Chapter Twenty-Eight I
Hoping to have a few words alone with Harry Kelly, Robert went down to breakfast early. But if he expected to learn anything further in regard to Janet or M. St. Hilaire, he was disappointed. Extracting teeth would have been easier than pumping Harry who, besides being more taciturn than ever, had developed a vein of pessimism quite out of keeping with his material prosperity.
Robert was actually relieved when the appearance of Mazie Ross at the breakfast table put an end to his efforts to draw Kelly out.
“Her Ladyship was sweetly singing ‘My Rosary’ when I passed her bedroom door,” said Mazie, alluding to Cornelia. “Things’ll be humming in the Maison Paulette this morning, if I know the Indian sign.”
Mazie was getting to be very chipper of late. Whether from the force of association or not, the presence of Robert and Janet had given her a chance to recover some of her old position.
Kelly appeared to agree with Mazie’s inference, though he was not so cheerful about it. He wished Mark Pryor were somewhere within reach. That fellow was a regular clairvoyant, and could tip you off about the most astonishing things. A tip would be handy at this time.
“Something’s going to happen,” added Harry, gloomily. “I feel it in my bones.”
“I’d feel it in my bones,” volunteered Mazie, “if I nearly killed myself like you do, Harry. You fairly chew up work. What’s the use? Let the Empress do some of the worrying.”
“She’s got enough to worry about, Mazie. She carries the whole responsibility for the artistic work of the house, and you know it.”
“You bet I do! The chief joy of my declining days is to watch her Ladyship curl up on a cozy sofa in the office and hug the responsibility while you do the work. When the weight is too much for her, she staggers over to the house switchboard, rings up each department in turn, and interferes with everybody impartially. Say, if you could limber up her knee action a bit—”
At this point, poor Harry, after an ineffectual attempt to stare Mazie into silence, got up and went out, unable to listen any longer.
“The goof!” said Mazie, pitying him contemptuously. “She only married him as a sure salvation from work.”
She was so manifestly unjust to Cornelia (who, however much of a shirker she might have been in Kips Bay, was now busy enough making her talent for line and color productive) that Robert refrained from argument.
“What’s the matter with Harry?” he said, attempting to change the subject. “He was always monosyllabic, but never as gloomy as this.”
“He wants a son and heir.”
“Oh!”
“Do you remember how Cornelia used to tell every man who paid us a call in Number Fifteen that the dearest wish of her life was to hold a che-ild to her maternal heart? Every brutal Outlaw that came along would offer to oblige on the spot. Except Harry. He melted right into putty when she sprang that mother gag; and then she gave the cue for the wild wedding bells to ring out. But now she’s married, it’s different. The muffler is on the maternal urge. On tight! And she’s strong for the birth control propaganda. She’s so strong for it that—”
Here Cornelia entered and Mazie was put to instant flight.
II
Cornelia’s hour with Robert had come. She lost no time in giving him to understand that his arrival in Paris had, to put it mildly, been inopportune. Not that it was his fault. Naturally, he couldn’t very well have foreseen the rapidly approaching crisis in Janet’s life. But there it was! M. St. Hilaire, a man of parts and of wealth, was anxious to marry Janet, who had just begun to see that the match was greatly to her advantage. Here was Janet’s golden opportunity to redeem the past—
“To redeem the past or to redeem Monsieur St. Hilaire?”
“Don’t be flippant, Cato. You know very well what I mean.”
“I’m quite serious. Redeem is a curious word to use in connection with Janet. It implies atonement for sin. Did you apply this word to your own case after your return from England to the model tenements?”
She stared at him icily. Did he intimate that Janet’s affair with Claude Fontaine was spiritually comparable to her affair with Percival Houghton? She would show him the difference. True, she had believed in free love (“a hundred years ahead of my time, Cato!”) and Janet had followed suit. But when she, Cornelia, had taken up the gauntlet against the irrational knot, she had let herself be pilloried for her convictions. Had Janet done as much? Let his own fairness be his tutor.
Not that she held Janet to blame. Oh, no. She would have Robert know that he and his principles had been the disturbing influence in Janet’s destiny. This had been the case in Kips Bay. She feared it would again be the case in Paris.
