Chapter XIII: Part 13

"Really, Cornelia, these phrases belong to the screen grade of fiction, not to the facts of the twentieth century."

Here Mazie interrupted with an urgent message from the exhibition room.

"Stay and talk to Robert," said Cornelia with frigid disdain. "He's a great salvager of damaged reputations."

Mazie looked inquiringly Robert's way, while Cornelia swept towards the door. In a mock-heroic tone, he explained:

"Cornelia says that Janet _went wrong_; therefore, unless M. St. Hilaire marries her, she'll be _ruined for life_."

Mazie caught the drift of the situation at once.

"Ruined!" she cried out, in a steaming torrent of slang. "Say, people in the States won't believe a girl is 'ruined' nowadays, even when she's committed to the House of the Good Shepherd. Ruined! Who's to ruin her? Why, the average American is such a hokey-pokey, near-beer, Sunday-school man of straw, he wouldn't ruin Cleopatra if she begged him on her bended knees! Take it from me. If Janet's people at the cemetery end of Brooklyn heard Claude described as the Duc de la Fontaine, they might give her the glassy eye. They might. They'll believe cruel things about a foreigner. But she mustn't let on that he's a gent from the U.S.A., or they'll think she's stringing them. Think! They'll know it. Why, my brown-eyed cherub, there's only one way a girl can go wrong in little old New York. And that's to have somebody break into her bank account."

Of the latter part of this choicely sustained opinion, Robert was the exclusive audience, Cornelia having already closed the door with a bang.

*III*

A little later in the morning Janet, glancing through a copy of _Le Matin_ three days old, caught sight of a familiar name in a telegraphic despatch from New York. The name was Fontaine. According to the brief news report, headed _C'est fini de rire!_ (the fun is over!), Fontaine and Company, the most noted of the Fifth Avenue dealers in precious stones, were charged with complicity in a sensational attempt at smuggling.

Piecing the somewhat disjointed details together, Janet gathered that secret agents of the Department of Justice on the lookout for spies had inadvertently found thousands of dollars' worth of diamonds concealed in the bottom boards of what purported to be cases of Japanese books. The cases, which had been opened by the Secret Service agents shortly after the "Ionic" docked in Hoboken, were ostensibly consigned to a San Francisco book dealer for whom one Hutchins Burley, a New York editor and foreign correspondent, appeared as the representative.

Burley was held, and the newspapers featured him as the "master mind" of a very clever band. On examination he confessed that the book dealer was a mere dummy for Fontaine and Company, whose stock rooms were the real destination of the diamonds. A warrant for the arrest of Mr. Rene Fontaine, head of the firm, was at once issued. Officials of the customs house alleged that the operations of the smugglers, whose ingenuity had baffled detection for years, reached gigantic proportions, the government's loss being estimated at many millions.

News so startling had to be told without delay. Janet excitedly reported it to Harry Kelly and then descended to the exhibition room where as a rule Cornelia held sway at this hour.

Entering the salon somewhat precipitately, she saw the young Duchess of Keswick seated in great state and surrounded by deferential minions. But no Cornelia visible. Janet beat a swift retreat. The Duchess reminded her, not altogether pleasantly, of Marjorie Armstrong at the Mineola Aerodrome. The two young ladies had the same fashionable contours, the same self-conscious pride of position, the same patricianism of the made-to-order rather than of the inborn type.

Hastening up a flight of stairs to Cornelia's office, Janet was brought to a stop outside the door by the sound of voices, which she recognized at once as those of her friend and of the Duchess's mother, Mrs. R. H. L. Jerome.

It was easy to overhear the conversation. Mrs. Jerome announced her departure for London the next day to inspect an apartment house restricted exclusively to professional women who, besides being mothers, were the sole supporters of their children. She intended to open a similar house (as a humanitarian, not a charitable undertaking) in New York. She had already offered Janet the post of resident business manager. Naturally, she would like to take the young lady with her to England at once, but she wouldn't insist on this. If the inconvenience to the Maison Paulette was too great, Janet could follow later, as soon as she had wound up her affairs.

Cornelia's reply was couched in a low voice so tense with emotion that Janet could distinguish only a word or two here and there. These words were ample. _M. St. Hilaire, woman-with-her-back-to-the-wall, Henriette, redemption, iron-law-of-retribution_, etc., such proper names and stagey phrases showed quite clearly that Cornelia was delivering her customary rigmarole about the sacrifices she was making to the end that Janet might cover up her past and glorify her future.

To Janet's ears, this rigmarole was now so stale as no longer to invite even remonstrance. But to declaim it to a comparative outsider! And to embroider it with all sorts of sticky innuendoes! Janet grew hot and cold by turns. So this was how one's name was buffeted about after an episode like hers with Claude Fontaine! If one's best friends talked this way behind one's back, what might not less intimate associates say or take for granted?

She had tried to steel herself against inevitable collisions with public opinion; yet this first impact, though only an oblique one, had given her a much nastier shock than any she had anticipated.

_M. St. Hilaire, the Chateau in Normandy, the prestige that was to cover a multitude of past sins_--Cornelia was going it again!

Mrs. Jerome replied that these matters were none of her affair. She needed Janet and she believed Janet needed her. Surely, the decision lay with the young woman herself?

