Chapter VIII: Part 8

Dramatic action there was none. Why cast pearls? After all, there was plenty of movement, plenty of "pep" and "kick" as the producer said. All the characters made their entrances and exits with frenzied vehemence and, whilst on the stage, jerked arms and body and legs ceaselessly to and fro, as if in the last throes of St. Vitus' Dance. The audience would get its money's worth of "speed"--so much was provided for, if nothing else was. The dialogue was spoken with a short, sharp, pop-gun explosiveness, except in the maudlin sentimental scenes in which it was drawled out into one world-without-end whine. Apart from these details, nothing in particular was to happen in the play; for nothing in particular mattered. However, a squealing child was kept in reserve, ready to be trotted out for "sure-fire" applause, if the "action" should chance to flag.

In its renovated form, Mr. Grey hardly recognized "The Great Reprieve." It seemed to him that his comedy had become an exact replica of each of the other ten American comedies then playing in Times Square. This, though Mr. Grey was no intellectual giant, made a difference to his artist's pride. It made no difference to the Broadway theatregoers. They fairly devoured the play. They swallowed all the old wheezes and all the old slush and all the George Ade lingo and all the Southern mammy stuff. They swallowed it all without winking. Despite the fears of the producer, they proved themselves to be almost fully up to the intellectual level of the fifteen-year-old leading juvenile. They greeted his every act of clownage and horseplay with salvos of applause. They laughed themselves sick over him. And when the poodle dog and the baby appeared, the applause brought down the rafters.

To put it mildly, Mr. Howard Madison Grey was stupefied. However, the success of "The Great Reprieve" became the talk of the town. An ex-President of the United States went to see it and drenched his box with the tears of hilarity and contentment. Next day, he described the play as "a clean, wholesome play of American life, manners and thought!--every one hundred per cent American will be satisfied with it."

This description was henceforth underscored in every advertisement of "The Great Reprieve." Seats were sold ten weeks in advance. The producer and his crew of play-salvagers added another feather to their caps. And Mrs. Howard Madison Grey began to look for an apartment on upper Park Avenue.

*IV*

The ensuing increase in the volume of engagements and correspondence threw Janet together with Mr. Grey for uninterrupted stretches, oftener than Mrs. Grey thought wise.

Before long, the author's wife noted significant alterations in her husband's behavior.

Mrs. Howard Madison Grey was nothing if not scientific. She believed religiously in the scientific method and applied it to all her activities, even to her excursions in jealousy. As she hadn't read "Science and Power" by Fitzfield Tyler, the efficiency engineer, for nothing, she understood thoroughly that the proper method for scientific research proceeds by three stages, namely:

One: Observing facts, without any preconceived notion.

Two: Imagining a general explanation or hypothesis that establishes the relation of cause and effect between two groups of facts.

Three: Verifying this hypothesis, a process of determining by means of personally conducted observations, whether the hypothesis fits the facts it proposes to explain.

Observing, imagining, verifying--these were the three stages the trained investigator had to grasp. And Mrs. Howard Madison Grey grasped them with considerable kinetic energy.

In the first place, observation of the library during work time ceased to reveal Mr. Grey in the careless act of dictating in shirt sleeves and suspenders or of puffing cigarette smoke unconcernedly towards Janet's innocent lungs. Instead, it disclosed him in a handsome velvet smoking jacket and betrayed the astonishing fact that from the very moment the smoking jacket was exhibited the smoking habit was suppressed. Clearly, Mr. Grey's behavior in the past and his behavior in the present showed the existence of two utterly different groups of facts.

To imagine a general explanation which should connect these two groups of facts was the second and by long odds the easiest step. Mrs. Howard Madison Grey formulated the hypothesis that some perverse piece of femininity had lost her head over Mr. Grey's resplendent fame and fortune, and had set out to tempt him into the primrose path of dalliance.

The third step was to verify this hypothesis with a series of experiments.

Mrs. Grey began by putting Janet through a systematic cross-examination. Didn't she think men looked revolting in shirt sleeves and suspenders? Quite so. Frankly, hadn't she simply longed to know a great literary genius intimately? Naturally! And what might be her views on the subject of nicotine? She thought smoking a disgusting habit? Ah, well!

These answers were supplemented by scraps of information obtained, it must be confessed, by experiments that might have daunted any but a most dispassionate investigator. Disregarding ethics, it is an open question whether a personally conducted observation is better served by studying truth face to face or by studying her through a keyhole. Mrs. Grey's contribution to the answer was to adopt the latter plan on the principle that all is fair in love and science.

She ratified the somewhat precarious keyhole method by the surer method of sudden sallies into the library. She heard Mr. Grey addressing his secretary in musically resonant tones, and saw him showing undue solicitude for her comfort. Nay more, she surprised them in animated, unworkmanlike conversations. True, she did not get the precise drift of these talks, but she was morally certain that the talkers were discussing six of the deadly sins and wishing the seventh. Though further proof was scarcely needed, she found the straw that topped the climax. Mr. Grey offered to double Janet's salary without request. The conclusion forced itself on Mrs. Grey that her hypothesis was incontestably established. It brought light out of darkness and order out of chaos, besides fitting all the facts it proposed to explain.

She lost no time in acting on the verified conclusion.

One Monday morning before Howard Madison Grey returned from a week-end on the New Jersey coast, she intercepted Janet.

"The new play," she said accusingly, "isn't progressing very fast."