“I the disturbing influence? Absurd, Cornelia. When did I ever demand that you, or Janet, or anybody else live up to my vaunted principles?”
“Cato, there’s something about you, some Satanic magnetism, that gives you a strange hold upon a woman’s soul. It makes her strive to appear before you always in her loftier, sublimer flights, to put on her Sabbath character, so to speak.”
“Why do you call this Sabbath magnetism Satanic?”
“Because it’s unnatural to ask a woman to assume her Sabbath character seven days a week. She’s bound to come to grief.”
She assured him that this Satanic faculty of his was what caused him to pique or fascinate women, though it seldom inspired them with passion. And, in the long run, it always threw them out of gear. As in the case of Janet! What had his intoxicating mixture of visionary theories and expedient compromises done for her in the Claude Fontaine affair? It had brought her out at the pitifully small end of the horn.
“I may remind you, Robert, that I was ready to ruin myself for Percival Houghton, ready to stand, upright and reckless, facing the world with him. I didn’t go slinking from one hotel to another, as his pretended wife.”
Cornelia’s heroics would have amused Robert but for the jibe flung at Janet. Thank heaven, Janet never declaimed about having faced a whole world or having ruined herself for anyone. After listening to such windy phrases, who would not be biased towards any course that seemed right to Janet and wrong to Cornelia?
He hung on her lips with rapt absorption, hoping by this look of intenseness to mask his thoughts.
In this hope he was deceived.
“Why on earth don’t you marry Charlotte Beecher?” she cross-questioned him abruptly.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know! Do you suppose a girl with position, wealth and brains turns up every day in the week? A girl who really wants you! I’m sure I can’t imagine why she does.”
“Nor can I.”
She repeated her question. Had he given Charlotte Beecher up merely because she loved him so much more than he loved her?
He couldn’t very well answer this question in the affirmative. So he said:
“Charlotte is a very intellectual girl, the most intellectual girl I know. She never met a man whom she regarded as her equal in point of brains until she met me. The regard was mutual. She mistook her admiration for love. I might have made the same mistake—if I hadn’t met you.”
“You can’t blarney me, Cato,” she said, highly flattered none the less. “It’s too late in the day!”
“I mean it, Cornelia. Meeting you, made me alive to the full force of the attraction between the sexes.”
“It is the one thing needful,” said Cornelia, in low siren tones. “For without it, love is as the dry stubble.”
“I, too, used to think so,” replied Robert, turning a cold douche on this sentiment. “We’ve all had that notion rammed down our throats since childhood. But can we be certain that sexual attraction is the only road to love? The poets assure us that pity is a famous short-cut. In the case of very young people, all roads seem to lead to love. For older folk, mutual admiration may be as good a road as any. Speaking for myself, I’m still considering a proposal to Charlotte Beecher—”
“Oh, you’re still considering her? And Janet is still considering M. St. Hilaire. For ice-cold calculation, give me a one-hundred per cent enthusiast like you or Janet.”
“Are you suggesting that Janet is so well-suited to me that I ought to propose to her?”
She rose, with a growing sense of contempt for him. If he did anything so insane—and he was doubtless capable of it—the results would be on his own head. He had already made a mess of his newspaper career, he had been too proud to cultivate the Fontaine influence, he had gratuitously antagonized his only well-to-do relation in California, even now he could barely make a hand-to-mouth living out of his connection with the radical press. And he actually proposed to lengthen this catalog of disasters! Well, he’d better remember one thing. His friends could pull him out of a hole, but not out of a bottomless abyss.
Really, did he believe in miracles? To put it bluntly: did he suppose that two failures added together made a success? Yes, two failures! He was an impecunious journalist or a discredited labor propagandist—which was it? And Janet! What had she to offer? A pirated soul (this to remind him of Claude Fontaine) and shattered prospects.
“Really, Cornelia, these phrases belong to the screen grade of fiction, not to the facts of the twentieth century.”
Here Mazie interrupted with an urgent message from the exhibition room.