While Janet was still debating whether or not she should walk straight in and interrupt, Cornelia shifted the attack, her diplomatic allusions to Janet's love affair being replaced by blunter speech. She effected the change with a great show of diffidence and hesitation. Her sense of loyalty alike to her friend and to Mrs. Jerome obliged her, etc.--Claude Fontaine, the _beau ideal_ of the Junior smart set, etc.--the transatlantic honeymoon to which the newspaper troubadours had given a far-flung notoriety, etc.--But doubtless Mrs. Jerome recalled these particulars well enough?

Came the tart rejoinder:

"No, I never do read newspaper scandal! The fact is, when I'm not gambling in Paulette frocks, I'm a very busy woman. If it wasn't for the Duchess, the Magpie Club in Mayfair would make short work of me. But the Duchess reads me some of the necessary tittle-tattle at breakfast so as to keep me _au fait_. She's a great newspaper fan, is the Duchess."

When Janet finally opened the door, walked in, and electrified the room, Cornelia had just been sweetly remarking:

"But about the managership of this house, a house for unattached mothers--widows and feminist women I presume?--about such projects public curiosity is simply insatiable,' isn't it? Do you really think that Janet is exactly the person for such a delicate position--?"

Ignoring Cornelia and her innuendo, Janet spoke directly to Mrs. Jerome.

"I'm sorry you didn't let me tell you everything last week, Mrs. Jerome," she said, keeping herself well in hand. "You see, all this would have been superfluous then."

"My policy, child, is never to learn more than it's good for me to know. But perhaps I was in the wrong this time."

"I had no idea you could overhear us, Janet," said Cornelia, with as much acerbity as if she were the injured party.

Janet scorned to reply on the level of this remark.

"I came to show you a piece of news in the Matin," was all she deigned to say.

Pointing out the place, she handed Cornelia the newspaper.

"I'd like to speak to Mrs. Jerome alone for a few minutes," she said. "Would you very much mind?"

"Oh, by no means," replied Cornelia, trying hard to be superior and authoritative. "Make any arrangements you like to suit your own interests. Never mind the Maison Paulette. Don't think that _I_ shall stand in your light."

And as she went out, unabashed, she offered the flowery remark that she had only done her poor best to follow the impulses of her heart, her sole desire having been to help both Janet and Mrs. Jerome to a mutual understanding, in the absence of which any joint project they might embark on would be only too likely to suffer shipwreck.

*IV*

Mrs. Jerome drew Janet down to a place beside her on the leather settee.

"Now, my dear," she said, "I'd just as soon you didn't dig up ancient history. Unless it's going to relieve your mind. But I shan't be any the wiser for it when you've finished, trust me. Why, if you told me that you were a new version of the Old Nick himself, one look into your lovely gray eyes would convince me that it wasn't true."

None the less, Janet, not wishing to sail under false colors, gave a very short resume of her life from the time she went to the Lorillard tenements in Kips Bay to the day she left M. St. Hilaire.

Throughout this narrative, Mrs. Jerome's round little face was sphinx-like, becoming animated only at the point of Janet's separation from Claude.

"He left you in the lurch, then?" she had interposed, much affected.

"Oh, no, he would have kept on providing for me," said Janet, evasively, and after a moment's hesitation.

Nobody had really believed the story that she had left Claude. Even Robert appeared to take the reverse for granted. Perhaps, on the whole, she had better fall into a view that people would be sure to adopt in any case, and that she was almost beginning to adopt herself.

"But of course you didn't let him," said Mrs. Jerome.

"No."

"Good. We mustn't be under any obligation of that sort to the selfish sex. Now don't worry about the matter any more. You're a plucky girl, my dear. Keep your pluck, and your pluck will keep you."

Mrs. Jerome added that she hoped Claude Fontaine had not behaved any worse than Janet had represented. She knew the young man. Who in New York didn't? As regards possible criticism, Janet should be comforted with the reflection that glass houses made the whole world kin, human architecture being nowhere complete without them. Why, most of the girls in the Younger Set had lost their heads over Claude, which was all they had had a chance to lose. She herself, meeting him once at a costume ball of the Junior League, had been knocked silly by his dashing airs and Apollo curls, not to mention the best pair of calves she had ever beheld.

"So you see, my dear, an old woman can be quite as feeble-minded as a debutante. Nobody has ever had a monopoly of making mistakes."

Janet pointed out that the world did not take quite so liberal a view. This being so, might she not prove a source of embarrassment to Mrs. Jerome? As people looked at it, running away with a man was--

"Child, for every woman who runs away with a man, there's a man who runs away with a woman."

This obvious truth had been lost sight of, and the time had come for its emphatic reassertion. Did Janet imagine that Claude had lost any credit? Well, let her look at the facts. Mr. Fontaine, senior, had just got himself into a very bad mess, one that involved the Fontaine firm in a case of diamond smuggling. The Duchess had read her the story from the papers. And only last night _Le Temps_ had reported that Mr. Fontaine was believed to have jumped his bail, leaving his son Claude behind to pull the firm out of the hole. And everybody felt so sorry for Claude! Not that he had anything to fear. He could not be held personally accountable. Still, there were the court proceedings, which were reckoned a terrible load for his handsome young shoulders to bear. And so bankers and clubmen and "sealskin" artists were rushing to his aid; matrons from upper Fifth Avenue were pulling wires; Colonel Armstrong, the great financier, was on the job behind the scenes; and it was freely whispered that when the storm had blown over, Claude and Marjorie Armstrong were to be married in St. Thomas'. Here was retribution! If you judged from the international tidal wave of sympathy and helpfulness that was sweeping towards Claude, you might be pardoned for thinking that he was Galahad, Parsifal, and Lohengrin rolled into one.