"No," admitted Janet, "it isn't. So many topical matters have had to be disposed of lately that the final copy of the play has been held back."

Janet could scarcely dwell on her employer's growing penchant for conversation with her when his wife was presumed to be securely occupied.

"Mr. Grey," said his wife, half reflectively, "Mr. Grey has the creative temperament."

She frequently aired this phrase; it had, she believed, the ring and tang of distinction. Privately, she thought that the artistic temperament incapacitated a man from the sane discharge of his most elementary duties.

"The creative temperament," she went on, "is too fine to cope with the details of business."

She gave Janet to understand that it was imperative that the success of "The Great Reprieve" should be followed up without delay.

"Mr. Sarsfield, the manager," continued Mrs. Grey, "has just telephoned anxiously for the next manuscript."

"Mr. Grey is still working on the revision of the third act," said Janet. "As soon as he finishes it, I shall rush the whole play through. Of course, I can type the first two acts at once."

"Yes, do. But can you work uninterruptedly here? Perhaps you could finish it faster at home--instead of coming here?"

Janet jumped at the chance. "Certainly," she said, "I can finish it at home in half the time."

Mrs. Grey was taken aback. On second thoughts, she put Janet's eagerness down to the new feminist strategy.

"There's the risk," she said, uneasily picturing the precious pages at the mercy of the New York transit services.

Anxious to escape the assiduities of the wife, if not of the husband, Janet gave reckless assurances of her devotion to the manuscript.

Mrs. Grey finally assented to the arrangement. Janet was to take the manuscript in sections and, if the scheme worked well, she might do all future typewriting for the playwright in the same way. She need come to the Greys' house only for the dictation.

"I hope Mr. Grey will be satisfied," Janet could not help saying, once the bundle of papers was safely tucked under her arm.

"I hope so," said Mrs. Grey meditatively. "But who can fathom the ways of the creative temperament--?"

She left an eloquent hiatus.

From which Janet inferred that the shortest way with that particular temperament was to let the explanation follow the act.

*V*

This bout with the green-eyed monster had taken place shortly before Claude's petulant flight to the Armstrong estate in Huntington. To Janet the whole affair was very ludicrous, and none the less so in that she had given Mrs. Grey little cause for anxiety.

Not for a moment had the newspaper acclaim of Howard Madison Grey imposed upon her. Having measured her own wits with the playwright's, she had formed an estimate of his talents which caused her to reject with contempt the fantastic eulogies of him in the press. She continued to see in Mr. Grey what she had always seen, namely, a decidedly middle-aged man with a bald head and a graceless figure, a man whose amorous pleasantries and elderly sentimentalism inspired her with the same distaste as the odor of stale tobacco smoke with which his person seemed to reek.

She knew quite well that she had captured his emotions and his illusions, but as she had found no difficulty in keeping his advances within bounds she had seen no reason for giving the matter serious thought.

On the day of Mrs. Grey's interference, Janet returned to Kips Bay in high feather. This had mystified Cornelia, who could not see in her friend's recital of events any great cause for congratulation. She gloomily predicted that Janet would soon lose her position altogether. Janet said she didn't care. A change was the only stimulant she ever took or needed. And any change, even a change for the worse, would serve the purpose admirably.

Cornelia wondered what was back of all this optimism until Janet pointed out that, with her new program of work, she could repay Robert for his many services to her. The firm of Barr & Lloyd could now carry on business in the mornings as well as in the afternoons, Robert sharing with her the work that came in from the Greys and perhaps from other authors, just as she had shared with him the work that came in from the League of Guildsmen. This statement was received in silence by Cornelia, who drew her own conclusions and communicated them only to Harry Kelly.

Janet's offer to pool her secretarial jobs from all sources with her typewriting for the League had been very welcome to Robert. His funds were running uncomfortably low just then. The reason was that the League was not a paying concern. The economic changes advocated by the Guildsmen were so drastic in character and called for so much discipline and far-sighted cooperation on the part of the working classes that the very people whom they were intended to benefit fought shy of them. Leaders of labor received the Guild proposals coldly, and the rank and file gave them little sympathy and less support.

For several mornings Robert and Janet pitched in with a will on the typewriting of Mr. Grey's manuscripts. In the afternoons they had continued the League work. Their comradeship was a happy and an intimate one, how happy and how intimate Janet did not fully realize until long after it was over. Perhaps the most delightful periods were those in which they proofread the manuscripts they had finished. They took turns reading aloud, and endless was the fun they extracted from the lines of Mr. Grey's new play. More delightful still were excursions into the fields of literature and economics, the play or some Guild pamphlet furnishing the starting point.

Thus the partnership of Barr & Lloyd had gone on swimmingly for two weeks, until the afternoon on the recreation pier, the memorable afternoon that had begun with the long talk about free love, and had ended in the model tenement with Robert's kiss and Claude's sulky fit of jealousy.

*VI*

On the morning after this fateful day, Janet had to go to the Howard Madison Greys' to return some finished manuscripts.

She had gone there for this purpose some two or three times a week, since the last arrangement with Mr. Grey. On these occasions, the playwright himself met her. And usually he spun out the interview as long as possible, due regard being had to the prudent Mrs. Grey who, hovering watchfully in the background, reminded Janet of a quiet but overcautious museum attendant.