“Stay and talk to Robert,” said Cornelia with frigid disdain. “He’s a great salvager of damaged reputations.”
Mazie looked inquiringly Robert’s way, while Cornelia swept towards the door. In a mock-heroic tone, he explained:
“Cornelia says that Janet went wrong; therefore, unless M. St. Hilaire marries her, she’ll be ruined for life.”
Mazie caught the drift of the situation at once.
“Ruined!” she cried out, in a steaming torrent of slang. “Say, people in the States won’t believe a girl is ’ruined’ nowadays, even when she’s committed to the House of the Good Shepherd. Ruined! Who’s to ruin her? Why, the average American is such a hokey-pokey, near-beer, Sunday-school man of straw, he wouldn’t ruin Cleopatra if she begged him on her bended knees! Take it from me. If Janet’s people at the cemetery end of Brooklyn heard Claude described as the Duc de la Fontaine, they might give her the glassy eye. They might. They’ll believe cruel things about a foreigner. But she mustn’t let on that he’s a gent from the U.S.A., or they’ll think she’s stringing them. Think! They’ll know it. Why, my brown-eyed cherub, there’s only one way a girl can go wrong in little old New York. And that’s to have somebody break into her bank account.”
Of the latter part of this choicely sustained opinion, Robert was the exclusive audience, Cornelia having already closed the door with a bang.
III
A little later in the morning Janet, glancing through a copy of Le Matin three days old, caught sight of a familiar name in a telegraphic despatch from New York. The name was Fontaine. According to the brief news report, headed C’est fini de rire! (the fun is over!), Fontaine and Company, the most noted of the Fifth Avenue dealers in precious stones, were charged with complicity in a sensational attempt at smuggling.
Piecing the somewhat disjointed details together, Janet gathered that secret agents of the Department of Justice on the lookout for spies had inadvertently found thousands of dollars’ worth of diamonds concealed in the bottom boards of what purported to be cases of Japanese books. The cases, which had been opened by the Secret Service agents shortly after the “Ionic” docked in Hoboken, were ostensibly consigned to a San Francisco book dealer for whom one Hutchins Burley, a New York editor and foreign correspondent, appeared as the representative.
Burley was held, and the newspapers featured him as the “master mind” of a very clever band. On examination he confessed that the book dealer was a mere dummy for Fontaine and Company, whose stock rooms were the real destination of the diamonds. A warrant for the arrest of Mr. Rene Fontaine, head of the firm, was at once issued. Officials of the customs house alleged that the operations of the smugglers, whose ingenuity had baffled detection for years, reached gigantic proportions, the government’s loss being estimated at many millions.
News so startling had to be told without delay. Janet excitedly reported it to Harry Kelly and then descended to the exhibition room where as a rule Cornelia held sway at this hour.
Entering the salon somewhat precipitately, she saw the young Duchess of Keswick seated in great state and surrounded by deferential minions. But no Cornelia visible. Janet beat a swift retreat. The Duchess reminded her, not altogether pleasantly, of Marjorie Armstrong at the Mineola Aerodrome. The two young ladies had the same fashionable contours, the same self-conscious pride of position, the same patricianism of the made-to-order rather than of the inborn type.
Hastening up a flight of stairs to Cornelia’s office, Janet was brought to a stop outside the door by the sound of voices, which she recognized at once as those of her friend and of the Duchess’s mother, Mrs. R. H. L. Jerome.
It was easy to overhear the conversation. Mrs. Jerome announced her departure for London the next day to inspect an apartment house restricted exclusively to professional women who, besides being mothers, were the sole supporters of their children. She intended to open a similar house (as a humanitarian, not a charitable undertaking) in New York. She had already offered Janet the post of resident business manager. Naturally, she would like to take the young lady with her to England at once, but she wouldn’t insist on this. If the inconvenience to the Maison Paulette was too great, Janet could follow later, as soon as she had wound up her affairs.
Cornelia’s reply was couched in a low voice so tense with emotion that Janet could distinguish only a word or two here and there. These words were ample. M. St. Hilaire, woman-with-her-back-to-the-wall, Henriette, redemption, iron-law-of-retribution, etc., such proper names and stagey phrases showed quite clearly that Cornelia was delivering her customary rigmarole about the sacrifices she was making to the end that Janet might cover up her past and glorify her future.