"But men stand by one another," added Mrs. Jerome, pointing the moral succinctly.

Women would have to take this lesson to heart and stand by one another just as men did. If Janet joined the Jerome forces, she could depend on one thing, and that was her support through thick and thin.

Janet felt inexcusably ungrateful at not accepting the managership on the spot, and frankly said so. She made no attempt to explain her indecision, her motives at the time being far from clear to herself.

Mrs. Jerome, blissfully unaware of the existence of Robert Lloyd as a factor in this hesitation, took it in very good part. Janet should make up her mind when she pleased. But surely, she wasn't again playing with the thought of marrying M. St. Hilaire? After her emphatic assertion that she didn't love him!

"Yet I don't dislike him, by any means," said Janet. "I was very fond of him in Brussels, before he lost his head."

"Fond! Child, one may marry for money without affection, or for affection without money, but one shouldn't marry for either money or affection without a little romance thrown in."

Saying which, this whimsical little lady laughed, rose, and put an arm lovingly around her favorite.

"Come back to the States with me, Janet," she continued. "You'll see what we women can do when we put on steam. You shall make an independent place for yourself in New York, besides helping other women to do the same. And by and by some suitable countryman of ours will come along, and we'll have you nicely married off."

*V*

_We'll have you nicely married off_. Left alone, Janet had to pull herself together after the shock of these words. Everybody seemed determined to get her married. Claude, Pryor, Cornelia, Robert. And now Mrs. Jerome, too!

Clearly, even people who were extremely well disposed towards her, had it at the back of their minds that she had lost credit with her fellow-men. And that nothing short of marriage could restore her to full public esteem! This was a situation she would have to reckon with. But how comical it was to have marriage urged upon her as though it were a kind of penance she must do in order to regain her standing!

Penance! She was driven to admit that it really would be something like an act of penance to marry M. St. Hilaire. Still, would she feel this way if she hadn't met Robert again? Would she? Scarcely. It was Robert's turning up that had caused M. St. Hilaire to appear in the light of a penitential infliction.

There were two courses open to her, and staying with Cornelia was not one of them. No, she recoiled from fashionable dressmaking and all its shows, and the atmosphere of the Maison Paulette with its lurking vapors of parasitism and prostitution grew more oppressively sickening every day.

True, the big establishment was an amusing novelty at first, when you saw only the surface glamor. Nor was it half bad to help Harry Kelly to train the manikins, so long as you supposed that this training merely equipped them to wear expensive frocks in the salon or at the races or at the opera. But when you found out that every one of these dainty girl models expected confidently to become the mistress of some rich merchant or politician, your zest for the work oozed away.

Not that you saw much difference between the kept mistresses who exhibited the Paulette garments and the kept wives who purchased them. But you began to look upon the whole traffic in dresses as a symbol of woman's enslavement to man and of man's enslavement to the dollar sign. And you observed how this traffic changed everybody connected with it for the worse. (Everybody except poor Mazie, who had experienced a revulsion of feeling against the ghost of her Ziegfeld "Follies" self--unluckily too late to do her any good.) You watched the crude boyish cynicism of Harry Kelly turn into a morose pessimism, and in Cornelia you felt the growth or stiffening of all that was grasping and cruel.

As Janet saw these metamorphoses, she realized that the house of Paulette was a house of bondage. It was not an institution with which a free-spirited woman would wish permanently to throw in her lot.

For practical purposes, then, her choice lay between the managership under Mrs. Jerome and a "marriage of convenience" with M. St. Hilaire.

Instinct, to be sure, pointed to another alternative in which the name of Robert figured in capital letters. But this was a romantic dream, a dream which her fancy might embroider but which her courage and common sense had to dispel. Thus, when instinct urged, "A little feminine beguilement will bring him swiftly to your feet," common sense rejoined, "You may elect life-long poverty for yourself; dare you inflict it on Robert?" Instinct could rear and curvet, it could champ the bit; but it was not in the saddle.

As between the two available courses, she had vastly preferred the managership. She would have jumped at it when Mrs. Jerome first offered it, but for a tacit understanding with Henriette. What a pull on her affections the little girl exercised! In a moment of weakness, or rather of passionate disgust with Paulette's, Janet had given her former pupil all but an outright promise to become her second mother. Yet, though the father's proposal was a handsome one, full of concessions to Janet's conception of a modern woman's sphere, it was difficult to ignore the likelihood of a bitter conflict after the wedding. A conflict on the issue of these very concessions. For between the feudal traditions of a man like M. St. Hilaire and the equalitarian assumptions of a woman like herself, there was a great gulf fixed. Could it ever be bridged?

Anyhow, Mrs. Jerome's offer had blazed out the real path of independence for her, and no mistake. Or so she had thought. A dozen times of late she had been on the point of imparting her final decision to Henriette and facing Cornelia and M. St. Hilaire with it. Lack of courage had not restrained her. A very different consideration had given her pause. Might net her "past" prove a source of serious embarrassment to Mrs. Jerome's work? The last two years had taught her something of the "chemical" methods of warfare, the "poison gas" attacks which the foes of progress did not scruple to adopt. Was it likely that the enemies of the women's movement would lose the chance of wrecking Mrs. Jerome's scheme by raising against her young manager the hue and cry of _immorality_, that cry with which a handful of knaves had so often brought a whole nation of fools and cowards to heel?

