"Good bye, Cornelia. I'd like to stay long enough to tell your next dupe what a fraud you are. But what's the use? She won't thank me for it, as I suppose she has a crush on you, like I had once. Well, it'll do her good to learn by experience. Finding you out, my dear, is such a complete education."
By the time Janet and Harry Kelly returned, all was quiet along the Potomac.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I
For the next few weeks, Janet lived excitedly in the glamor of the Lorillard tenements. She could not well have imagined a bigger difference than that between the complete orthodoxy of the Barrs of Brooklyn and the complete heterodoxy of the model tenementers of Kips Bay.
Her impression of the new life was put into words for her by Lydia Dyson, the author of "Brothers and Sisters," (then in its twenty-fifth big printing). Lydia, whose tall, thin form and pale olive skin lost none of their spectacular qualities by the snake-like movements she affected, the huge jet earrings she wore, or the gold-tipped cigarettes she smoked, assured Janet, in a rich Kentucky drawl:
"We obey only one custom here, and that is to disobey all customs; we hold only one belief, and that is to hold no beliefs."
Janet was fully persuaded that the first part of this statement was true and that the second part was a vast improvement upon the Barr regime.
In truth, she found the Lorillardian absence of formality, constraint and regulated behavior a decided relief after her long course of Calvinistic repression at home. And, active though she was by nature, she did not at first notice how the days slipped by with great ado, but with very little done.
The Lorillard tenementers were not exactly lazy. They were merely idle. Like the idle rich and the idle poor they were ceaselessly occupied—in killing time.