To Janet’s ears, this rigmarole was now so stale as no longer to invite even remonstrance. But to declaim it to a comparative outsider! And to embroider it with all sorts of sticky innuendoes! Janet grew hot and cold by turns. So this was how one’s name was buffeted about after an episode like hers with Claude Fontaine! If one’s best friends talked this way behind one’s back, what might not less intimate associates say or take for granted?
She had tried to steel herself against inevitable collisions with public opinion; yet this first impact, though only an oblique one, had given her a much nastier shock than any she had anticipated.
M. St. Hilaire, the Chateau in Normandy, the prestige that was to cover a multitude of past sins—Cornelia was going it again!
Mrs. Jerome replied that these matters were none of her affair. She needed Janet and she believed Janet needed her. Surely, the decision lay with the young woman herself?
While Janet was still debating whether or not she should walk straight in and interrupt, Cornelia shifted the attack, her diplomatic allusions to Janet’s love affair being replaced by blunter speech. She effected the change with a great show of diffidence and hesitation. Her sense of loyalty alike to her friend and to Mrs. Jerome obliged her, etc.—Claude Fontaine, the beau ideal of the Junior smart set, etc.—the transatlantic honeymoon to which the newspaper troubadours had given a far-flung notoriety, etc.—But doubtless Mrs. Jerome recalled these particulars well enough?
Came the tart rejoinder:
“No, I never do read newspaper scandal! The fact is, when I’m not gambling in Paulette frocks, I’m a very busy woman. If it wasn’t for the Duchess, the Magpie Club in Mayfair would make short work of me. But the Duchess reads me some of the necessary tittle-tattle at breakfast so as to keep me au fait. She’s a great newspaper fan, is the Duchess.”
When Janet finally opened the door, walked in, and electrified the room, Cornelia had just been sweetly remarking:
“But about the managership of this house, a house for unattached mothers—widows and feminist women I presume?—about such projects public curiosity is simply insatiable,’ isn’t it? Do you really think that Janet is exactly the person for such a delicate position—?”
Ignoring Cornelia and her innuendo, Janet spoke directly to Mrs. Jerome.
“I’m sorry you didn’t let me tell you everything last week, Mrs. Jerome,” she said, keeping herself well in hand. “You see, all this would have been superfluous then.”
“My policy, child, is never to learn more than it’s good for me to know. But perhaps I was in the wrong this time.”
“I had no idea you could overhear us, Janet,” said Cornelia, with as much acerbity as if she were the injured party.
Janet scorned to reply on the level of this remark.
“I came to show you a piece of news in the Matin,” was all she deigned to say.
Pointing out the place, she handed Cornelia the newspaper.
“I’d like to speak to Mrs. Jerome alone for a few minutes,” she said. “Would you very much mind?”
“Oh, by no means,” replied Cornelia, trying hard to be superior and authoritative. “Make any arrangements you like to suit your own interests. Never mind the Maison Paulette. Don’t think that I shall stand in your light.”
And as she went out, unabashed, she offered the flowery remark that she had only done her poor best to follow the impulses of her heart, her sole desire having been to help both Janet and Mrs. Jerome to a mutual understanding, in the absence of which any joint project they might embark on would be only too likely to suffer shipwreck.
IV
Mrs. Jerome drew Janet down to a place beside her on the leather settee.
“Now, my dear,” she said, “I’d just as soon you didn’t dig up ancient history. Unless it’s going to relieve your mind. But I shan’t be any the wiser for it when you’ve finished, trust me. Why, if you told me that you were a new version of the Old Nick himself, one look into your lovely gray eyes would convince me that it wasn’t true.”
None the less, Janet, not wishing to sail under false colors, gave a very short résumé of her life from the time she went to the Lorillard tenements in Kips Bay to the day she left M. St. Hilaire.
Throughout this narrative, Mrs. Jerome’s round little face was sphinx-like, becoming animated only at the point of Janet’s separation from Claude.