None the less, good sense had suggested that if Mrs. Jerome could risk it, so could she. And she had at last nerved herself to a conclusive interview with M. St. Hilaire. It was no more than fair that after so much shilly-shallying, she should explain at first hand her definitive refusal.

She was awaiting him now. Had everything gone smoothly, she could have shown him that her career was already booked for passage by a different route. Booked! But at this critical moment she had struck a snag in the shape of Mrs. Jerome's intimation that the shortest way with an awkward past was to "marry it down," so to speak. Had she been mistaken in Mrs. Jerome? Was the good lady so bravely taking a risk only with the quiet resolve to insure this risk at the earliest opportunity? Well, if she had to get married for her sins, one thing was certain. The St. Hilaire she did know was better than the St. Hilaire she didn't.

These reflections were brought to an abrupt close by the return of Cornelia.

"Monsieur St. Hilaire is below," she announced, stormily. "It seems to me that you owe an explanation to me as well as to him."

"If you don't mind," returned Janet in a voice that was strangely calm, "let me accept him first. I'll explain to you afterwards."

Cornelia stared at her. For some time she had believed that, despite the disturbing influence of Mrs. Jerome and Robert, there was a fairly good chance of putting the St. Hilaire marriage through. She had cherished this belief until today. Then she suddenly learned that Janet had all along been carrying on an intrigue with Mrs. R. H. L. Jerome, the upshot of which was that the benevolent Cornelia's plans were to be set wholly at naught. And as if this humiliation were not enough, Janet had entertained the disloyal scheme of deserting the Maison Paulette at barely a day's notice.

These distressing facts had transpired scarcely half an hour ago. And now Janet was again serenely proposing to marry M. St. Hilaire! She had been acting in this erratic fashion ever since Robert came on the scene. Had he had anything to do with this latest change of heart?

"I'll tell M. St. Hilaire to come up," she said tonelessly, paralyzed by the instability of her friend's decisions. "The coast is quite clear. Mazie is upstairs with Harry, and Robert has just gone to Fontainebleau for the day."

She omitted to say that she had packed him off on a factitious errand.

"Yes," she continued, her cadenced speech picking up as she went on. "I told him to make the most of his glorious freedom. You know, he's as good as betrothed to Charlotte Beecher."

"How lucky for them both!" said Janet hypocritically.

Cornelia went out, having thus drawn the long bow at a venture. And not, she trusted, in vain.

*VI*

M. St. Hilaire came in. Janet had never been tempted to rave over him as Cornelia lately did. She thought him a little too short, but she admitted that his well-poised figure, ruddy complexion, and auburn beard were a delight to the eye. And she liked his courtly and somewhat superior demeanor.

Yet, at the first intimate touch of his hand, she recoiled almost with violence.

Her sudden start robbed him of every shred of confidence. And it astonished Janet herself. The fascination of Claude and the voltaic attraction of Robert had put these two, for her, in a class by themselves. But she had met men who were not half so agreeable to talk to or to look upon as M. St. Hilaire--men whose company was dull or whose personalities she disapproved of and yet whose caresses she would not have wished to repel.

It had been this way ever since their first meeting in Brussels. M. St. Hilaire had befriended her in a time of need, he possessed many mental and material advantages, he was the father of Henriette. But he lacked some one thing needful. When she dreamed her day dreams, she never pictured him; and when he touched her, she never thrilled.

True, in his absence, she thought of him (if she thought of him at all) as precisely the sort of man a girl ought to be able to love. But in his presence she was overwhelmed with the single conviction that to live with him would be more than she could bear. The conviction was absurd, unjust, incomprehensible; yet it was not to be gainsaid.

Sensing her thoughts, M. St. Hilaire was disheartened.

"I hoped I had made amends," he said, in sorrowful allusion to the cause of their rupture in Brussels. "But I see you've never forgiven me."

"Oh, no, no," she cried, with a pang of remorse. "I've forgotten all about that. Please believe me. It isn't that at all. It's--I don't quite know--something tells me that I simply can't live with you as your wife."

He rose, by main force suppressing caustic and resentful comments that leapt to the tip of his tongue. He had one more card to play.

"And you mean to--to go back on Henriette?" he asked, in measured tones.

She came to his side and, affectionately taking his hand, began:

"I'm terribly fond of Henriette--"

The door flew open and in walked Robert! But stopped on the instant! He saw Janet caressing the arm of M. St. Hilaire, heard the tender words, and felt the whole universe reel.

In the flash of an eye, he pulled himself together.

"Pardon," he said between his teeth. And, turning sharply round, flung headlong out.

Janet gazed after him in stupefaction.

She never knew how she finished the interview with M. St. Hilaire, nor how, with a hardening of her voice, she made it clear to him that, in a straight conflict between Henriette's self-interest and her own, it was not the former that she was bound to consult.

M. St. Hilaire took his dismissal with a good deal of dignity and self-control, albeit Janet's display of firmness had excited a deeper emotion than any woman had ever aroused in him before. An unconsidered trifle, snatched away, may become the heart's desire. And Janet had ranked far higher than a trifle in M. St. Hilaire's European scale of values, at least since her departure from Brussels. Yet, throughout his courtship of this strange, incalculable American girl, he had never been quite free from an uneasy fear that the marriage might prove a social indiscretion. He now felt certain that his choice had been in keeping with the very best taste. And this certainty, while adding poignancy to his loss, afforded some consolation to his pride.