Mrs. Grey would frequently contrive to come into the room for the undisguised purpose of glancing at or even criticizing Janet's typewriting. The expectation of such a visit made Janet, on this particular day, decidedly nervous. For, what with her distraction by Claude's anger, and a sudden crotchiness that had overtaken the typewriter, her papers bore the glaring evidence of innumerable corrections and erasures.

However, Mrs. Grey seemed for once to be off duty. So at least Janet concluded from the fact that the author himself received her with much less than his customary constraint and far more than his ordinary enthusiasm. And not only was he in the best of spirits; he was groomed to perfection. He had put on a suit cut in a fashionable English mode, with quaint cuffs on the sleeves of the coat as well as on the bottoms of the trousers.

These and other details of sartorial artistry were probably lost on Janet, but she was sensible enough of the general effect to surmise that her employer had dressed himself to conquer. This surmise would have forced itself upon her in any event, for Mr. Grey soon launched into repeated hints looking to an assignation with her outside his home, hints that presently crystallized into a direct invitation to a dinner at Sherry's.

According to the principles of Kips Bay--and Janet at this time subscribed to these principles--there was absolutely no reason why Mr. Grey should not invite her and absolutely no reason why she should not accept. But the heart has a reason to which reason must bow. Janet's heart was in submission to but one law, and that was the law of her integrity. She could no more strike up a friendship with a man to whom she was not naturally, spontaneously drawn than she could fly. And she could hardly pretend to be drawn to Mr. Grey. No, not even for the pleasure of giving the suspicious Mrs. Grey something to be suspicious about.

Besides, the man was too cocksure. He appeared to share Mrs. Grey's conviction that the slightest nod on his part would incline Janet (or any other woman) to follow him to the ends of the earth. This was amusing. But it was also irritating to one's pride of sex.

The trouble with Mr. Grey was that, having realized the first of the two ambitions which governed his desires, he felt satisfied he was about to realize the second. As an author, he had conquered the public; as a man, he now meant to conquer women.

To Janet, Mr. Grey's illusions about himself were as transparent as his illusions about her. It was plain that he took with the utmost seriousness the greatness that had recently been thrust upon him. His reasoning was quite simple. If success in pleasing the crowd and its leaders did not imply the possession of superior gifts and of a masterly technique in exploiting those gifts, what did it imply?

This reasoning struck Janet as puerile. Yet Mr. Grey could hardly be expected to share her view that talent and superb execution had never by themselves attracted the plaudits of the crowd, or that the only man who could please the million was the man born with the taste of the million. Mr. Grey had been lucky enough to inherit this taste. Why demand that he look a gift horse in the mouth?

But the judgment of youth is direct and pitiless! It seemed nothing less than ridiculous to Janet that Mr. Grey should seriously pose as a fount of the divine fire, and calmly invite her to become a ministering angel to the sacred fount. What was still more ridiculous was that he disguised his offer in weird, roundabout phrases calculated to enable her to "save her face."

He was still confidently urging the project, when Mrs. Grey swept in and fell upon them like a moral landslide.

Mrs. Grey did not stop to account for her unexpected return, to disclose how long she had been eavesdropping, or to listen to Mr. Grey's stumbling and embarrassed explanations. Her belligerent manner left no doubt that she put the very worst construction on what she had heard. Ignoring Janet altogether, she opened her batteries full on her husband and discharged a broadside of questions, short, sharp and desolating.

Her questions were entirely rhetorical.

Was this the loyalty he had sworn to her, when she picked him out of the gutter of obscurity and married him? Had she not, all along, suspected that he was plotting an affair with this girl? No doubt the girl had been setting her cap at him, but was that a legitimate excuse for inconstancy? At his age, he ought to be beyond a desire to sow wild oats. Didn't he know that a mature man sowing his wild oats presented as idiotic a spectacle as if he were sucking his thumb? She didn't know or care what _his_ family would think, but was he proposing to besmirch the unstained record of _her_ family with a divorce scandal? And so on--

Janet listened in icy humiliation whilst the storm broke over and around her. She expected every moment to be caught up in it, whirled into its vortex, and destroyed.

What actually happened was that Mr. Grey played a ghastly imitation of his masterful hero in "The Klondike Mail," until his lady, infuriated by even this shadow of defiance, reached a degree of tension that would have burst a twelve-inch gun. Death and destruction were almost afoot when she spied the typewritten papers which Janet had just returned. She pounced upon these papers and violently projected them to a point within three inches of her spouse's nose, after which she regaled him with a description of the flaws in the typewriting and the deficiencies in the typist.

This description was pithy, elaborate, exhaustive, but it was not exactly verified.

Followed an effective oratorical pause. And then Mrs. Grey begged to be informed whether the quality of the work was not ample evidence that the worker came for no good and sufficient business reasons. No one venturing to reply, she hurled the manuscripts at the head of Mr. Grey's rapidly retreating form and, as her aim was marred by a trifling miscalculation, she picked up another document and took a shy at Janet. While Janet was warding off this missile, the playwright made good his escape.

"Really, Mrs. Grey," said Janet, standing her ground boldly as her indignation got the better of her fright, "you are behaving worse than a fishwife."

Mrs. Grey sobered down with incredible suddenness.

"My poor girl," she said, solicitously, "did I hit you?"

"You came within an ace of knocking out one of my eyes!"

"Just so. Within an ace. That was my intention, precisely. I aimed for effect, not for damage. I assure you I'm a first-rate shot."