“He left you in the lurch, then?” she had interposed, much affected.
“Oh, no, he would have kept on providing for me,” said Janet, evasively, and after a moment’s hesitation.
Nobody had really believed the story that she had left Claude. Even Robert appeared to take the reverse for granted. Perhaps, on the whole, she had better fall into a view that people would be sure to adopt in any case, and that she was almost beginning to adopt herself.
“But of course you didn’t let him,” said Mrs. Jerome.
“No.”
“Good. We mustn’t be under any obligation of that sort to the selfish sex. Now don’t worry about the matter any more. You’re a plucky girl, my dear. Keep your pluck, and your pluck will keep you.”
Mrs. Jerome added that she hoped Claude Fontaine had not behaved any worse than Janet had represented. She knew the young man. Who in New York didn’t? As regards possible criticism, Janet should be comforted with the reflection that glass houses made the whole world kin, human architecture being nowhere complete without them. Why, most of the girls in the Younger Set had lost their heads over Claude, which was all they had had a chance to lose. She herself, meeting him once at a costume ball of the Junior League, had been knocked silly by his dashing airs and Apollo curls, not to mention the best pair of calves she had ever beheld.
“So you see, my dear, an old woman can be quite as feeble-minded as a debutante. Nobody has ever had a monopoly of making mistakes.”
Janet pointed out that the world did not take quite so liberal a view. This being so, might she not prove a source of embarrassment to Mrs. Jerome? As people looked at it, running away with a man was—
“Child, for every woman who runs away with a man, there’s a man who runs away with a woman.”
This obvious truth had been lost sight of, and the time had come for its emphatic reassertion. Did Janet imagine that Claude had lost any credit? Well, let her look at the facts. Mr. Fontaine, senior, had just got himself into a very bad mess, one that involved the Fontaine firm in a case of diamond smuggling. The Duchess had read her the story from the papers. And only last night Le Temps had reported that Mr. Fontaine was believed to have jumped his bail, leaving his son Claude behind to pull the firm out of the hole. And everybody felt so sorry for Claude! Not that he had anything to fear. He could not be held personally accountable. Still, there were the court proceedings, which were reckoned a terrible load for his handsome young shoulders to bear. And so bankers and clubmen and “sealskin” artists were rushing to his aid; matrons from upper Fifth Avenue were pulling wires; Colonel Armstrong, the great financier, was on the job behind the scenes; and it was freely whispered that when the storm had blown over, Claude and Marjorie Armstrong were to be married in St. Thomas’. Here was retribution! If you judged from the international tidal wave of sympathy and helpfulness that was sweeping towards Claude, you might be pardoned for thinking that he was Galahad, Parsifal, and Lohengrin rolled into one.
“But men stand by one another,” added Mrs. Jerome, pointing the moral succinctly.
Women would have to take this lesson to heart and stand by one another just as men did. If Janet joined the Jerome forces, she could depend on one thing, and that was her support through thick and thin.
Janet felt inexcusably ungrateful at not accepting the managership on the spot, and frankly said so. She made no attempt to explain her indecision, her motives at the time being far from clear to herself.
Mrs. Jerome, blissfully unaware of the existence of Robert Lloyd as a factor in this hesitation, took it in very good part. Janet should make up her mind when she pleased. But surely, she wasn’t again playing with the thought of marrying M. St. Hilaire? After her emphatic assertion that she didn’t love him!
“Yet I don’t dislike him, by any means,” said Janet. “I was very fond of him in Brussels, before he lost his head.”
“Fond! Child, one may marry for money without affection, or for affection without money, but one shouldn’t marry for either money or affection without a little romance thrown in.”
Saying which, this whimsical little lady laughed, rose, and put an arm lovingly around her favorite.
“Come back to the States with me, Janet,” she continued. “You’ll see what we women can do when we put on steam. You shall make an independent place for yourself in New York, besides helping other women to do the same. And by and by some suitable countryman of ours will come along, and we’ll have you nicely married off.”
V
We’ll have you nicely married off. Left alone, Janet had to pull herself together after the shock of these words. Everybody seemed determined to get her married. Claude, Pryor, Cornelia, Robert. And now Mrs. Jerome, too!
