Chapter V: Part 5

Her impression of the new life was put into words for her by Lydia Dyson, the author of "Brothers and Sisters," (then in its twenty-fifth big printing). Lydia, whose tall, thin form and pale olive skin lost none of their spectacular qualities by the snake-like movements she affected, the huge jet earrings she wore, or the gold-tipped cigarettes she smoked, assured Janet, in a rich Kentucky drawl:

"We obey only one custom here, and that is to disobey all customs; we hold only one belief, and that is to hold no beliefs."

Janet was fully persuaded that the first part of this statement was true and that the second part was a vast improvement upon the Barr regime.

In truth, she found the Lorillardian absence of formality, constraint and regulated behavior a decided relief after her long course of Calvinistic repression at home. And, active though she was by nature, she did not at first notice how the days slipped by with great ado, but with very little done.

The Lorillard tenementers were not exactly lazy. They were merely idle. Like the idle rich and the idle poor they were ceaselessly occupied--in killing time.

Cornelia was in the habit of getting up somewhere between nine and eleven. After breakfast, the two friends would set out to look for a job. The spirit in which they proceeded was the spirit in which young people go skylarking. Hunting for a job was an old pastime of Cornelia's. If she ever came up to a job's requirements, the job never came up to hers. Or if by chance it did, she discovered a bewildering array of reasons for not taking it, or for speedily leaving it, when taken.

At noon, the day's duty was considered fully done. After lunch, there was another jaunt; this time to an art gallery, concert hall, theatre or movie. Free tickets from Cornelia's theatrical friends were reasonably plentiful, and when these failed, there were return calls to pay.

Thus, Charlotte Beecher's studio was a favorite stopping place, as Janet soon discovered. Charlotte possessed a million dollars or more in her own right, and she had three or four studios in totally different parts of the city. She did her hardest work in her double Lorillard flat every morning; her evenings were spent warding off fortune-hunting suitors like Denman Page, who besieged her Fifth Avenue apartment; on certain afternoons she served an "intellectual tea" in a studio sumptuously fitted up in Washington Mews.

Janet was always taken to the studio _de luxe_ in the Mews. Cornelia, invariably busy, would be sketching some new design of a hat, or pinning together a one-piece dress, whilst she luxuriated happily amidst the rich Chinese rugs and the soft silken cushions of Charlotte's show room. The serpent in this garden of Eden was the "little group of serious thinkers" (an element alien to Kips Bay) that met in the Mews by virtue of Charlotte's encouragement.

"These intellectuals!" Cornelia would say scornfully to Janet on the way home. "Did you ever hear such bumptious talk?"

"I find them rather amusing," Janet would perhaps reply.

"Araminta, what nonsense! They positively put the furniture on edge. But that's Charlotte all over. There's a nigger in every woodpile, and there's a jarring note in every one of Charlotte's rooms. My dear, it bores me cruelly."

Still, Cornelia went on visiting the Mews, intellectuals, cruel boredom, and all. It puzzled Janet for a time. She had still to learn that a perfect Kipsite is prepared to suffer no end of martyrdom in the sacred cause of luxury.

Every evening was like a new party to Janet, flat Number Fifteen being one of the chief rendezvous in the tenements. After supper, visitors of both sexes dropped in unannounced and uninvited, until by midnight, a dozen people, more or less, were sure to be occupying the whole flat.

Generally, the guests split up into small groups and spent the time in play. Some played at dancing or at music, others at clever repartee or giddy flirting. To this play, the counterpoint was enthusiasm. A magnificent enthusiasm for self. In a rapturous torrent of words, each Kipsite painted a roseate future that led by startling steps to a supreme moment in which the world lay prostrate at the enthusiast's feet.

It was a cosmopolitan gathering. All the arts and sciences and occupations, all the moral and immoral standards, and all the races and nationalities of New York were represented. A dancer from the Hindoo Kush, several would-be Fokines or Stravinskys, two or three imitation Oscar Wildes, Theodore Dreisers or Frank Harrises--these were sure to be there. Even the solid banker (or aspiring Pierpont Morgan), who kept a quiet flat and a lady in it, was an occasional visitor. No one was excluded who was piquant or picturesque.

Cornelia's specially privileged guests were a scanty handful. Among the men were Claude Fontaine, Robert Lloyd, Denman Page, and Harry Kelly, the "Harlem Gorilla." Soon after Janet's coming, Mark Pryor, immaculate and unobtrusive, joined the ultimate circle and began mysteriously to appear and to disappear.

Still fewer were the women admitted to the inner ring. Of these the chief were Lydia Dyson, the spectacular, and Charlotte Beecher, the industrious. The novelist came in silks, the heiress in calicos. Charlotte's cheap but natty working costume was looked upon among the Outlaws as an affectation. Her blouses and skirts gave Cornelia the horrors.

So did her marked preference for Robert Lloyd.

Janet had an idea that these evening visitors came chiefly to admire Cornelia or to be admired by her. She assumed that Cornelia was "the whole show." It was a pardonable assumption. Cornelia sat in a rocking chair in the central room and was feline, and languid, and observant, while the excitement eddied and swirled around her. To all appearances she held the reins of her party with the masterly skill of the Borax man who drives the celebrated twenty mule team.

Robert would have it that Cornelia was neither the star nor the manager of the nightly performance in Number Fifteen. According to him, the only management she displayed was in the skill with which she focused attention upon herself. The cadenced laugh, the sugary stab, the artful question--these were not the subtle devices of a clever hostess; they were merely the centripetal pulls of an egomaniac against the centrifugal interests of her guests.