Mrs. Grey had now composed her feelings and her dress, both of which had been considerably ruffled.

"A husband is hard to get nowadays," she went on, smiling, "but he is even harder to keep. When a charming girl makes this comparative difficulty a superlative one, she does a wife grave wrong. Still, under the circumstances, I forgive you."

"You mustn't presume too much on my wickedness," said Janet, smiling at this strange turn of affairs. "I'm disgracefully inexperienced."

"Inexperienced! Ah, well, men have an amazing weakness for some kinds of inexperience--in a girl. In a wife they're not so keen on it. My dear, if unmarried girls would only put themselves in a wife's place, what a lot of trouble they'd save--for us now and for themselves later on. But of course, they can't do it. They think marriage is a picnic on a motorcycle with the bride in the carriage attachment. What a dream! Marriage is more like a tennis game with the two players facing each other across the dividing line of sex. You'll find that out the day after the wedding! You'll know then that the only way to manage a husband is to discover his weakest point and keep driving at that until the game and the set are in your hands. Mr. Grey's weakest point is his horror of facing facts. He dreads a fact the way a boy dreads soap. I discovered that at our honeymoon hotel when we debated how to stop the waiter from serving us with cold soup. Rather than compel the waiter to change it, Mr. Grey tried to prove that the soup was really quite hot. No, I'm not the tartar you think I am. I don't object to a man having his fling now and then, provided it's a short fling. But I can't let him get into the grip of a girl of your sort, the permanent sort. That might introduce fatal complications, and I don't mean to take any chances."

"Then why did you let me come here in the first place?"

"Because you took me in completely," replied this astonishing woman. "You had none of the obvious female ways. You were almost pathetically businesslike and you seemed to be--well--no beauty. Excuse me for being frank."

"The excuses are all on my side, I'm sure," said Janet, highly amused.

"Not at all, my dear. I'm convinced I was quite wrong. You grow on one, even on a woman. I soon found out that beneath your dovelike innocence there was a serpentine wisdom. It's a magic combination. No man can resist it."

"Thank you, Mrs. Grey. This flattery is more than I deserve, but--"

"It's no good protesting. There is a devilish fascination about you. If I'm beginning to feel it myself, what must poor Mr. Grey feel?"

And with a gesture which betokened that, in these matters, feelings transcended verbal arguments and oral contracts, she paid Janet what was owing to her and made it clear that she need not come again.

At the door, she wished Janet good luck.

"My dear," she said, "as a typist you cut rather a poor figure. But that combination I spoke of--it's worth a fortune--"

Janet went away not knowing whether to laugh or to cry. A good cry would not have come amiss; and yet, as she counted up the fortunes of the last two days, she could not help observing that her mishaps had trod on one another's heels in a procession that was well-nigh comic. Claude's letter and flight, Cornelia's bad temper, her own involuntary rudeness to Robert, the crop of errors in the playwright's manuscript, Mrs. Grey's impertinences, and the crowning loss of her position--here was a downpour of calamities amounting to a regular deluge!

And not a single ray of sunshine in sight, either.

On second thoughts, she had to admit that this statement was not strictly true. For Robert would probably be home, and what an immense relief it would be to tell him all that had happened to her! At the same time she would be able to obliterate the effect of yesterday's rudeness.

For she guessed that Robert's feelings had been deeply hurt by her gesture of withdrawal from him. But she felt no doubt of her power to conciliate him or to conquer his just resentment. In fact, she had so little doubt of this power that, the nearer home she got, the more she looked forward to the prospect of exercising it.

Ah, yes, it would be simple and sweet to make up with Robert, and they should spend a very jolly afternoon together, working over sundry papers and planning new activities for the firm of Barr & Lloyd.

And (such is the peremptory, indomitable influence of the heart!), her spirits rose again. In the full flush of agreeable anticipation, she began to turn the day's adventures over in her mind. As she did so, she gave them a humorous twist, for she meant to relate them to Robert entertainingly, in return for his expected concession to her.

*CHAPTER NINETEEN*

*I*

On reaching her own street, Janet had to plough her way to the Lorillard tenements through shoals of children that scampered about as derelict as herself. She felt the keenest pity for these little tots who came from the very immodel tenements not far away, where five or even eight people existed in a single room, defying the decencies of life by day and mocking them by night in order to live up to "the highest standard of living" in the world.

She did not expect Robert until two o'clock, when he regularly returned from the League of Guildsmen. In the interval she looked, as a matter of course, under Cornelia's alarm clock, where the four friends were in the habit of putting brief communications for one another. She found the following note addressed to her in Robert's painstaking hand:

Dear Janet:

Forgive me for not being on hand this afternoon. During the next few days, and perhaps longer, I shall be in Pittsburgh. For some time, therefore, the whole burden of the firm of Barr & Lloyd will have to rest on the shoulders of one partner. Lucky that this partner is so thoroughly staunch and dependable, isn't it?

What is taking me out of town is the strike in Pittsburgh. Thousands of steel workers have laid down their tools in protest against the conditions under which they are obliged to work. The contest between these men and their all-powerful employers is horribly uneven, and the apathy of the general public towards the issues at stake is appalling. Naturally, every agency that is pledged to the success of a healthy labor movement must pitch into this prickly business. For the strikers need all the help they can get, whether of a material or a moral kind.