Clearly, even people who were extremely well disposed towards her, had it at the back of their minds that she had lost credit with her fellow-men. And that nothing short of marriage could restore her to full public esteem! This was a situation she would have to reckon with. But how comical it was to have marriage urged upon her as though it were a kind of penance she must do in order to regain her standing!
Penance! She was driven to admit that it really would be something like an act of penance to marry M. St. Hilaire. Still, would she feel this way if she hadn’t met Robert again? Would she? Scarcely. It was Robert’s turning up that had caused M. St. Hilaire to appear in the light of a penitential infliction.
There were two courses open to her, and staying with Cornelia was not one of them. No, she recoiled from fashionable dressmaking and all its shows, and the atmosphere of the Maison Paulette with its lurking vapors of parasitism and prostitution grew more oppressively sickening every day.
True, the big establishment was an amusing novelty at first, when you saw only the surface glamor. Nor was it half bad to help Harry Kelly to train the manikins, so long as you supposed that this training merely equipped them to wear expensive frocks in the salon or at the races or at the opera. But when you found out that every one of these dainty girl models expected confidently to become the mistress of some rich merchant or politician, your zest for the work oozed away.
Not that you saw much difference between the kept mistresses who exhibited the Paulette garments and the kept wives who purchased them. But you began to look upon the whole traffic in dresses as a symbol of woman’s enslavement to man and of man’s enslavement to the dollar sign. And you observed how this traffic changed everybody connected with it for the worse. (Everybody except poor Mazie, who had experienced a revulsion of feeling against the ghost of her Ziegfeld “Follies” self—unluckily too late to do her any good.) You watched the crude boyish cynicism of Harry Kelly turn into a morose pessimism, and in Cornelia you felt the growth or stiffening of all that was grasping and cruel.
As Janet saw these metamorphoses, she realized that the house of Paulette was a house of bondage. It was not an institution with which a free-spirited woman would wish permanently to throw in her lot.
For practical purposes, then, her choice lay between the managership under Mrs. Jerome and a “marriage of convenience” with M. St. Hilaire.
Instinct, to be sure, pointed to another alternative in which the name of Robert figured in capital letters. But this was a romantic dream, a dream which her fancy might embroider but which her courage and common sense had to dispel. Thus, when instinct urged, “A little feminine beguilement will bring him swiftly to your feet,” common sense rejoined, “You may elect life-long poverty for yourself; dare you inflict it on Robert?” Instinct could rear and curvet, it could champ the bit; but it was not in the saddle.
As between the two available courses, she had vastly preferred the managership. She would have jumped at it when Mrs. Jerome first offered it, but for a tacit understanding with Henriette. What a pull on her affections the little girl exercised! In a moment of weakness, or rather of passionate disgust with Paulette’s, Janet had given her former pupil all but an outright promise to become her second mother. Yet, though the father’s proposal was a handsome one, full of concessions to Janet’s conception of a modern woman’s sphere, it was difficult to ignore the likelihood of a bitter conflict after the wedding. A conflict on the issue of these very concessions. For between the feudal traditions of a man like M. St. Hilaire and the equalitarian assumptions of a woman like herself, there was a great gulf fixed. Could it ever be bridged?
Anyhow, Mrs. Jerome’s offer had blazed out the real path of independence for her, and no mistake. Or so she had thought. A dozen times of late she had been on the point of imparting her final decision to Henriette and facing Cornelia and M. St. Hilaire with it. Lack of courage had not restrained her. A very different consideration had given her pause. Might net her “past” prove a source of serious embarrassment to Mrs. Jerome’s work? The last two years had taught her something of the “chemical” methods of warfare, the “poison gas” attacks which the foes of progress did not scruple to adopt. Was it likely that the enemies of the women’s movement would lose the chance of wrecking Mrs. Jerome’s scheme by raising against her young manager the hue and cry of immorality, that cry with which a handful of knaves had so often brought a whole nation of fools and cowards to heel?