*VII*

As for Janet, she fairly bolted upstairs and threw a bombshell into the gymnasium by the summary announcement of her intention to leave for England with Mrs. Jerome next day. An unalterable intention. She was determined to establish her independence not by marriage but by hard work.

Mazie listened to her with very mixed feelings; Harry Kelly looked like one who heard the rumble of an approaching earthquake; Cornelia stood petrified.

She came to life again with a sinister, arpeggiative laugh.

"So you'll go trapesing to America on Robert's heels, after all?" she said. "To dish his whole career!"

"Cornelia, you're a devil!" cried Janet, incandescent with anger. "I'd like to know the reason, the real reason for your anxiety to get me married to M. St. Hilaire. Not to do me a good turn, that's one sure thing."

Mazie advanced between them.

"Say, Janet," she called out, pacifico-satirically, "even the devil sometimes does a pal a good turn--just for a change."

Cornelia extinguished her with a gesture.

"Why did you ever run away with Claude," she said, turning to Janet again, "if you were so gone on Robert?"

"How was I to tell the difference between an infatuation that was bound to perish and a love that had scarcely been born?" replied Janet, once more her cool, keen self. "How was I to tell, until I had tried them out?"

"Tried them out! Words fail to describe your morals, Janet. But go on your own way rejoicing, my dear. Hang yourself around Robert's neck, if you like. You'll make a charming picture there, I'm sure. Of course, clinging vines have gone out of fashion. But clinging leeches are always with us."

Janet went out ignoring these insults and mutely denying Harry Kelly's passionate appeal to her not to mind what Cornelia was saying in a vertigo of rage.

"For God's sake, Cornelia," said Harry, making a frantic demonstration, "don't let her leave us like that."

"Hold your tongue, you imbecile!" called out his wife, turning on him fiercely. "When I want to play the fool. I'll ask for your advice."

Her exit, a tempestuous one, left Mazie and Kelly alone and forlorn. Poor Harry Kelly collapsed in his swivel chair, while Mazie hovered around the desk like a gadfly.

"Unless you give her what for," she warned him, "_you'll_ never travel on asphalt."

He looked up and feebly waved her away.

"What can I do?" he said plaintively. "Just jawing back won't help matters."

"No," said Mazie scornfully. "Jawing back won't. But how about knocking her down and jumping on her with both feet? Gee, if I had your strength for five minutes! I tell you what, my frazzled Gorilla, if you don't mop up the floor with her this very minute, she'll make a doormat of you for the rest of your life."

Her tone was slighting, and there was bark in the dose she administered. For a second, he straightened up. Then he shook his head at her, slumped again, and buckled down to the papers on the desk. Poor Harry! His muscle was willing, but his nerve was weak.

*CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE*

*I*

The blow which Robert got between the eyes when he saw Janet and St. Hilaire together had left him shunned. And he was on the train speeding to Fontainebleau before he began coming to, a painful process of returning sensibility, beside which the pins and needles of a limb that had been asleep would have seemed the merest child's play.

The wild nomadic images that chased one another across the field of his consciousness! They racked his brain, his world-reforming brain, and limited his feverish introspection to one discovery, the startling discovery of how very much he was in love.

Rather an awkward plight, he told himself, for a young man who had purposed the moral regeneration of mankind and in pursuit of this purpose had sworn to spurn fate, scorn death, and set his hopes above happiness and love. Especially love! Didn't all the Dick Dudgeons and Devil's Disciples begin by renouncing love? Indeed, didn't they make this renunciation a cardinal point of honor?

To think that even Cornelia had cautioned him against making an utter ass of himself about Janet! Cautioned him in vain. And Janet, too, had tried her hardest to warn him off by jibing at his poverty. This cruel kindness had almost worked; almost, but not quite. The poet, the lunatic, the lover--they were the embodiments of diseases (Shakespeare had said it!), diseases that resisted the most desperate remedies.

Of course she preferred St. Hilaire to himself. Why not? According to his own theories, he should be the first to dub her an imbecile if she didn't. When she needed sex to gratify desire, she had taken Claude by preference. Now that she needed a position, she would take St. Hilaire. And rightly so.

He had nothing to offer her but his brains.

Brains and no money! And that in the twentieth century, the triumphant mechanical century, in which any fool with a little low cunning and a good thick skin could make money by the bushel.

What on earth had possessed Mark Pryor to start him on this trail? Confound it! It had all grown out of a chance encounter with Pryor in Charlotte Beecher's studio one fatal afternoon. The fellow had taken him aside and poured out a harrowing story of Janet's miseries coupled with a picture of her dependence on Cornelia! But for that _rencontre_, he wouldn't have gone on this wild-goose chase from Geneva to Paris to rescue Janet from a gilded cage.

A gilded cage! No, by heaven! He might be living in a gilded cage himself (the gilt being drawn from Charlotte Beecher's gilt-edged securities), instead of in one-third of a model tenement flat in Kips Bay. To think that Pryor, the transcendently practical Pryor, should have been the instigator of this fatuous proceeding! Hang the fellow for his unwarranted meddling and plausible tongue!

