By contrast with Claude, Robert seemed to lead a decidedly work-a-day or humdrum life. Especially so, since his newspaper employment had been cut off and his active time given up to the League of Guildsmen. As far as Janet could see, Robert's entire thought and energy were absorbed by an overwhelming interest in the Labor movement. For though he had plenty of esthetic diversions, she noticed that the books he read, the music he delighted in, and the pictures he admired were all in some way expressive of souls in bondage, aspiring to freedom.
Now for the time being, Janet wanted to forget about the lowly and the oppressed. She had the same feeling towards "causes" and "reforms" that a released convict has towards societies for Improving the Condition of Prisoners on Parole.
It must not be supposed that Janet took an unsympathetic view of the movements for human freedom which were convulsing society after the Great War. She was a sincere convert to the principle of woman's equality and she made an honest effort to be open-minded to the theories that Robert expounded. But her heart was not in theories. Her pulse refused to quicken when Robert told her of the new social cleavage which was fast ranging the useful active people on one side, and the parasitic profiteering people on the other. In common with a great many of her contemporaries, she sat heedlessly on a volcano, enchanted by the twinkle of the stars.
What if Robert did prove up to the hilt that the world was in the birth throes of a new social order! Youth must have its glamor. And there is no glamor about birth throes, not even about the birth throes of a new world.
Besides, the old social alignment in which princes of the purple and masters of the gold ruled in pomp or circumstance over the toilers of the factory, the office and the soil—this old alignment was much more familiar to poor Janet (and to everybody else) than the new one predicted. Literature and legend, the school room, the pulpit and the press—all the regular organs of education, in fact—had mesmerized her into viewing the practical politics and the dominant economics of the day as splendors and glories without parallel. Was the psychology of a lifetime to be uprooted or transformed by a few weeks of unconventional conduct in a Kips Bay tenement, or even by a brief high-tension course of reading in the works of Samuel Butler, Bernard Shaw, Romaine Rolland and other prophets of the life to come?
Clearly not. And so when Claude came with his many-colored news from the seats of the mighty, he found it easy to engross and transport Janet. But when Robert talked to her of strikes, trade unions and labor congresses, he left her bewildered or mystified, though seldom cold. In short, the rivalry even for the mind of Janet was a rather one-sided affair, Claude, the darling of the gods, holding an immense initial advantage over Robert, the advocate of rebel causes.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I
On an afternoon late in May, Claude took Janet to see the boat race between Yale and Pennsylvania over the so-called American Henley course on the Schuylkill. Nature was in one of her soft and sober moods. The weather was mild, the sky lightly overcast, and the colors of the landscape as well as of the living things upon it were toned down to various shades of slate, dove or lavender, all blending into the serious beauty of a dominant pearl gray.
After the race, while the crowds were melting away, the two lovers walked into the pathway along the river. Perhaps in response to the pallid coloring around, Claude became a prey to melancholy thoughts; and the day, the mood and the girl impelled him to confidences about the marriage with Marjorie Armstrong into which he felt himself being forced.