None the less, good sense had suggested that if Mrs. Jerome could risk it, so could she. And she had at last nerved herself to a conclusive interview with M. St. Hilaire. It was no more than fair that after so much shilly-shallying, she should explain at first hand her definitive refusal.
She was awaiting him now. Had everything gone smoothly, she could have shown him that her career was already booked for passage by a different route. Booked! But at this critical moment she had struck a snag in the shape of Mrs. Jerome’s intimation that the shortest way with an awkward past was to “marry it down,” so to speak. Had she been mistaken in Mrs. Jerome? Was the good lady so bravely taking a risk only with the quiet resolve to insure this risk at the earliest opportunity? Well, if she had to get married for her sins, one thing was certain. The St. Hilaire she did know was better than the St. Hilaire she didn’t.
These reflections were brought to an abrupt close by the return of Cornelia.
“Monsieur St. Hilaire is below,” she announced, stormily. “It seems to me that you owe an explanation to me as well as to him.”
“If you don’t mind,” returned Janet in a voice that was strangely calm, “let me accept him first. I’ll explain to you afterwards.”
Cornelia stared at her. For some time she had believed that, despite the disturbing influence of Mrs. Jerome and Robert, there was a fairly good chance of putting the St. Hilaire marriage through. She had cherished this belief until today. Then she suddenly learned that Janet had all along been carrying on an intrigue with Mrs. R. H. L. Jerome, the upshot of which was that the benevolent Cornelia’s plans were to be set wholly at naught. And as if this humiliation were not enough, Janet had entertained the disloyal scheme of deserting the Maison Paulette at barely a day’s notice.
These distressing facts had transpired scarcely half an hour ago. And now Janet was again serenely proposing to marry M. St. Hilaire! She had been acting in this erratic fashion ever since Robert came on the scene. Had he had anything to do with this latest change of heart?
“I’ll tell M. St. Hilaire to come up,” she said tonelessly, paralyzed by the instability of her friend’s decisions. “The coast is quite clear. Mazie is upstairs with Harry, and Robert has just gone to Fontainebleau for the day.”
She omitted to say that she had packed him off on a factitious errand.
“Yes,” she continued, her cadenced speech picking up as she went on. “I told him to make the most of his glorious freedom. You know, he’s as good as betrothed to Charlotte Beecher.”
“How lucky for them both!” said Janet hypocritically.
Cornelia went out, having thus drawn the long bow at a venture. And not, she trusted, in vain.
VI
M. St. Hilaire came in. Janet had never been tempted to rave over him as Cornelia lately did. She thought him a little too short, but she admitted that his well-poised figure, ruddy complexion, and auburn beard were a delight to the eye. And she liked his courtly and somewhat superior demeanor.
Yet, at the first intimate touch of his hand, she recoiled almost with violence.
Her sudden start robbed him of every shred of confidence. And it astonished Janet herself. The fascination of Claude and the voltaic attraction of Robert had put these two, for her, in a class by themselves. But she had met men who were not half so agreeable to talk to or to look upon as M. St. Hilaire—men whose company was dull or whose personalities she disapproved of and yet whose caresses she would not have wished to repel.
It had been this way ever since their first meeting in Brussels. M. St. Hilaire had befriended her in a time of need, he possessed many mental and material advantages, he was the father of Henriette. But he lacked some one thing needful. When she dreamed her day dreams, she never pictured him; and when he touched her, she never thrilled.
True, in his absence, she thought of him (if she thought of him at all) as precisely the sort of man a girl ought to be able to love. But in his presence she was overwhelmed with the single conviction that to live with him would be more than she could bear. The conviction was absurd, unjust, incomprehensible; yet it was not to be gainsaid.
Sensing her thoughts, M. St. Hilaire was disheartened.
“I hoped I had made amends,” he said, in sorrowful allusion to the cause of their rupture in Brussels. “But I see you’ve never forgiven me.”
“Oh, no, no,” she cried, with a pang of remorse. “I’ve forgotten all about that. Please believe me. It isn’t that at all. It’s—I don’t quite know—something tells me that I simply can’t live with you as your wife.”
He rose, by main force suppressing caustic and resentful comments that leapt to the tip of his tongue. He had one more card to play.