He reached Fontainebleau in a drizzling rain and voted it a sleek and stupid place. In the chilly Hotel de Londres he had ample leisure to reflect on his folly. Sightseeing! His business in the world was to create new sights not to see old ones. A fat lot he cared for chateaux in which the greasy Bourbons had entertained their mistresses and in which streams of tourists would be sure to blink in awe at vulgarly showy decorations or childishly ornamented bric-a-brac, not to mention the celebrated, idiotic insipidities painted by Boucher and David.

Merely to read about these "sights" in the guidebook made him sick. Why hadn't he followed his own nose instead of letting Cornelia map, or rather, Baedeker, his course for him?

"What dire offence from trivial causes springs," he silently quoted. His present plight was the result of putting Cornelia into a bad temper at the breakfast table that morning. Afterwards, he had gone to pacify her, a feat he had so often accomplished before. So often, in fact, that it seemed to him rather a joke to watch Cornelia's stony heart melt into abject sentimentality. A double-edged joke, now he came to think it over, in his present plight.

Well, on this occasion she had _not_ been as wax in his hands. Nor had she been sentimental. True, she had apparently let herself be mollified as of old. But he was so absorbed in Janet that he failed to be struck by her unusual manner. In retrospect it stood out. Cornelia had become playful: it was the playfulness of the panther.

She had begged him to go to Fontainebleau, pointing out that everybody went at least once in a lifetime, and that he could oblige her by doing his duty to himself and performing a service for her at one and the same time. The service (it would save Harry a journey!) was to give a commission for a special Paulette design to an artist who had an open-air studio in the famous Fontainebleau forest.

On his way from Paulette's to the Gare de Lyon he had wondered whether Janet wouldn't be mightily piqued by his unannounced absence of two days. Two days cut clean out of a visit that was not scheduled to be a long one! Well, if she was piqued, so much the better.

Yes, but mightn't she suppose him deeply wounded by her wantonly taunting shot at his impecunious, ineligible pretentions? Possibly. But, as a matter of fact, he had been deeply wounded. A taunt from her lips, at such a moment, and in such a style! It was horribly unlike the Janet he had known in Kips Bay. Had she really become calculating to her finger tips in accordance with the law of the evolution of the Lorillardian female? Did her rapturous return of his kisses mean nothing to her?

Oh, well, after a tremendous love affair like hers with Claude, a young lady was probably as much thrilled by a kiss of rapture now and then, as by an extra slice of toast at breakfast.

So he had reasoned as he was about to jump on a bus running to the Lyon station. He had stopped and retraced his steps to the Maison Paulette, telling himself that as a sane and sensible citizen of the world it would be much better to bid her a brief good-bye.

Here in Fontainebleau his memory retraced these steps for the fiftieth time. Cornelia had been in the exhibition room, thank heaven. So he had hurried upstairs to the gymnasium, stopping to glance in at the private office on his way. That was how he had come to swing open the door and burst incontinently upon Janet and St. Hilaire.

Certainly, there was nothing like a smasher in the face for making you feel things you had been innocent of feeling before.

"Let the pain do the work!" said Robert, quoting to himself the oldest and most respected maxim known to the medical profession. Then he went to bed.

A sleepless night followed.

*II*

The weather next morning was brisk and clear. Under its inspiration Robert began to recover from the depression of the night before and, for a time at least, to drive away the misgivings that had tormented him. He yielded to the beauty of the forest of Fontainebleau, a fact which made the discharge of his mission for Cornelia much less tedious than he had dreaded.

During his return through wooded walks to the town, he so far regained his self-confidence that he was able to laugh at yesterday's morbid speculations and nightmarish fancies. What a bother he had made about a crisis that ought to have been foreseen, and a sequel that ought to have been taken for granted!

And, as a pure point of information, could he be absolutely sure that Janet really did mean to marry St. Hilaire?

This startling query, coming like a whisper from the void, crystallized a decision towards which he had unconsciously been groping. He would return posthaste to Paris and level the invisible wall that had sprung up between Janet and himself. "An invisible wall!" To suppose that a figment like that could separate two people endowed with good will, quick wit, and flexible tongues, was to insult his intelligence.

Parks, palaces, gardens, and all the other sights of Fontainebleau could go hang!

He tingled with shame as he reflected that now, more than at any other moment since the dissolution of the firm of Barr and Lloyd, Janet might need the friendly counsel or the sympathetic ear that he had pressed upon her with unlimited enthusiasm in their Kips Bay workshop. Yet this was the moment he had chosen in which to act like the screen hero who advances his money or his time to the heroine in amounts arithmetically proportioned to the exact quantity of amorous response from the lady's side. True, this sordid barter was the popular American conception of the course of true love. But did he propose to fall in with this conception? Was he ready to prostitute his gifts to the worship of the great Atlantic bitch-goddess, _Success_?

If only he had been in a position to make Janet a tolerably acceptable offer of marriage!

Still, no need to blink the fact that he was now better circumstanced than at any time since leaving the _Evening Chronicle_. Hadn't the Confederated Press given him this assignment at Geneva, the most responsible assignment in its province? He flattered himself that he had reported the proceedings of the Labor Congress with a color, vividness, trenchancy, and fire none too common in American journalism. It ought to make people at home sit up and take notice; it might lead to a much more profitable commission. Look where Hutchins Burley's articles on the Colorado mine strike had carried him, chock-full of rhetorical clap-trap and maudlin pathos though the beggar's work had been!

