A stream of silvery laughter escaped Cornelia. Then, in a studied tone of superiority, she replied:
"My dear boy, the love relation between two individuals is strictly their own private affair. It is nobody else's business whatever. I have no right to interfere in Janet's intimacies, and neither have you. Anyhow, I believe she is quite competent to stand on her own feet."
"I'm not so sure, Cornelia. Janet is utterly different from the Lorillard Outlaw girl, or the Greenwich Village Bohemian girl. The effect of Greenwich Villageism is to make irregularity (what regularity so often is) a bore. The purpose of Lorillardism is to make irregularity pay. But Janet is not likely to adopt a radical creed merely as a pose or with an eye to its profit. She will adopt it in a spirit of sheer blind self-sacrifice. And every advantage will be taken of her, precisely because she's not a sex profiteer."
"Cato, the beginning of wisdom is self-knowledge. Have you ever heard of any gain in self-knowledge without some loss of happiness? No. It is a law of life which neither you, nor I, nor Janet can escape."
"But," he urged, "you must admit that Janet's case is a special one. She has just left a home where purely private gratifications dictate which conventions shall be kept; and she has entered this model tenement life where, again, purely private gratifications dictate which conventions shall be broken. She may not grasp this difference all at once. Are we to let her inexperience cause her unnecessary suffering?"
"I, too, have suffered for my convictions, Robert!" she said, with a conclusive gesture of impatience.
Robert felt like telling her that, at this moment, she reminded him forcibly of the fox that had its tail cut off. But he didn't quite dare.
Naturally, under the circumstances, the visit to the Grand Central Palace was a complete failure. Cornelia, loathing the exhibition, seized the first available excuse for asking to be taken home.
The resentment she harbored was too strong to be hidden beneath the ordinary civilities of polite intercourse. Her affection for Robert, which had long been hanging by a slender thread, was now sharply snapped through the complete revulsion of feeling she experienced towards him.
From her point of view, the fault was entirely his. She had always hated what she termed his moralistic nature. But never before had he shown such a callous want of sympathy with her past misfortunes or such a frank hostility to her present outlook on life. What she did not acknowledge to herself was that his concern for Janet had given her amour propre a mortal wound for which she could never forgive him.