It is on the moral side that our League of Guildsmen comes in. The recent war has filled the earth with indescribable bitternesses and resentments. It has also given sovereign strength to the idea that henceforth the control of the world's affairs must be taken away from the idlers and profiteers and given to the workers and producers. At every turn, omens of a vast incalculable change force themselves upon our senses.

Clearly, those who don't want a bloody revolution have got to work tooth and nail for a pacific one. Now the Guildsmen, being advocates of a change that shall be peaceful though drastic, have a vital interest in drumming it into people's heads that violence can never breed anything save violence and violence again.

You see, don't you, that I am needed there far more than here? Please believe that I'm sorry in the last degree to upset our joint business plans and to hold up "The Klondike Mail" on the typewriter at just the critical moment when Mr. Grey's double-dyed desperadoes are holding it up in the middle of the third act. It makes me feel like an accessory to the crime, all the more so in that it gives you, at the secretarial end, the task of foiling one more villain.

Arrangements have been made at the League office for the delivery to you of another batch of Mss. Could you call in there tomorrow afternoon?

More later, as soon as my plans are surer.

Ever yours,
Robert.

P.S. On second thoughts, it seems a shame that you should be saddled with a partner who is bound to be more or less on the jump. I recall the plan you confided to me last week, the plan of turning Barr & Lloyd into a real secretarial business on an extensive scale. With this on your mind, you may well fear that my haphazard movements will prove ruinous to any settled policy. If so, and whenever you can find a more stable associate, please have no compunction about making a change. We must not let sentiment stand in the way of good management.

"He can't even say good-bye without delivering a lecture," said Janet bitterly.

She felt aggrieved. Just when she needed Robert most, he left her in the lurch. True, his direct connection with the labor movement made his departure inevitable. But did he have to rush off to Pittsburgh the very moment the strike broke out? She supposed his haste was partly prompted by his injured feelings. If not, why had he so needlessly offered to dissociate himself from her, why, indeed, had he written such an entirely cold, unsympathetic letter?

"Like his cold, unsympathetic views on love," she said to herself, recalling with some scorn his severe, intolerant pronouncements on the free love theme.

She reviewed the business-like contents of the letter with a growing sense of desolation. It looked as though she were in for a dismal evening, one of those dismal evenings that are enormously good for us _afterwards_, because at the time they so thoroughly plough up our deepest feelings.

*II*

But the facts of the present were too disturbing to permit her to extract much consolation from a philosophy of the future.

For Janet's difficulties were by no means entirely sentimental.

Much as Claude's anger and Robert's coolness tortured her feelings, it was the destruction of her plans that chiefly occupied her thoughts. These were the plans that Robert had referred to in his letter.

Ably assisted by Cornelia, whose power of sketching the most imposing schemes quite exhausted her capacity for executing even the humblest ones, Janet had mapped out a very ambitious career for herself. Her intention was to make the most of her stenographic foothold; to accumulate enough resources to permit a spur, so to speak, to be run into the domain of the law; and eventually to reach a point where the secretarial specialty and its legal intertwinings should be united in one occupation.

It was, as Cornelia all aglow remarked, a time when women were not only casting down the barriers raised by men around the old professions, but were actually bestirring themselves to carve out brand-new professions.

What Cornelia put into enthusiasm, Janet proposed to put into cold deeds.

As a first step in this direction, she resolved that the firm of Barr & Lloyd, which had been born in jest, should be reared in dead earnest. Her work for Mr. Grey, a certain amount of casual work which she was getting from friends of the playwright, and such odd jobs as Robert brought from the Guild League--these three sources were to form the basis of a secretarial office dealing with authors' manuscripts in relation to typing, revision, criticism, and so on.

In short, Barr & Lloyd (Barr first, because Robert, as an advocate of the absolute equality of men and women, insisted that the correct order of precedence was a strictly alphabetical one)--Barr & Lloyd were to be manuscript specialists, handling every conceivable matter linked up with the preparation and sale of manuscripts and the protection of authors' rights.

From Robert, Janet had extracted a promise to supervise the department of criticism and revision. Claude (this was before his flight in a fit of pique) had refused to take the project seriously. Cornelia, in her most pronounced _bel canto_ style, had volunteered to "lend a helping hand" to the typewriting department and to give her moral support to most of the other departments. As Janet's last illusions about Cornelia were being speedily dissipated, and as she judged that some birds in a bush are worth ten in the hand, she contracted for Cornelia's moral support and nothing but her moral support in all the departments.

Then, as regards the legal department. Janet held that, in order to round out her business in the most complete way, one member of the firm ought to be equipped with a first-hand training in jurisprudence. She saw nothing for it but to be this member herself, and accordingly she had already made arrangements to attend the coming fall sessions of an Evening Law School. Needless to say, this part of her dream had not been so much as breathed to Claude.

Janet intended, as soon as she had passed her bar examination, to specialize on all points of law bearing on literary and dramatic productions, the rights of authors, and the relations between the buyers and sellers of manuscripts. She had been put onto this idea by a popular short-story writer, one of Mr. Grey's friends. This man had assured her that the literary field, on its legal side, was practically a virgin field. Merchants, inventors, landlords, captains of industry and the like could, where the law touched their spheres of influence, find appropriate legal specialists with all the precedents, traditions, decisions, appeals, evasions, etc., at their fingers' ends. Authors alone were in no such happy case. The legal background of authorship was a vast morass of contradictions, quibbles and uncertainties. Authors were frequently at sea in respect of their rights, constantly handicapped in the matter of expert advice, and always liable to be done in the eye by the more unscrupulous members of the fraternity of editors, publishers, managers and agents.