A pity that the Confederated Press served chiefly radical newspapers with a limited circulation! It kept your tenure on quicksand. He might have to yield to temptation and falsify his better self by sinking into one of the fat jobs that the plutocratic press would now be sure to offer him.

For the sake of marrying Janet? No, no, it wouldn't do at all. Not even if she were insane enough to be willing to take the plunge. He pictured himself and her together in the marital state, saw the cramped Harlem flat in which they'd be boxed up. Both working of course! No conveniences, no facilities for either sociability or solitude, no children (on less than ten thousand a year birth control would be imperative), no health. And the economies they'd have to practice! They'd have to deny themselves freedom of movement, shun social and professional contacts, and take refuge in an isolation paralyzing to their talents.

Until death did them part--

Thousands of childless couples in every big city existed thus. And the lives they led were hell.

In spite of which solemn conclusion Robert had no sooner reached his hotel than he prepared to desert the spacious freedom of Fontainebleau. And he actually took the first afternoon train back to Paris with the express purpose of seeking Janet out for a heart-to-heart talk.

The perfection of French "system," so extensively advertised on paper, is also realized on paper, and there only. This truth was once more brought home to Robert when, grimy with soot, he reached the capital long after his train was due. He decided to skip the supper at Paulette's, partly from a desire to avoid Cornelia, partly from a hope that he might find Janet alone after Harry Kelly and his wife had left, as they often did, for an evening's entertainment.

A bus to the American Express Company enabled him to get his mail just before the office closed. He kept the dozen-odd letters in his pocket, intending to read them whilst taking a snack in a quaint, spotless little dairy restaurant (the _a toute heure_ shop, as he and Janet called it, in allusion to its boast of never closing) in the Boulevard Montmartre.

The waitress having taken his order, he rapidly sorted out his letters, seven or eight of which had official or commercial headings that at once betrayed the enclosures as mere announcements or bills. These he stuffed back unread into his pocket. Of the remaining few, the first one proved to be from the London agent of the Confederated Press. This was the man under whose orders he worked while in Europe. A grudging, carping cuss! Robert hoped that the fellow had at last seen the light (of Robert's merit), and that handsome amends were forthcoming.

The message ordered him home to New York at once!

So much for the recognition and advancement which his gorgeous accounts of the Labor Congress were to bring him. Had the ironical shafts, tipped with caustic wit and aimed at the rancor and obstructiveness of some of the labor leaders, given mortal offence to his own side?

With a horrible sense of the insecurity of life, and with a nameless dread more invasive and powerful than any he had ever known before, he reached the Maison Paulette about an hour later. He met one of the principal manikins at the door.

"Mademoiselle Janet? Hadn't he heard the tragic news? _C'est si triste_. The whole Maison was in mourning. Mademoiselle had departed that very noon with Mrs. R. H. L. Jerome, the great rich lady without a heart. _Ah, comme c'est triste_!"

*III*

The "Touraine" had been two days out from Havre in weather decidedly rough, before Robert got his sea-legs back again. Others on board were doubtless still deploring the pit of instability that lurks beneath the surface of things. But as a rule their reflections had an origin that was strictly physical. Robert, on his first brisk walk around the second-class deck, reasoned from premises of a very different nature.

For he had reached a point where he felt constrained to take a sort of inventory of himself, a mental stock-listing of his reverses, his prospects, and his altered outlook on affairs.

Not that his theories had changed in substance.

From first to last, his mind had been filled with a fierce impatience of the stupidity of man today and an unquenchable faith in a sanity to come. Evil; as he conceived it, was a by-product of human growth, and not, as Shelley conceived it, something imposed on man by a malignant external power on the fall of which the race would at once become perfect. In short, he believed that the incessant conflict of life was largely a struggle between high and low desires, with money and numbers on the side of Satan, and high-spirited intelligence on the side of the angels.

In America, to be sure, where achievements not open to a flat cash interpretation are passed by with a shrug or a vulgar joke, Robert's view of life had excited as much interest as a whisper in the wind. The few who gave his philosophy a brief attention had hastily dismissed it as a matter for milksops or imbeciles; on the fool who preached this philosophy they had bestowed a cynical pity, and on the failure who practised it, an amused contempt.

The failure who practised it! Robert knew that, judged by every standard save his own, he was a failure, a complete, incurable failure. He did not try to dodge this unanimous judgment. He despised it as much as he exulted in his own faith. To be exact, as much as he _had_ exulted in his own faith.

For the blow that had knocked him galley-west in the office of the Maison Paulette had seriously shaken his self-confidence.

A review of his recent conduct led him straight to a very unpalatable verdict. He had behaved as stupidly towards Janet as any average man of stone-age instincts. Because she had made one risky experiment in the field of sex and had almost been tempted to make an even riskier experiment in the field of subsistence, he had displayed in turn his pique, jealousy, anger and scorn. The childish resentment that had mastered him! And this when he owed Janet unbounded gratitude for her wisdom in frightening him off from a suicidal offer of marriage. In his varied exhibition of neolithic folly, where was the high-spirited intelligence he boasted of possessing?

Look how Janet had stuck to _her_ guns! As he might have foreseen (if he hadn't been a perfect donkey!), she was going to make a glorious fight of it, on her own. She had given to Caesar the things that were Caesar's; and for the rest, she had kept her integrity intact.

Incidentally, there was a grain of comfort in the fact that she hadn't accepted M. St. Hilaire after all. A grain! Say rather, several tons.

