing at her feet. And she's no great beauty at that."

"Quit it, Mazie. What's the good of fooling yourself with the idea that Janet hasn't had her troubles. My guess is that Claude threw her overboard."

"Well, you can guess again, my simple Samson."