This, then, was the field that Janet meant to conquer. She had a roseate vision of Barr & Lloyd occupying a suite of offices on the lower end of Madison or Park Avenue. If fortune favored her, these offices were to be staffed with ambitious young women assistants whom she would help to useful and honorable careers (as far as male prejudice and discrimination would allow). Barr & Lloyd, in other words, besides their primary business as manuscript practitioners, would have a secondary mission, namely, that of multiplying the avenues along which woman might march towards economic equality with men.

Such was the purpose which Janet had already begun to work for. She now saw all her plans collapsing like a pricked balloon. The action taken by Mrs. Grey meant the loss of much potential custom which she had hoped would grow by recommendation out of the Grey patronage. The most galling, stabbing fact in all this sorry business was the reflection that she had failed not merely in her human and business dealings but in her workmanship. If only she hadn't made a mess of those last manuscripts for the playwright, the ones she had prepared under the strain of Claude's tempestuous displeasure! Mrs. Grey's taunt still rankled in her ears: "As a typist, you cut a very poor figure--"

True, Mrs. Grey had tacked on another phrase--the one about her "magic combination." But what did this trumped-up compliment weigh against the maddening behavior of Claude and Robert?

Both of them had deserted her!

Janet was not addicted to the windy heroics cultivated by the Outlaws of Kips Bay, but for once she believed herself entitled to indulge in them. She really felt deserted. By Claude, by Robert, by Cornelia and, of course, by her family.

"How naturally I think of the family when I'm glum!" was her silent comment.

Her thoughts ran back to the time when she had left home in defiance of Mrs. Barr's ultimatum.

Since then, her mother had written one letter full of that spirit of Christian forbearance that has driven so many people into the devil's camp. After that, not another word from her. But there had followed a steady stream of appeals from her father, imploring her to come back at any price, swearing that life at home was not worth living without her, and promising to do anything in the wide world she demanded (except, as Janet sardonically observed to herself, damp down her mother's tyranny a trifle. He had never had, and he never would have, the nerve to do this or to put up the least show of fight.)

As a last effort, her sister Emily had paid a visit to the Lorillard tenements--partly perhaps from curiosity. She affirmed that she had come of her own free will, and probably believed this statement to be the truth. Janet knew very well that her sister was, consciously or unconsciously, the family ambassador. The Barrs always throve best when their right hand did not know what their left hand was doing.

Emily, all a-tingle with the exhilaration which an angel inevitably feels when descending upon a glittering abode of vice, had tried hard not to betray her excitement. In a tone essenced with pious sorrow and celestial distress! She had assured the erring one (though not in these words), that all would be forgiven if only she returned to her home before the world (of the Barrs) should discover that a Barr had abandoned Brooklyn for Kips Bay, and her family for the society of atheists, Bolshevists, and Bohemians!

"But I haven't the faintest notion of abandoning you," Janet had replied. "I believe I can lead a fuller, freer, more active life away from mother's apron strings, that's all. Of course I want to see the family from time to time. I could come on short visits--"

Emily had assured her, not without a trace of exultation, that Mrs. Barr would never hear of such a cool arrangement. Either the prodigal daughter returned once and for all, or the family would treat her as dead.

"Really! But how you'll miss the funeral!" Janet had wickedly exclaimed.

At which Emily had put on her gloves.

All later messages sent by Janet to her mother in an effort to put their mutual relations on a more reasonable footing had been severely ignored. The only communications she had received were growingly infrequent notes from her father, and these contained nothing but the same old appeals--sentimental, pathetic, fatuous.

*III*

The doorbell startled her out of her long, melancholy reverie. She flew to the threshold, and in came Claude! She had proposed to treat him coolly at their next meeting. But his return was as sudden as it was unexpected. And he was Claude, the same Claude with the same striking appearance, the same telling voice, the same handsome face. Instantly, the magnetic spark that had darted from one to the other at the Outlaws' Ball made its swift, poignant, thrilling leap between them again.

Though words were superfluous, Claude, as he clasped her in a passionate embrace, murmured:

"Janet, darling, forgive me. I was a beast to write a letter like that."

"Confession is good for the soul," said Janet, laughing and trying to release her head.

"Are you angry? Well, you ought to be. And I ought to grovel in the dust at your feet. You are a saint to forgive me, and I should be ashamed to accept forgiveness if I hadn't suffered. Yes, Janet, I've suffered cruelly. I never had so keen a grief and I never so thoroughly deserved one. But I'm nearly ill with worry."

He _did_ look pale, nor did it hurt his cause that pallor became him. Besides, his apologies were as overwhelming as his fits of temper. How could the poor girl help forgiving him?

And so Janet, who but a few minutes before had been considering (mock-heroically to be sure) sundry historic forms of self-slaughter, now forgot all about jumping off Brooklyn Bridge, etc., and poured a heavenly compassion on Claude.

"Something happened in Huntington," she said. "Something serious. Does it involve me? I want you to tell me straight."

"That scoundrel Burley tipped my father off about us, and as a result, the old man is half out of his wits. He is determined that my marriage with Marjorie shall not fall through, for the one terror of his life is that of disobliging Mr. Armstrong. In what form the word was passed along the line, I don't know. But they were at me, one and all, day and night, giving me a hundred and one sly intimations of the general satisfaction that would follow the much desired event. The pressure got to be unbearable."

