As it was fairly plain that Robert would have preferred to be alone, Cornelia perversely lost no time in proposing that he carry out his original intention of visiting the Japanese Industrial Exhibition, she, of course, to take Janet's place as his companion.
She had another reason for inviting herself out with Robert. This reason was the Harlem Gorilla. He, though almost superstitiously devoted to her, sometimes had to be "managed," in accordance with Cornelia's view that love makes the most constant of men uncertain, coy, and hard to please. Luckily, the treatment that Harry Kelly's case required was not a subtle one, and so it was Cornelia's practice to alternate a little encouraging discouragement, with a little discouraging encouragement. On this occasion, by accompanying Robert who didn't want her, and deserting Kelly who wanted her very much, she neatly killed two birds with the same stone.
On the way to the exhibition, Robert gave Cornelia an account of his latest occupation. He had been made organizing secretary of a body called the League of Guildsmen. Was this a fanciful name for another set of Outlaws? No, the Guildsmen were servers of the community, the Outlaws were spongers on it.
"You have golden opinions of us," said Cornelia, theatrically. "I marvel that you soil your garments by staying in our midst."
"It's nothing to marvel at, Cornelia. I had to learn what Kips Bay and its slum population were at first hand before I could desire in earnest to destroy them, root and branch. Familiarity, which sometimes breeds contempt, often breeds homicidal mania. Do you recollect how Caesar spent a short vacation among a band of desperate pirates and how the experience filled him with a conviction that it was his duty to exterminate them? Well, I am filled with the same conviction about Kips Bay."
"What a passion you have for reforming everybody and everything, Cato! I am sure it is a very noble passion, though it does include poor me in its program of extermination. Still, I wonder whether reform, like charity, oughtn't to begin at home?"
"I used to think so," replied Robert, unmoved by her sarcasm. "In my schooldays, my elders obliged me to hack my way through obsolete French tragedies or the differential calculus instead of allowing me to gain a working knowledge of current English plays or of modern political economy. And when I made a fearful hash of their instruction, they voted me a miserable failure. Whereupon, I determined to reform myself in order that I might reform the world. I am wiser now. I know that I must reform the world before I can hope to reform myself."
"Cato, you are a perfectly gorgeous mixture of building air castles and of seeing things upside down! One can never tell whether your head is in the clouds or on the ground."
Robert indulgently proceeded to say that the Guildsmen were young people of like sentiments with his own. In a general way, their aim was to advance the idea that the producers and servers of society, being the rightful possessors of the earth, must eliminate the profiteers and the parasites who have usurped possession.
"If that is your aim, Robert, I predict that your league and your secretaryship will have a short life and a merry one."