“And you mean to—to go back on Henriette?” he asked, in measured tones.
She came to his side and, affectionately taking his hand, began:
“I’m terribly fond of Henriette—”
The door flew open and in walked Robert! But stopped on the instant! He saw Janet caressing the arm of M. St. Hilaire, heard the tender words, and felt the whole universe reel.
In the flash of an eye, he pulled himself together.
“Pardon,” he said between his teeth. And, turning sharply round, flung headlong out.
Janet gazed after him in stupefaction.
She never knew how she finished the interview with M. St. Hilaire, nor how, with a hardening of her voice, she made it clear to him that, in a straight conflict between Henriette’s self-interest and her own, it was not the former that she was bound to consult.
M. St. Hilaire took his dismissal with a good deal of dignity and self-control, albeit Janet’s display of firmness had excited a deeper emotion than any woman had ever aroused in him before. An unconsidered trifle, snatched away, may become the heart’s desire. And Janet had ranked far higher than a trifle in M. St. Hilaire’s European scale of values, at least since her departure from Brussels. Yet, throughout his courtship of this strange, incalculable American girl, he had never been quite free from an uneasy fear that the marriage might prove a social indiscretion. He now felt certain that his choice had been in keeping with the very best taste. And this certainty, while adding poignancy to his loss, afforded some consolation to his pride.
VII
As for Janet, she fairly bolted upstairs and threw a bombshell into the gymnasium by the summary announcement of her intention to leave for England with Mrs. Jerome next day. An unalterable intention. She was determined to establish her independence not by marriage but by hard work.
Mazie listened to her with very mixed feelings; Harry Kelly looked like one who heard the rumble of an approaching earthquake; Cornelia stood petrified.
She came to life again with a sinister, arpeggiative laugh.
“So you’ll go trapesing to America on Robert’s heels, after all?” she said. “To dish his whole career!”
“Cornelia, you’re a devil!” cried Janet, incandescent with anger. “I’d like to know the reason, the real reason for your anxiety to get me married to M. St. Hilaire. Not to do me a good turn, that’s one sure thing.”
Mazie advanced between them.
“Say, Janet,” she called out, pacifico-satirically, “even the devil sometimes does a pal a good turn—just for a change.”
Cornelia extinguished her with a gesture.
“Why did you ever run away with Claude,” she said, turning to Janet again, “if you were so gone on Robert?”
“How was I to tell the difference between an infatuation that was bound to perish and a love that had scarcely been born?” replied Janet, once more her cool, keen self. “How was I to tell, until I had tried them out?”
“Tried them out! Words fail to describe your morals, Janet. But go on your own way rejoicing, my dear. Hang yourself around Robert’s neck, if you like. You’ll make a charming picture there, I’m sure. Of course, clinging vines have gone out of fashion. But clinging leeches are always with us.”
Janet went out ignoring these insults and mutely denying Harry Kelly’s passionate appeal to her not to mind what Cornelia was saying in a vertigo of rage.
“For God’s sake, Cornelia,” said Harry, making a frantic demonstration, “don’t let her leave us like that.”
“Hold your tongue, you imbecile!” called out his wife, turning on him fiercely. “When I want to play the fool. I’ll ask for your advice.”
Her exit, a tempestuous one, left Mazie and Kelly alone and forlorn. Poor Harry Kelly collapsed in his swivel chair, while Mazie hovered around the desk like a gadfly.
“Unless you give her what for,” she warned him, “you’ll never travel on asphalt.”
He looked up and feebly waved her away.
“What can I do?” he said plaintively. “Just jawing back won’t help matters.”
“No,” said Mazie scornfully. “Jawing back won’t. But how about knocking her down and jumping on her with both feet? Gee, if I had your strength for five minutes! I tell you what, my frazzled Gorilla, if you don’t mop up the floor with her this very minute, she’ll make a doormat of you for the rest of your life.”
Her tone was slighting, and there was bark in the dose she administered. For a second, he straightened up. Then he shook his head at her, slumped again, and buckled down to the papers on the desk. Poor Harry! His muscle was willing, but his nerve was weak.