"Cornelia, you wouldn't say spiteful things like that if you only knew the truth about sex relations. I forgive you because you don't."
"If I only knew!" said Cornelia. She gave a florid operatic laugh. "Do you really suppose I don't know?"
"No woman does who hasn't been married to a man. Not until she has been chained in wedlock for some time does she see the cloven hoof or feel the mark of the beast, or get her fanciful pictures about love put in a proper perspective. That's one thing marriage does for a woman."
"By your own admission, then," remarked Janet, "Cornelia is right in thinking that the game isn't worth the candle, isn't she?"
"Dearie," said Lydia, with unction, "ask the most wretched wife on earth, and she'll answer: 'Tis better to have wed and lost, than never to have wed at all.'"
II
Cornelia, observing that Janet took Claude's absence with surprising composure, wondered whether it was a case of still waters running deep. It was partly that, but there was another reason. The apparent ease with which Claude had yielded the preference to Marjorie's claim upon his time carried with it an unflattering implication as regards the value he set upon Janet's friendship. To be sure, there was the rapturous love letter. But fine words buttered no parsnips; they pleased the ear but they neither explained Claude's course nor justified it.
Thus Janet was as much nettled as disappointed by her lover's absence. Yet it was not her way to stew in misery. And her control of her feelings was made easier by the pressure of some secretarial work for which she had just been engaged by Howard Madison Grey, the playwright.
Immediately after supper, therefore, Janet left her friends in the Japanese pagoda on the roof, having arranged to spend the evening in Harry Kelly's office in flat Number Thirteen, where she proposed to practice on the athlete's typewriter.
Her object was to "increase her speed" so that her most recent position might be made securer.