He said that the older people had left no stone unturned to bring the Armstrong-Fontaine alliance to pass. Pacing the floor restlessly, he spoke of the delicate hints, the veiled references, the consummate skill with which he and Marjorie were engineered into tete-a-tetes. Could Janet picture him alone with Marjorie, and the resultant sessions of sweet, silent thought? Had she any idea of what the imperious will of Armstrong's daughter could do in the way of maneuvering a man into the most difficult situations? Janet had little difficulty in calling up an image of the stately brunette with lustrous dark hair, patrician nose, and sulky, discontented mouth. This imposing young lady had impressed herself indelibly upon Janet's mind at the Mineola Aerodrome, and, such are the unfathomable processes of sex, Janet profoundly pitied Claude. She did this without a suspicion that he might be drawing generously upon his imagination for the sake of that very pity of hers, which she gave him so divinely. Nor did it occur to her that there were few young men in all New York who would have been in unrelieved misery if Marjorie Armstrong had set her cap at them.

As a matter of fact, Claude quite omitted to mention that he had gone to Huntington with more than a vague notion of finding out whether he and Marjorie couldn't hit it off together, after all; also that, if Marjorie, with all her eagerness to capture him, had not so plainly exposed her design of "bossing" the marriage after it had taken place--well, then--

What he did say, was:

"Of course, I was left quite free to do as I pleased. Oh, quite free. They wouldn't lead the horse to water--not they, that would be brutal coercion--they would simply make it drink."

This irony expressed the full truth. Claude had virtually given his father a promise not to marry Janet. But Mr. Fontaine senior put no faith in vows that were subject to the stresses and strains of love. Mistrustful of his son's infatuation and also of the unknown quantity of Janet's ambition, he did not scruple to adopt any tactical measure by which the union of the Armstrong-Fontaine forces might be achieved.

"What do you mean to do?" asked Janet, greatly troubled.

"What _can_ I do? What can _any_ prisoner do? Run away, I suppose."

"What--without me?"

"Well, you see, I'm planning to go to Europe, darling. Separated by the Atlantic I shall be able to make my position much clearer to my father. An ocean is an astonishing convenience when it stands between the giver and the receiver of an explanation."

"Yes, but why can't I go, too?"

"You dear innocent," he said, taking her hand tenderly, "we can't go cavorting over two continents as if we were merely joy-riding from here to Quakertown."

"Why not?" she persisted, with her customary refusal to be sidetracked.

*IV*

The question embarrassed him. Even had he been clear about the train of thought at the back of his mind, he could not, in all brutal directness, have said: "A man in my station does not flaunt his mistresses in the face of the public. That is all very well for the vulgar rich. But not for my sort. High-class polygamy is strictly _sub rosa_."

Claude did not explicitly think this, much less say it. His chief difficulty in the way of reaching a straightforward understanding with Janet was that his mind did not work straightforwardly upon the problem of sex relations. His adopted radical professions were entirely subordinate to powerful, instinctive reactions along traditional lines.

Thus, at heart, he had little use for Janet's views about free love. To Janet, the term meant a public abandonment of an obsolete institution. To Claude, it was little more than a polite synonym for illicit intercourse.

Claude, in fact, had no deep quarrel with existing institutions. He prided himself on being tolerant, and his tolerance extended to the institutions of Bohemianism (which had no recognition in law), as well as to the institutions of the established order (which enjoyed this recognition). His support of "advanced" art, his membership in the Outlaws' Club, his philandering among the Lorillard tenementers--these were all ways of escape from the particularity of normal civilized life. Bohemianism, by systematically discarding troublesome forms, costly conventions and restrictive social obligations, really organized these ways of escape for him and provided a maximum of pleasure with a minimum of effort.

He was, therefore, by no means prepared to go as far as Janet wished to go, openly; yet he was fully prepared to go to the limit, clandestinely. So much so, that a severe critic like Robert would have said that Claude was deliberately taking advantage of Janet's inexperienced outlook on life. And it was quite true that Claude was willing to profit by her belief in free love, although he was far from willing to champion this belief, much less to become a martyr in its promotion.

But if he was exploiting Janet's infatuation for him, he was not doing so consciously. And the fact remained that, had she been so minded, she could just as easily have exploited his infatuation for her. Indeed, the latter would have been easier. Claude was not aware of this. He was aware only of his own power, and he believed he was exercising almost superhuman self-control in an effort to avoid compromising her future.

He believed he was doing this now, whilst fishing for an answer to Janet's candid "_why not?_" A few hours earlier, in Huntington, under the concerted pressure of the Armstrong family, he had realized that he would have to give up either Marjorie or Janet; and it had occurred to him that if he took Janet now, Marjorie was not lost to him later; whereas if he took Marjorie now, Janet was lost to him forever.

Naturally, it was not in terms of pitiless realism that he sought to explain his choice.

A more heroic explanation was that he had given up Marjorie for Janet's sake, and that, on a peremptory summons of the heart, he had run away from Huntington determined to risk everything--from his father's wrath to the loss of Mr. Armstrong's protection in the matter of smuggled diamonds. The heroic explanation was the one he meant to give to Janet.