Janet dismissed this explanation lightly and begged Robert not to analyze every joy until its very essence had been probed--and destroyed. She laughed at his attempt to convince her that these gay evenings of Cornelia's were a kind of renaissance. His theory was that the light of Cornelia's splendor had been getting dim of late, as it had got dim on several previous occasions. But the impact of a new partner against her, like the impact of an astral visitor against a dying sun, now as always gave her a new lease of brilliance.

In short, Robert asserted that it was the replacement of Mazie by Janet which had caused a tremendous revival of interest in Cornelia's flat. Everybody in the inner ring of the Outlaws or in the outer ring of the tenements, everybody indeed, that had any shadow of a claim to an entree, had come trooping in to sun themselves in the restored glory of Number Fifteen.

To most of Robert's remarks, Janet paid little attention. But she carefully treasured up one of them.

This was that never before had Claude Fontaine been such a constant visitor.

*II*

Yet for a few days after the Outlaws' Ball, Claude had behaved as if his confession of love had never been made, or had merely been the expression of an impulse, for which he disclaimed responsibility. There had been no return to the intimacy that instantly abolishes all the formulas of mere politeness and all the prescriptions of mere etiquette; there had been no recurrence of that world-without-end moment at the ball or of that other moment in the limousine next day.

At the ball he had treated her as he would have treated any respectable middle-class girl who might take his fancy. That is, he had stretched the conventions as far as an impressionable young woman will usually allow a dashing young man to stretch them, but not further.

After she joined Cornelia, however, his attitude changed. He treated her with a certain wariness of manner by which he appeared to convey the following:

"I took you to be a girl who strictly observed the moral customs established and honored in Brooklyn, but long fallen into disuse in certain parts of Manhattan, and nowhere less respected than in Kips Bay. It amused me to tempt you to violate these customs, especially as I had little hope of meeting with success. But now that you have become a Lorillard girl, what spice is there in tempting you? Either you never were the girl I took you for; or, at any rate, you soon won't be.

"At all events I shall be on my guard. You are the first girl to work upon me so mightily with a single glance. But you are not the first girl who has looked as innocent as a dove and acted as subtly as a serpent. Be warned! Neither your innocent subtlety nor subtle innocence can make me forget that a Claude Fontaine is in the habit of forming but one sort of friendship with a girl in the Lorillard tenements."

Janet, always very sensitive to atmosphere, got the effect of this train of thought, and in consequence kept Claude at as great a distance as her naturally cordial nature would let her.

In one of the evening gatherings at Cornelia's the talk turned on marriage, and it came out that Janet had adopted Cornelia's views on the wickedness of marriage in its modern form. Claude, with the common failing of lovers, promptly referred her action to himself.

Was this Janet's way of announcing that she meant to make no greater demands on a rich man than any other girl in the Lorillard environment? At first, it seemed so to Claude, and he felt relieved. But, on second thoughts, another question occurred to him. Might not Janet's conversion to Cornelia's beliefs in free love be a mere blind? A pretended dislike of wedlock was a recognized bait for landing a man at the altar. Was her conversion of this type or was it of the franker type of Mazie Ross, who asked all that was due to a Lorillard tenement girl but asked no more?

On the whole, it seemed fairly safe to treat Janet on the Mazie Ross plane, and this he proceeded to do.

Mazie, by the way, had returned as a visitor to Number Fifteen within a week of her spectacular exit. Her doll-like face had recovered its pretty smile and her baby blue eyes gave no clue to whether she was seeking vengeance or merely currying favor again. No one asked or cared, hatred, like love, being a very fluctuating stock in the model tenements.

Janet had not failed to notice that Claude made little difference between his manner to her and his manner to Mazie. She did not like it, but she had to wait some time for the chance of showing how much she scorned his judgment.

*III*

The opportunity came at one of Cornelia's gayest parties given at the end of Janet's second week in Kips Bay. It was really a sort of "coming out" party for Janet. All the Outlaws, both of the inner and the outer ring turned out to hail the new favorite. Even Mark Pryor put in an appearance and actually remained on deck until the end, perhaps because the trio of Cornelia's friends who provided the music played Lehar, Straus, and more recent dance tunes without the customary sentimental whine.

Contemptuous of the fitness of things, Claude did his best to monopolize Janet. When the gayety was at its highest and the music at its most intoxicating, he danced her into a room which, for the moment, proved to be nearly but not quite empty.

Pushed out of the way against a corner stood a screen. Behind this he whirled her, and then swiftly took her in his arms and kissed her passionately. As swiftly, she pushed him away with an expression of extreme distaste.

"I don't like my friends to imitate Hutchins Burley," she said, her voice quiet and cool, her gray eyes full of life and scorn.

The others in the room laughed in mockery or applause. For an instant, Claude's all-conquering look was replaced by a crestfallen one. But he quickly regained his poise and spirits.

"Just a kiss to try," he said jauntily, as he attempted to recapture her arm.

"It's much too trying for gentle Janet," blithely chirped Mazie, who had danced into the room and taken in the situation, as Janet again turned away from Claude.

AS a matter of fact, it was Janet's sense of propriety in public that was offended more than anything else. As for Claude, he was only less mortified by the affront to his vanity than by the haunting fear that Janet's rebuff came from genuine dislike.

No girl had ever given the brilliant, impetuous Claude Fontaine a glance of undisguised repugnance.