Suspending this train of thought, Robert turned to his other great problem, his work in the labor movement. He asked himself whether he, like Janet, had kept _his_ integrity intact. Two weeks ago he would have shouted out a triumphant yes. But now the thin edge of doubt had entered his soul. This incorruptible, critical gift--the gift above all others that he prized--was he justified in pushing its exercise to the furthest limit? He had always rejoiced in the uncompromising candor with which he had exposed and flayed the special weaknesses of the radical leaders, the general deficiencies of his own side. But when candor compelled you to smite people in the fifth rib in order to save their souls, weren't you carrying virtue a little too far?

Well, his employers on the Confederated Press thought so. And that they were not alone in their opinion was evident from his several failures. He counted them up: the _Evening Chronicle_, the Guild movement, the attempt to unionize the mercantile workers, the Labor Party publicity, and now this latest debacle. Not to mention his friendships!

He retained the hearty confidence of nobody.

Ought a successful honest man, then, to show as much discretion in the practice of candor as a successful knave shows in the practice of deceit? It would seem so. Plainly, he who would change the moral standards of his kind could not afford to be one thing to all men. Not a specialist or an extremist, in short.

How to be an aggressive revolutionist and at the same time a progressive evolutionist--this was the paradox that every effective radical had to embody in his own life.

It was clear that he would have to begin again at the bottom of the ladder.

This being so, the first thing to do was to ascertain his liabilities, material no less than spiritual.

Here Robert was reminded abruptly of the half dozen letters--bills, circulars, and the like, as he surmised--which he had rammed into his coat pocket at the _a toute heure_ restaurant. The coat in question was in his stateroom and he would look for the letters when he went below.

Half an hour later he found them. One of the first envelopes bore the heading: Simons and Hunt, Attorneys-at-Law, 150 Broadway. It had two enclosures. The first one he opened read:

..vspace:: 2

My Dear Nephew:

About a year ago you wrote to me suggesting that I do something handsome by you. In your own delicate words you asked me to subsidize your imagination, a quality you believed of sufficient value to your fellow men to be worth preserving. As a proof that you possessed this quality, you provided me with an outline of your career in all its ups and downs, chiefly downs. You were also good enough to favor me with copies of your several articles on social and industrial reform.

As I am in receipt of some ten thousand requests for money every year, it is obviously impossible for me to comply with them all. And I am bound to say that I saw no reason for complying with your request, the more so in that its tone of mockery and sly derision led me to doubt whether it was made in entire good faith. The claim of kinship which you advanced (somewhat belatedly I thought) had little weight with me. You know what family ties are amongst the Lloyds! I was but a youngster of fourteen when my father and my elder brother (_your_ father) ripped up my gilded dreams of a future as an artist and hashed my romantic plans by a single practical act. They pitched me out of the house into the street. There I remained to live on my own wits, and this fate I have had little occasion to complain of.

But to return to your letter. It did not win me to your way of thinking. Nor, to be candid, did your articles on "the collapse of modern society." I will admit that your attacks on land speculators (like myself) were witty, if not wise. And when you sailed into the monopoly on land values, you wrote with astonishing authority; indeed the only flaw I could find in your otherwise perfect qualifications for solving the economic problem of land was the trifling fact that you had never owned a foot of it.

This might have passed. Not so your observations on the distribution of the country's wealth and other related iniquities. Here you repeated the usual flub-dub with the usual fine flourish of the man who imagines he has made a startling discovery. Thus, you solemnly pointed out that there are only two kinds of people on earth: those who prey and those who are preyed upon. You announced that you had never seen the profiteer forsaken, nor the preying man begging his bread. And you informed the world that the [Transcriber's note: some text appears to be missing from the source book] intensified every year, the sheep being now more securely muzzled and more efficiently fleeced than ever before.

Now, my dear nephew, there is nothing new in your "discovery." Since the days of Plato all prudent men have been of one opinion respecting the class war, but no prudent man has ever admitted it. Conscious of this, I was unmoved by your ringing call to the sheep that they had nothing to lose but their muzzles; and your desire to see them organize for the purpose of destroying the wolves by mass action, left me cold. A world of sheep--and nothing but sheep--would not be to my taste. For the wolves, whatever else we may say of them, at least vary the drab monotony here below. Besides, I suspect that your indignation in the matter of the muzzles is largely shandygaff. It is not necessary to muzzle sheep!

In fine, your credentials did not greatly impress me. Your writings, it is true, were clever, witty, imaginative.

But what is imagination without matter or money to work upon? Like a spark without tinder on a wet day in the woods. At all events, I could scarcely overlook the fact that, whereas _I_ had made a fortune by my real estate speculation, _you_ were unable to make so much as a bare living by your real estate denunciation.

Have patience a little longer with the garrulity of a dying man. A few weeks ago, I was taken ill with a fatal dilatation of the aorta, and the end may come in a day, a month, a year. What to do with my investments became an immediately pressing problem. The charities I had named in my last will were administered, as I well knew, by a host of charity-mongers even more distasteful to me than kith and kin.

In this painful dilemma I read your letter again, thinking that my reaction to it, a year ago, had been hasty or unfair. Perhaps the wish was father to the thought; perhaps my infirmity has softened my brain. Whatever the cause, one passage in your letter struck me. My eyes were opened and I saw, or believed I saw, that you were a chosen vessel to bear my name and fortune before the American people. Accordingly I revoked all charitable bequests and appointed you as my principal heir and assign.