Looking, at the moment, into Janet's gray eyes in their superb setting of long, dark lashes, he was ready to give his thoughts any form that might be acceptable to her. Surely, such a mixture of radical daring and native good sense, of enticement and candor, of self-reliance that ennobled her and soft yielding that flattered _him_--such a mixture had never before been found in one woman. It made her exquisite, enigmatic, thrilling and quite indispensable to him.

So reasoned his heart. And all his commanding nonchalance returned.

*V*

The result was that when Janet, failing to get an answer to her question, repeated anew her wish to accompany him abroad, he enfolded her in his arms and said:

"After all, why not?"

And after a fervent embrace, he added:

"Janet, I think you ought to face what's in store for us."

"Don't let's cross bridges, Claude," she pleaded.

"We'll get married, of course," he went on, unheeding her. "Frankly, my father won't like it. He'll probably make Rome howl. However, he'll get used to it in the end--especially when he meets you. But, though there's a storm ahead, you are brave and we'll weather it, I'm sure."

"Your father won't raise a storm," said Janet, with a strange smile, "for a small but important reason. Remember, I'm not going to be married."

"Janet!"

"You know I don't believe in it."

They argued the matter pro and con, she spiritedly, he lamely. Janet pointed out, among other things, that when Mr. Fontaine senior learnt of their free union he was little likely to attempt any serious interference, but would count on time to separate them.

"'Love's not Time's fool!'" said Claude, quoting dithyrambically. "We'll never be separated, darling, will we?"

"Well--not for the present," said Janet, with dancing eyes. "I won't vouch for our dim and distant feelings."

"No teasing, you darling imp!"

"Claude, I mean it. If--if it should turn out that your father was right, that will merely prove that we were wrong."

He was at a complete loss how to treat her incredible self-surrender. As a man of the world, he was part scandalized, part uneasy, according as he swerved from the conviction that Janet was candid, to the suspicion that she was designing. Again, as a gay Bohemian trifler, he saw in her attitude an easy way out of possible complications. Whether he should or should not carry out his offer of marriage was now a question he would not have to face. She did not mean to put his vows to the test! This was breath-bereaving, staggering; it was even slightly annoying. But, her eccentric choice being a fact, surely the consequences did not rest on his soul?

"Janet, you don't know what you are doing!" he cried out involuntarily, being torn many ways at once.

She, too, was greatly agitated; but, under the pressure of her theory, she kept her head. While he stood there as if distraught, she poured out a flood of reasons to which he scarcely listened. For instance, she said it was criminal for two people to form a permanent union or bring children into a family until they were sure of being well-suited to each other and of establishing a family that children would wish to enter.

All marriages ought to be trial marriages of the kind that George Meredith had suggested long ago.

Moreover, until she became independent in the matter of money, she couldn't dream of subscribing to any permanent arrangement.

He replied that this was all nonsense and derided Meredith as a bookworm and a dreamer. For his own part, hadn't he money enough to provide for them both? If she wouldn't take half his money, she didn't love him. That was flat!

"I do love you!" cried Janet, with more visible emotion than before. "That's why I mustn't marry you."

He rose with a wild movement.

"I must save myself--and you, too!" he murmured. "I'm going abroad by the first steamer."

But these words were dashed with insurgent passion. Handsome, hypnotic, intense, his whole being vibrated towards her. She surrendered incontinently.

"Not without me!" she said, enchaining him in her arms.

He kissed her tempestuously.

"It's a daring step, and a perilous one," he said, more in weak protest than in forceful remonstrance.

"No, no, no!" she cried, as with a gesture of ecstasy she hid her face on his shoulder.

*PART IV*

*NEMESIS*

*CHAPTER TWENTY*

*I*

One morning in the middle of August, Harry Kelly cut short his gymnastics and went downstairs to get fruit, cream and rolls for Cornelia, as he had done daily since Janet left. The letter box held one letter, a fat one, postmarked Paris. Cornelia was inclined to be lackadaisical before breakfast, but a letter enlivened her at once, especially if it came from a long-lost friend or bore a foreign postmark. Kelly sent his powerful form bounding up the staircase, the victuals being safeguarded by a miracle of balancing.

"A letter from Paris," he called out joyfully, as he entered Apartment Fifteen.

"From Janet!" exclaimed Cornelia with conviction. One glance at the handwriting verified her guess.

"Janet's hand," she said, and tore the envelope open feverishly.

"Wouldn't you enjoy reading it more after breakfast?" he said wistfully as he watched Cornelia unfolding a great many pages of writing.

"What an idea! Make the coffee, Hercules, there's a good boy. The water is boiling; all you need to do is to pour the water on the coffee and let it stand."

As Kelly had fallen sole heir to the daily duty of preparing her breakfast, he uncomplainingly went to work. Meanwhile, Cornelia, in a very becoming green-and-gold Mimosa jacket, sat down on a lounge and buried herself in Janet's letter.

*II*

Dear Cornelia:

Here I am in the Luxembourg Gardens, alone with my fountain pen and my pad of paper, Claude having gone to the races as the guest of a Russian Grand Duke. I feel ages removed from the days of Kips Bay, though by the calendar only four weeks have gone by.

Why haven't you heard from me in all this time? That, I imagine, is the first question you would ask me if we met face to face. No, you wouldn't. You would divine the answer. You would know that the blinding, paralyzing, notoriety into which we were suddenly plunged, left me with but one desire, the supreme desire for solitude. A desert without a single oasis would not have been too lonely for me to live in. For a few days even Claude--