Janet spent the rest of the evening chiefly in conversation with Robert Lloyd and Mark Pryor. Meanwhile, Claude affected a complete indifference to her actions. He threw himself into the party with a mad abandon, and whipped up the conviviality with a riotous, headstrong wildness until everybody voted it the merriest evening in years. Amongst the other sex, he exploited to the utmost his patrician graces and masculine daring, and was so much the center of the occasion that the party might have been his rather than Janet's.

The women thought him magnificent, graceful, cruel--in a word, irresistible; the men laughed at his impudence, and envied or admired his readiness, effrontery and ease.

And yet, as he showed his fine points triumphantly now to this adoring girl and now to that, his voice vibrated towards Janet.

Janet took it all in, and continued talking to Robert with undisturbed satisfaction. She saw Claude pass recklessly from one favorite to another, and guessed easily that none of these was his real aim.

When the party broke up, Claude induced Janet to listen to him alone for a moment. He was suddenly all contrition. To his whispered plea for forgiveness, she said, in a not unkindly tone:

"Forgiveness for what? For advertising your emotions?"

"For the kiss," he said, his voice full of sensuous charm. And he added, on a more audacious note: "I wish I could take it back."

"Oh, do you? You'd better begin with the publicity."

"Please forgive the kiss _and_ the publicity, Janet."

"I'll forgive the second when I forget the first," she replied, much more gaily than she intended, thus proving that Claude was not the only one in the grip of a resistless passion.

Claude went home, satisfied that his daring had once again enabled him to snatch victory out of the arms of defeat.

*CHAPTER TWELVE*

*I*

And so it had. None the less, the experience had taught Claude a lesson which, for once, he took to heart. He never again supposed that Janet's friendship was to be had on the same terms as Mazie's or even Cornelia's.

True, he remained in the dark as to what precisely her idea of self-respect was. Conflicting and irreconcilable inferences were the only ones he could draw from the conduct of a girl who lived in the Lorillard tenements, moved in the Outlaws' circle, professed to be hostile to marriage, yet stood on her dignity withal, in quite a traditional womanly way.

But Claude was not the man to waste time on psychological conundrums. Besides, he was too happy to be critical. He was back in the good graces of Janet, or rather, as he soon paraphrased the case, she was back in his. He flattered himself that he was the dominant influence over a girl who was a piquant, if puzzling, amalgam of Brooklyn and Bohemia.

In the next two weeks, his position as Janet's particular friend was established beyond dispute. Few afternoons passed in which his motor car did not drive up to the Lorillard and whirl her away to a place of gayety or recreation. The chief rival claimant upon her time was Robert Lloyd. But as Claude, in point of social advantages and personal graces, far outdistanced him, this rivalry was not taken seriously by any of the three persons concerned, least of all by Claude.

One day, to Cornelia's astonishment, Janet announced that she had planned to spend the afternoon, not with Claude, but with Robert. She made the announcement from a tuffet on which she sat soberly, while reading a book by Mrs. Beatrice Webb.

"Is this your pensive day?" asked Cornelia, ironically.

"Yes," replied Janet. "Robert complains that I'm neglecting him, and consequently my education. I think I ought to give him a chance to prove both assertions. So I've asked him to come here this afternoon. I can't spend all my days in sky-larking, can I?"

"My dear, 'youth's a stuff will not endure.' If you choose Mrs. Sidney Webb and Robert Lloyd rather than Claude Fontaine, the choice is your own. Of course, Robert is very entertaining. He pledges you with facts and figures. But when I was a rosebud like you, Araminta, I preferred a man who drank to me only with his eyes."

"Cornelia, I adore being made love to; yet I get horribly tired of it--even of Claude's love making--when it's kept up too long. And I hate facts and figures; yet Robert's never bore me."

"What a morbid symptom, my dear!"

"Oh, don't say that. I feel sure it's quite a natural condition, in my case. But perhaps there's a quality left out of me, a quality that other women possess."

Janet was clearly eager to carry on her self-analysis, but Cornelia gave no sign of sharing this eagerness.

Cornelia, in fact, was far from pleased. Her unconscious game was to keep Robert revolving in an orbit around herself. He was such an excellent drawing card! For had he not the rare power of raising the value of any object or person he admired? Not that people ever credited him with unusual discernment or insight. Yet the fact remained that Robert had only to praise a human being or a work of art hitherto undervalued or overlooked, and presto, the article or the person instantly became subject to an urgent popular demand. This was one of the reasons why Cornelia (who felt that she had been handsome enough in surrendering Claude without a murmur) did not wish Robert as well to gravitate from her stellar system to Janet's.

But, seeing no way of cancelling Robert's visit, she determined not to be a spectator of it.

"I must run in next door, Janet," she said, "and ask the Gorilla to do an errand for me."

She left, omitting her customary lyrical phrases of affection. Janet did not suspect the jealousy behind this omission. But she was undeniably disappointed because Cornelia had not encouraged her to discuss her friendships with Claude and Robert about whom her heart and her thoughts were brimful.

Thus quickly did Cornelia damp down the fire of intimacy by treating the exchange of self-revelation as a strictly one-sided transaction. She had (so it struck Janet) a very low opinion of all confidences--other than her own.

*II*

When the bell rang, Janet opened the door wondering why Robert had come an hour before the appointed time.

But it was Claude who entered! He came in, like the god of the glorious spring without, in his gayest, most engaging mood.

