"Is this your pensive day?" asked Cornelia, ironically.
"Yes," replied Janet. "Robert complains that I'm neglecting him, and consequently my education. I think I ought to give him a chance to prove both assertions. So I've asked him to come here this afternoon. I can't spend all my days in sky-larking, can I?"
"My dear, 'youth's a stuff will not endure.' If you choose Mrs. Sidney Webb and Robert Lloyd rather than Claude Fontaine, the choice is your own. Of course, Robert is very entertaining. He pledges you with facts and figures. But when I was a rosebud like you, Araminta, I preferred a man who drank to me only with his eyes."
"Cornelia, I adore being made love to; yet I get horribly tired of it—even of Claude's love making—when it's kept up too long. And I hate facts and figures; yet Robert's never bore me."
"What a morbid symptom, my dear!"
"Oh, don't say that. I feel sure it's quite a natural condition, in my case. But perhaps there's a quality left out of me, a quality that other women possess."
Janet was clearly eager to carry on her self-analysis, but Cornelia gave no sign of sharing this eagerness.
Cornelia, in fact, was far from pleased. Her unconscious game was to keep Robert revolving in an orbit around herself. He was such an excellent drawing card! For had he not the rare power of raising the value of any object or person he admired? Not that people ever credited him with unusual discernment or insight. Yet the fact remained that Robert had only to praise a human being or a work of art hitherto undervalued or overlooked, and presto, the article or the person instantly became subject to an urgent popular demand. This was one of the reasons why Cornelia (who felt that she had been handsome enough in surrendering Claude without a murmur) did not wish Robert as well to gravitate from her stellar system to Janet's.
But, seeing no way of cancelling Robert's visit, she determined not to be a spectator of it.
"I must run in next door, Janet," she said, "and ask the Gorilla to do an errand for me."