And when he looked in on Janet in her sitting room to say good-by, he began with a satirical, "Congratulations, Jenny."
Jenny looked at him with wondering eyes. She was drooping like a sunless flower and was reading poetry out of a beautifully bound volume. "What is it, Ross?" she asked.
"On shaking Artie so smoothly. Trust you to do the right thing at the right time, and in the right way. You're a beauty, Jen, and no mistake," laughed Ross. "I never saw your like. You really must marry a title—Madame la Duchesse! And nobody's on to you but me. You aren't even on to yourself!"
Janet drew up haughtily and swept into her bedroom, closing the door with almost coarse emphasis.
CHAPTER XII
ARTHUR FALLS AMONG LAWYERS
Arthur ended his far from orderly retreat at the Auditorium, and in the sitting room of his suite there set about re-forming his lines, with some vague idea of making another attack later in the day—one less timid and blundering. "I'd better not have gone near her," said he disgustedly. "How could a man win when he feels beaten before he begins?" He was not now hazed by Janet's beauty and her voice like bells in evening quiet, and her mystic ideas. Youth, rarely wise in action, is often wise in thought; and Arthur, having a reasoning apparatus that worked uncommonly well when he set it in motion and did not interfere with it, was soon seeing his situation as a whole much as it was—ugly, mocking, hopeless.
"Maybe Janet knows the real reason why she's acting this way, maybe she don't," thought he, with the disposition of the inexperienced to give the benefit of even imaginary doubt. "No matter; the fact is, it's all up between us." This finality, unexpectedly staring at him, gave him a shock. "Why," he muttered, "she really has thrown me over! All her talk was a blind—a trick." And, further exhibiting his youth in holding the individual responsible for the system of which the individual is merely a victim, usually a pitiable victim, he went to the opposite extreme and fell to denouncing her—cold-hearted and mercenary like her mother, a coward as well as a hypocrite—for, if she had had any of the bravery of self-respect, wouldn't she have been frank with him? He reviewed her in the flooding new light upon her character, this light that revealed her as mercilessly as flash of night-watchman's lantern on guilty, shrinking form. "She—Why, she always was a fakir!" he exclaimed, stupefied by the revelation of his own lack of discernment, he who had prided himself on his acuteness, especially as to women. "From childhood up, she has always made herself comfortable, no matter who was put out; she has gotten whatever she wanted, always pretending to be unselfish, always making it look as if the other person were in the wrong." There he started up in the rate of the hoodwinked, at the recollection of an incident of the previous summer—how she had been most gracious to a young French nobleman, in America in search of a wife; how anybody but "spiritual" Janet would have been accused of outrageous flirting—no, not accused, but convicted. He recalled a vague story which he had set down to envious gossip—a story that the Frenchman had departed on learning that Charles Whitney had not yet reached the stage of fashionable education at which the American father appreciates titles and begins to listen without losing his temper when the subject of settlements is broached. He remembered now that Janet had been low-spirited for some time after the Frenchman took himself and title and eloquent eyes and "soulful, stimulating conversation" to another market. "What a damn fool I've been!" Arthur all but shouted at his own image in a mirror which by chance was opposite him. A glance, and his eyes shifted; somehow, it gave him no pleasure, but the reverse, to see that handsome face and well-set-up, well-dressed figure.
"She was marrying me for money," he went on, when he had once more seated himself, legs crossed and cigarette going reflectively. The idea seemed new to him—that people with money could marry for money, just as a capitalist goes only where he hopes to increase his capital. But on examining it more closely, he was surprised to find that it was not new at all. "What am I so virtuous about?" said he. "Wasn't I after money, too? If our circumstances were reversed, what would I be doing?" He could find but one honest answer. "No doubt I'd be trying to get out of it, and if I didn't, it'd be because I couldn't see or make a way." To his abnormally sensitized nerves the whole business began to exude a distinct, nauseating odor. "Rotten—that's the God's truth," thought he. "Father was right!"
But there he drew back; he must be careful not to let anger sweep him into conceding too much. "No—life's got to be lived as the world dictates," he hastened to add. "I see now why father did it, but he went too far. He forgot my rights. The money is mine. And, by God, I'll get it!" And again he started up; and again he was caught and put out of countenance by his own image in the mirror. He turned away, shamefaced, but sullenly resolute.