"What luck, to find you in!" he cried. "Janet, I've come in an open car on the chance of taking you for a spin to Mineola to see the start of the great Cross-Continental airplane race."

"Oh, Claude, how nice of you. But--I'm afraid I can't go."

"Why not?"

"Well--you see--I've promised to go out with Robert this afternoon."

His face clouded.

"And you never told me!" escaped from him.

"You are not my diarist," she said, faintly ironical.

"Please forgive me, Janet," he said, dropping his possessive tone, as he reminded himself how touchy she was about her independence. "But I'm disappointed, bitterly disappointed. I planned the excursion as a surprise for you. And how I've counted on it!"

"Not more than I long to go, Claude. But what can I do?"

He took her hands in his, and said eagerly:

"_Must_ you keep the engagement? Can't you think of some excuse? Where on earth was he going to take you to?"

"To the Japanese Industrial Exhibition at the Grand Central Palace."

He made a contemptuous grimace.

"A stuffy exhibition!" he exclaimed. "Good Heavens, Janet, why hesitate to change your plans? It isn't as if Robert wanted you for himself, as I do. He'll understand."

Janet wondered whether Claude would understand if she confessed that she was actually more interested in the Japanese Exhibition than in the cross-continent air race. But though she kept silent on this point, because she really wanted greatly to go with Claude, she was rather troubled. It was not easy for her to gratify a private desire at the expense of a social obligation.

"I don't like to hurt Robert's feelings," she said, turning away in her indecision.

"Oh, very well, if you don't wish to come with me!"

He flung himself sulkily into a chair.

Janet was astonished at his complete change of mood. She might have felt hurt, had she not had a woman's instinctive weakness for spoiling the man she was fond of.

She sat down irresolutely, and reflected that this would be the second time she had broken an engagement with Robert.

"It's idiotic," he said, rising, with a sense of deep injury. "Here is the most sensational race in a century, on a perfectly glorious day. And I'm mad to be with you."

"Perhaps Robert is, too," she said, a merry light dancing in her eyes.

"Of course, he's no fool. He'd rather be with a wonderful girl than an ordinary one. But what he wants more even than a wonderful girl is a chopping-block, any chopping-block, for his sociological theories. Why on earth did you leave your home, if all you crave is more instruction, and if the only freedom you want is the freedom to stand on more ceremony than before?"

"That has nothing to do with the matter, Claude," said Janet, refusing to ignore the truth simply because it was disagreeable. "Robert may not be offended at finding me away, but he is sure to be offended at finding me rude."

"It seems to me that you are far more concerned with Robert's feelings than with mine," said Claude, changing to a tone of melancholy reproach.

"But I really haven't a good excuse, Claude," she said, troubled, but still indecisive.

"I know girls who wouldn't take two minutes to find an excellent one," he said, with a return of his superior authoritative air.

Janet's temptation was great; greater yet when Claude, in his most handsome and daring manner, drew her out of the chair and put an arm around her waist.

"It's an occasion in a million, Janet. I've set my heart on this ride with you. What does it matter what Robert may think, or what anyone may think, as long as we two want so much to be together? You must come. I shall believe you don't care a straw for me, if you don't."

His flawless form and vibrant voice annihilated argument. With a happy heart but a guilty conscience, Janet dismissed her scruples.

On the way out, she stopped in at Number Thirteen to beg Cornelia to smooth matters over with Robert.

Cornelia, serene and all smiles again, promised to do her best.

*III*

Robert came home soon after and, getting no response from Number Fifteen, went to his own room in Kelly's suite next door.

He got all the news from Cornelia, who politely tried not to gloat over his disappointment. She professed to see no reason for finding fault with Janet's easy submission to the force of an irresistible attraction.

As it was fairly plain that Robert would have preferred to be alone, Cornelia perversely lost no time in proposing that he carry out his original intention of visiting the Japanese Industrial Exhibition, she, of course, to take Janet's place as his companion.

She had another reason for inviting herself out with Robert. This reason was the Harlem Gorilla. He, though almost superstitiously devoted to her, sometimes had to be "managed," in accordance with Cornelia's view that love makes the most constant of men uncertain, coy, and hard to please. Luckily, the treatment that Harry Kelly's case required was not a subtle one, and so it was Cornelia's practice to alternate a little encouraging discouragement, with a little discouraging encouragement. On this occasion, by accompanying Robert who didn't want her, and deserting Kelly who wanted her very much, she neatly killed two birds with the same stone.

On the way to the exhibition, Robert gave Cornelia an account of his latest occupation. He had been made organizing secretary of a body called the League of Guildsmen. Was this a fanciful name for another set of Outlaws? No, the Guildsmen were servers of the community, the Outlaws were spongers on it.

"You have golden opinions of us," said Cornelia, theatrically. "I marvel that you soil your garments by staying in our midst."

"It's nothing to marvel at, Cornelia. I had to learn what Kips Bay and its slum population were at first hand before I could desire in earnest to destroy them, root and branch. Familiarity, which sometimes breeds contempt, often breeds homicidal mania. Do you recollect how Caesar spent a short vacation among a band of desperate pirates and how the experience filled him with a conviction that it was his duty to exterminate them? Well, I am filled with the same conviction about Kips Bay."

"What a passion you have for reforming everybody and everything, Cato! I am sure it is a very noble passion, though it does include poor me in its program of extermination. Still, I wonder whether reform, like charity, oughtn't to begin at home?"

