II
Yet for a few days after the Outlaws' Ball, Claude had behaved as if his confession of love had never been made, or had merely been the expression of an impulse, for which he disclaimed responsibility. There had been no return to the intimacy that instantly abolishes all the formulas of mere politeness and all the prescriptions of mere etiquette; there had been no recurrence of that world-without-end moment at the ball or of that other moment in the limousine next day.
At the ball he had treated her as he would have treated any respectable middle-class girl who might take his fancy. That is, he had stretched the conventions as far as an impressionable young woman will usually allow a dashing young man to stretch them, but not further.
After she joined Cornelia, however, his attitude changed. He treated her with a certain wariness of manner by which he appeared to convey the following:
"I took you to be a girl who strictly observed the moral customs established and honored in Brooklyn, but long fallen into disuse in certain parts of Manhattan, and nowhere less respected than in Kips Bay. It amused me to tempt you to violate these customs, especially as I had little hope of meeting with success. But now that you have become a Lorillard girl, what spice is there in tempting you? Either you never were the girl I took you for; or, at any rate, you soon won't be.
"At all events I shall be on my guard. You are the first girl to work upon me so mightily with a single glance. But you are not the first girl who has looked as innocent as a dove and acted as subtly as a serpent. Be warned! Neither your innocent subtlety nor subtle innocence can make me forget that a Claude Fontaine is in the habit of forming but one sort of friendship with a girl in the Lorillard tenements."
Janet, always very sensitive to atmosphere, got the effect of this train of thought, and in consequence kept Claude at as great a distance as her naturally cordial nature would let her.
In one of the evening gatherings at Cornelia's the talk turned on marriage, and it came out that Janet had adopted Cornelia's views on the wickedness of marriage in its modern form. Claude, with the common failing of lovers, promptly referred her action to himself.
Was this Janet's way of announcing that she meant to make no greater demands on a rich man than any other girl in the Lorillard environment? At first, it seemed so to Claude, and he felt relieved. But, on second thoughts, another question occurred to him. Might not Janet's conversion to Cornelia's beliefs in free love be a mere blind? A pretended dislike of wedlock was a recognized bait for landing a man at the altar. Was her conversion of this type or was it of the franker type of Mazie Ross, who asked all that was due to a Lorillard tenement girl but asked no more?
On the whole, it seemed fairly safe to treat Janet on the Mazie Ross plane, and this he proceeded to do.