"I used to think so," replied Robert, unmoved by her sarcasm. "In my schooldays, my elders obliged me to hack my way through obsolete French tragedies or the differential calculus instead of allowing me to gain a working knowledge of current English plays or of modern political economy. And when I made a fearful hash of their instruction, they voted me a miserable failure. Whereupon, I determined to reform myself in order that I might reform the world. I am wiser now. I know that I must reform the world before I can hope to reform myself."

"Cato, you are a perfectly gorgeous mixture of building air castles and of seeing things upside down! One can never tell whether your head is in the clouds or on the ground."

Robert indulgently proceeded to say that the Guildsmen were young people of like sentiments with his own. In a general way, their aim was to advance the idea that the producers and servers of society, being the rightful possessors of the earth, must eliminate the profiteers and the parasites who have usurped possession.

"If that is your aim, Robert, I predict that your league and your secretaryship will have a short life and a merry one."

Robert laughed and admitted that he did not expect a long tenure of office. The Guild plan was a European idea for which America was by no means ripe.

"I fancy we are as progressive in industrial matters as the Europeans are," said Cornelia, on her mettle.

"Oh, more so," replied Robert, drily. "Our giant industries lead the world in maximizing the production of things of a mediocre quality and the creation of human life of a contemptible quality. Yes, in crude capacity, we are ahead of our European competitors. But in political capacity, we still lag far behind. Hence the difficulty of transplanting to our soil a high-class social policy like that of the Guildsmen."

"But when this Guild plan dies a natural death, what forlorn hope will you champion next?"

"I fear there'll be nothing left but to throw myself on the mercy of a rich uncle."

"What, an uncle in a fairy tale?"

"No, an uncle in California, a real live one."

Cornelia evinced little more than a languid interest in Robert's information. Fabulously rich relatives--who were cast for the parts of _Deus ex machina_, but who never materialized in flesh or cash--made a golden splash in the 'scutcheon of too many veteran Lorillard inhabitants. She preferred a conversation dealing with more tangible personages. Truth to tell, she rather hoped that Robert would try to undo the painful impression he had made on her by his recent criticism of her affair with Percival Houghton.

All the greater was her chagrin when he brought the talk around to the subject of Janet.

*IV*

He began adroitly enough by complimenting her on the success with which she had made Janet alive to the galvanic interests of contemporary life. It was a miracle of education, he assured her, and he begged her not to spoil the achievement by converting Janet to her favorite theory of free love. He hoped she would rather warn her friend of the folly of contracting a free union under existing social sanctions.

"Like the majority of men, you believe love and sex emotion to be one and the same thing," she retorted, cuttingly. "That's why you have no understanding of what freedom in love means."

"Now, Cornelia, I won't be drawn into a controversy on the merits of free love."

"Then don't sneer at it."

"I don't. In fact, like every healthy young human being, I am by nature something of a varietist myself. But, as a civilized member of society, I'm bound to take the institutions of my country and generation as I find them. I believe Janet will be better off, if she does so too. Let her set out to alter or revolutionize our institutions, but not to defy them."

"My poor Cato! Don't you know that numbers of the young women of today are quietly doing what numbers of the young men have always done?"

"Living in illicit relations, you mean?"

"That is what a ridiculous man-made custom calls it."

"But, Cornelia, although many of the Lorillard girls have admittedly flung a glove in the face of social conventions--"

"I'm not talking of Lorillard girls, Robert. I'm talking of teachers, lawyers, stenographers--the 'respectable' girls who remain in their schools and offices without any loss of self-respect or public esteem, and who merely do what the 'respectable' men do, that is, pay a mock tribute to outward appearances, and go scot free."

"Exactly, Cornelia," said Robert, triumphantly. "They pay a tribute to appearances. They quietly disobey existing conventions. But they don't defy them, much less try to alter them. They are frequently their staunchest supporters."

"Just like the men."

"Just like the men. But you are wrong when you say they go scot free. You are wrong again when you say that the tribute they pay is a mock tribute. It is anything but that. It is an endless payment by installments, a payment in degrading stealth and harassing secrecy."

"What are you driving at?"

"Janet is not the girl to pay a tribute of this kind," he said, with emphasis. "If she champions the cause of free love, she won't do so merely to experience the ups and downs of an underground existence. She will do so, believing it to be a wise or progressive departure. And she will defend her championship in the teeth of the whole world, regardless of its effect on her future."

Cornelia received this speech unmoved.

"Well, why shouldn't she?" she said. "Others have endured much more for their beliefs. To be candid, I really don't see how Janet's behavior concerns you, any way."

"You forget, Cornelia, that I, too, talked modernism in a blue streak to her before she broke with her people. And so I feel that I share with you the responsibility for her present course."

"Oh, do you?"

"Yes. There's a lot of moonshine in Kips Bay that passes for modernity. I think the least we can do is to show Janet that modernity is not simply a new watchword for moonshine. We ought to prevent her from being taken in by the illusion which the Outlaws produce of easy, satisfying intimacies between the sexes."

A stream of silvery laughter escaped Cornelia. Then, in a studied tone of superiority, she replied:

"My dear boy, the love relation between two individuals is strictly their own private affair. It is nobody else's business whatever. I have no right to interfere in Janet's intimacies, and neither have you. Anyhow, I believe she is quite competent to stand on her own feet."

"I'm not so sure, Cornelia. Janet is utterly different from the Lorillard Outlaw girl, or the Greenwich Village Bohemian girl. The effect of Greenwich Villageism is to make irregularity (what regularity so often is) a bore. The purpose of Lorillardism is to make irregularity pay. But Janet is not likely to adopt a radical creed merely as a pose or with an eye to its profit. She will adopt it in a spirit of sheer blind self-sacrifice. And every advantage will be taken of her, precisely because she's not a sex profiteer."

"Cato, the beginning of wisdom is self-knowledge. Have you ever heard of any gain in self-knowledge without some loss of happiness? No. It is a law of life which neither you, nor I, nor Janet can escape."

"But," he urged, "you must admit that Janet's case is a special one. She has just left a home where purely private gratifications dictate which conventions shall be _kept_; and she has entered this model tenement life where, again, purely private gratifications dictate which conventions shall be _broken_. She may not grasp this difference all at once. Are we to let her inexperience cause her unnecessary suffering?"

"I, too, have suffered for my convictions, Robert!" she said, with a conclusive gesture of impatience.

Robert felt like telling her that, at this moment, she reminded him forcibly of the fox that had its tail cut off. But he didn't quite dare.

Naturally, under the circumstances, the visit to the Grand Central Palace was a complete failure. Cornelia, loathing the exhibition, seized the first available excuse for asking to be taken home.

The resentment she harbored was too strong to be hidden beneath the ordinary civilities of polite intercourse. Her affection for Robert, which had long been hanging by a slender thread, was now sharply snapped through the complete revulsion of feeling she experienced towards him.

From her point of view, the fault was entirely his. She had always hated what she termed his moralistic nature. But never before had he shown such a callous want of sympathy with her past misfortunes or such a frank hostility to her present outlook on life. What she did not acknowledge to herself was that his concern for Janet had given her _amour propre_ a mortal wound for which she could never forgive him.

On their return to the Lorillard tenements, she promptly called Harry Kelly into Number Fifteen. The Harlem Gorilla (renicknamed Hercules as a mark of favor) was highly flattered and only too willing to be a listener and a comforter.

"Robert is getting to be quite impossible!" she exclaimed, with a lurid Belasco intonation. "I can't imagine what has come over him, or why he continues to honor the Outlaws with his presence, seeing that he is now an enemy of freedom and not a friend of it. Hercules, will you believe it, he cannot hear the word Lorillard so much as mentioned without showing the cloven hoof."

*CHAPTER THIRTEEN*

*I*

While Robert and Cornelia were going to and from the Grand Central Palace, Claude's car was carrying its occupants through pleasant stretches of Long Island country to the Mineola aerodrome. The day, the air, the landscape, and the man conspired to make the occasion an intoxicating one for Janet.

Claude's gayety and personal charm were fully matched by his perfect ease. This was the quality that magnetized her, it was so new in her experience of American men. The men she had known in Brooklyn, struggling professional and business men, wore their manners as they did their Sunday clothes, with a painful effect of unfamiliarity. Their behavior was as different from Claude's as a sputtering torch is from an arc light.

In the company of women, these men were nearly always ill at ease. Sometimes they acted obtrusively protective or aggressively possessive, more frequently they were apprehensive, timid or even pitiably afraid. Whatever they did, they did with constraint. And they never seemed able to forget the towering fact that their manhood had an economic value. They were as painfully conscious of this asset as an elderly maiden is of her chastity--and they guarded it with the same zeal.

Janet was inexpressibly thankful that Claude had never treated her as if she belonged to an unknown or unclassified species, and that he was not constantly filled with a nervous dread that she might at any moment begin picking his soul, if not his pocket.

They talked of everything under the sun; she of her childhood, her school days, her aspirations; he of social or artistic doings in and about New York, with the more notable and distinctive of which he had a first-hand familiarity. But no matter how sober or philosophic the topic chosen, it was sure, in some mysterious way, to be sidetracked into the catechism of love.

Janet had all she could do to keep matters from taking too amorous a turn. It was delicious to be made love to as audaciously as only Claude could. It was great fun to tremble on the quicksilvery margin between how much he dared and how little she permitted. And it was her native mother wit rather than her instinct that set a limit to his impetuous wooing.

As soon as they reached the aerodrome, Claude became a more conventionally courteous cavalier again. And Janet got a glimpse of a section of his life to which she had hardly given any thought.

*II*

The Trans-Continental Air Race had been widely advertised, and the gigantic aerodrome was jammed with excited crowds. Claude at once plunged his companion into the thick of things. Anybody and everybody appeared to know him, and he knew everybody who was anybody. In swift succession Janet was introduced to the superintendent of the grounds, the president of the Aero Club, the chief contestants of the day, several foreign aviators of renown, the naval officer who commanded the first "blimp" across the Atlantic, and to so many other notabilities that her head began to whirl.

Once or twice Claude left her to pay special homage to some lady, frequently an elderly one and a personage of uncommon account. In these intervals, while standing a little away from the throbbing, bewildering spectacle around her, she attempted to give some perspective to her impressions.

It was gradually clear to her that the spectators resolved themselves into two classes: first, the _hoi polloi_ whose teeming throngs pushed along the common passageways and packed the benches in the stands to the point of suffocation; and then a small, compact group of men and women whose breeding, dress and carriage would have differentiated them from the other spectators even if the weather-beaten air of superiority with which they promenaded within the fenced-off and sacrosanct places, had not sufficiently done so.

Superficially, the attitude of these chosen ones towards the gallery was the attitude of actors towards an audience: they affected to be oblivious of its existence, and yet it was patent that they were greedily conscious of the snobbish admiration and flattering envy which the crowd radiated collectively and in its component parts.

Janet watched these bankers and railroad directors and senators with their wives and daughters urbanely encircling the placid airplanes, the restive airmen and the little extra demonstrations for the elect. And it seemed to her that they appropriated the special privileges inseparable from the governors of a democracy with an affably paternal air which was as much as to say: "What a very democratic ruling-class it is that runs this very democratic nation."

Of course she knew that they were not really thinking this. Seeing that they were the ruling class, they ought to have weighty, superior problems of finance, transportation or statesmanship at the back of their minds. Had they? Or were they merely thinking that unless they were on the _qui vive_ they might be caught in an awkward pose by one of the brigade of camera men who were photographing celebrities for the Sunday pictorial supplements and the cinema current topics.

Janet perceived also that the faces of the ladies and gentlemen of the plutocracy, though set in hard lines and wreathed in hard smiles, were, on the whole, much less hard than the faces of the poorer middle-class people among whom she lived and moved and had her being. Their complexions were far better, too. And they were healthier and robuster and decidedly cleaner and politer.

Politer, but not better mannered. Temporarily, Janet might have been deceived by the surface courtesy with which the men approached one another and the ceaseless vehemence with which the women talked and smiled, or rather, exhibited the whole of a fine set of front teeth from the top of the upper row to the tip of the nether gum. But when she had mingled with them at Claude's side, these same ladies that paraded their toothful smiles so amiably for the photographer's benefit, had politely but uncannily looked her through and through in the most literal sense of the words. To put it bluntly, they had instantly sized her up as an intruder from a sphere they had no personal contact with. True, they murmured the necessary courteous phrases, but they did so to a creature whose common humanity with themselves their glances insolently and emphatically denied.

Had Claude sensed this, and left her alone to spare her (and perhaps himself) embarrassment? The question made her feel uneasy and disconcerted. It also made her wish him back, in the hope that his presence would restore her confidence. What was keeping him so long this time? By way of finding an answer, her eyes searched him out among the machines.

She saw him, not very far away, in the midst of a group of three other people: a couple in the prime of life, who were obviously the parents of a young lady of about Janet's own age. The attention of the daughter was fixed detainingly on Claude; that of the parents was fastened proudly on their daughter.

Thanks to a fine eyesight, Janet was enabled to get an excellent view of the young lady's appearance.

She was a tall, light brunette, and her frock, her sulky discontented mouth and her affectation of stateliness were all highly fashionable. So was her face, which had a tolerably clear skin and otherwise neither a noticeable blemish nor a spark of fire. It was the kind of standard feminine face just common enough in America to fit the popular conception of beauty and just enough above the common to be in constant request by illustrators as a model for the covers of monthly magazines.

It struck Janet that she was making some demand upon Claude which was taxing his charm and diplomacy to the utmost. Eventually, as he took leave of the group, she abruptly turned away from him, the back of her shoulders expressing the most intense vexation.

*III*

Soon thereafter he was at Janet's side again, looking somewhat harassed.

"Those were the Armstrongs and their daughter, Marjorie," he said, in answer to her look of curiosity.

"Who are the Armstrongs?"

Claude was taken aback by this question. In his world, where everybody knew everybody else, the bare name of Armstrong had a very definite and compact meaning.

"Dear little ignoramus! The Dupont Armstrongs, of course."

This addition meant very little more to Janet, although it rekindled a vague memory that she had seen the name somewhere in the newspapers. Politely concealing his wonderment, Claude explained more at length.

He said that Colonel Dupont Armstrong came of an old Southern family, and was the active head of the great firm of Harmon, Armstrong & Co., the international bankers whose financial power had built golden bridges between continents. His wife had a passion for collecting exquisite jewels; he had a mania for hoarding Chinese vases. But the operation of his esthetic taste being unreliable, he had struck up an intimacy with Claude's father soon after he discovered this gentleman to be a thoroughly dependable guide. In time, he became a regular patron of the Fontaine galleries and his purchases of diamonds, necklaces and porcelains had contributed appreciably to Mr. Fontaine's fortune.

Janet's curiosity in respect of worldly matters was much more quickly satisfied than her curiosity in respect of people.

"Is Mr. Armstrong's daughter as charming as she looks?" she asked Claude at the end of his explanation.

"Well, most men think so," said Claude, smiling. "Marjorie is undoubtedly very beautiful and fully conscious of the fact. You may have seen her portrait by Ben Ali Haggin in the last Academy exhibition? It was a tone poem in russet brown, quite the stir of the season."

"Oh, I'm sorry I missed it. I've never been to an Academy exhibition, Claude."

"How amazing! Not even to one?"

"Not even to one. Imagine how hopelessly ignorant I am of art!"

"Art! People don't go to the Academy in quest of art, you dear innocent. It would be a waste of effort. They go as a compliment to their friends whose portraits have been painted, not as a tribute to the men who painted them."

But Janet was not to be deflected from her purpose.

"I played the spy whilst your back was turned," she said, "and watched your pretty friend closely. She was evidently displeased with you. What had you done?"

"Absolutely nothing. That's just Marjorie's way when she can't have all she wants--which seldom happens."

"Then she wanted _you_?"

"Yes, for some party or other. But I'm not going to leave you merely to gratify a passing whim of hers. Anyhow, it isn't so much a case of wanting me to be with her, as of wanting me not to be with anybody else."

"Rather dog-in-the-mangerish, isn't it?"

"Oh, all the tyrants of the earth are like that, especially the fascinating feminine tyrants," replied Claude, in an attempt to recapture his good spirits.

But it was plain that his mood had radically changed. For the remainder of their stay he was preoccupied and his gayety was forced.

The cloud that this cast over their outing was not fully lifted that day. Outwardly Claude recovered his equipoise and, on the way home, tried to make up for his earlier abstraction by a deepened tenderness towards his companion. But something was manifestly weighing on his mind. Janet herself was in a pensive mood. She had been quick to discern that in Claude's manner towards Marjorie Armstrong and the other young women of his own set there was an inexpressible something which was absent from his manner towards her.

This troubled and dissatisfied her. True, Claude no longer ventured to treat her as flippantly as he treated Mazie Ross. But neither did he treat her as finely as he treated Marjorie Armstrong. Why was this? Did Claude still misinterpret her considered expression of disbelief in marriage? She had a passionate longing to give love and to receive love on a plane worlds above material considerations. Could no masculine mind grasp the reality of this simple passion in a modern girl's heart? Was it possible that her freedom from the vulgar commercial associations of love was precisely what cheapened her to such as Claude?

The thought was ironic, it was maddening, it burrowed into one's soul. But it did not rob Janet of her self-approval. She set a high value on her integrity, and she was secretly resolved that by no mere man should this value lightly be set aside.

*CHAPTER FOURTEEN*

*I*

The Fontaine galleries occupied a conspicuous building on Fifth Avenue above the Forties. It was one of the show places in New York's principal show street, and it received a daily stream of visitors as much for the sumptuousness of its interior appointments as for the worth of its stock and its exhibitions.

Mr. Rene Fontaine had inherited the business from his father, who had left France in his boyhood and had begun in a small way as a jeweler on lower Sixth Avenue. The founder of the house had built up a fashionable trade in pearls and precious stones and, having a strong private fancy for certain kinds of ceramic ware, had been led into adding a department of rare porcelains.

After the death of the founder, the business was incorporated. Mr. Rene, as president of the firm, continued his father's twofold policy with such success that, when the uptown trend of high-class trade necessitated a change of quarters, Fontaine and Company transferred their establishment to one of the choicest corners of Fifth Avenue. Here the ceramic and other works of art were displayed in galleries on the second floor. And the patronage of these galleries was so profitable that Claude had persuaded his father to open a gallery for paintings on the third floor and let him conduct the new department.

Mr. Fontaine was a fastidious man and a stickler for appearances, particularly British appearances. The fashionable set in New York aped English manners, and consequently, the door attendant at Fontaine's was an English youth and the salesmen in the art departments were Englishmen with consciously superior airs fortified by British university educations, Oxford accents and modish London clothes.

A humble art lover on a visit to the galleries might easily have been frightened off by the sumptuous appointments, or overawed by seven or eight swagger young gentlemen who would eloquently ignore him as he crossed their several posts. They might have been so many heirs to dukedoms engaged in a feeble game of passing themselves off as prosaic American commoners. Yet they could pay a very flattering attention to multimillionaires, especially of the feminine gender; and these, as their astute employer knew, they attracted in considerable numbers.

Moving in and out among his father's young men, Claude might readily have passed for one of them. He was like them in the ingratiating, physical appearance that comes from a systematic cultivation of the body, and his accent, if not of an Oxford, was of a Harvard flavor. The only real difference was that he was several degrees less arrogant--not that humility was one of his specialties, by any means.

*II*

About ten days after the Mineola outing he was seated at his desk, opening the morning's mail. Two letters caught his eye. One, from Marjorie Armstrong, supplemented Mr. Armstrong's invitation to the two Fontaines to attend a week-end party in the Armstrong's Long Island home. The other was a note from Cornelia, reading:

"Lothario, remember your appointment with us this evening. We shall sup _al fresco_ in the Japanese pagoda on the Lorillard roof--Araminta, Hercules and you will be the guests of honor. Only the chosen few are invited: Lydia, Charlotte, Robert and the invisible Pryor. A special attraction has been provided after supper--if indeed you need an attraction other than the piteous spectacle of Araminta pining away for you.

Cornelia.

This operatic reminder was much more welcome to Claude than Marjorie's frigid message. Cornelia's latest party--parties trod on one another's heels in the model tenements--was in celebration of Janet's admission to the society of the Outlaws. Everybody counted on Claude to be the bright particular meteor of the occasion. Yet how was he to follow his natural inclination without offending his father, to say nothing of Colonel Armstrong and Marjorie?

He turned over a volume of Muther's _History of Painting_ and, while staring vacantly into its pages, raked his mind for a diplomatic escape from attendance at the Armstrongs' party. He was still far from successful, when his father approached to transact a little business. This settled, Claude referred to a Van Gogh he had lately bought for $5,000. Mr. Fontaine's face puckered quizzically.

"You are worse than the prodigal son," he said. "That young man squandered his patrimony on real extravagances, while you fritter yours away on unreal mockeries."

"Did you look at it, father?"

"Bless my soul, no. Its mere presence in the house is enough to upset me. As soon as I learned of its arrival, I looked at a copy of Ruisdael's "Mill" for ten minutes to steady my nerves. Whenever I hear of one of your modern pictures, I steal comfort from an ancient one."

"But you can't judge a picture without seeing it," remonstrated Claude.

"My boy, you once induced me to spend ten minutes at a Matisse exhibition in Stieglitz's Little Secession Gallery. What I saw there was one horrible libel on humanity after another. That will last me a lifetime, thank you."