She knew quite well that she had captured his emotions and his illusions, but as she had found no difficulty in keeping his advances within bounds she had seen no reason for giving the matter serious thought.
On the day of Mrs. Grey's interference, Janet returned to Kips Bay in high feather. This had mystified Cornelia, who could not see in her friend's recital of events any great cause for congratulation. She gloomily predicted that Janet would soon lose her position altogether. Janet said she didn't care. A change was the only stimulant she ever took or needed. And any change, even a change for the worse, would serve the purpose admirably.
Cornelia wondered what was back of all this optimism until Janet pointed out that, with her new program of work, she could repay Robert for his many services to her. The firm of Barr & Lloyd could now carry on business in the mornings as well as in the afternoons, Robert sharing with her the work that came in from the Greys and perhaps from other authors, just as she had shared with him the work that came in from the League of Guildsmen. This statement was received in silence by Cornelia, who drew her own conclusions and communicated them only to Harry Kelly.
Janet's offer to pool her secretarial jobs from all sources with her typewriting for the League had been very welcome to Robert. His funds were running uncomfortably low just then. The reason was that the League was not a paying concern. The economic changes advocated by the Guildsmen were so drastic in character and called for so much discipline and far-sighted cooperation on the part of the working classes that the very people whom they were intended to benefit fought shy of them. Leaders of labor received the Guild proposals coldly, and the rank and file gave them little sympathy and less support.
For several mornings Robert and Janet pitched in with a will on the typewriting of Mr. Grey's manuscripts. In the afternoons they had continued the League work. Their comradeship was a happy and an intimate one, how happy and how intimate Janet did not fully realize until long after it was over. Perhaps the most delightful periods were those in which they proofread the manuscripts they had finished. They took turns reading aloud, and endless was the fun they extracted from the lines of Mr. Grey's new play. More delightful still were excursions into the fields of literature and economics, the play or some Guild pamphlet furnishing the starting point.
Thus the partnership of Barr & Lloyd had gone on swimmingly for two weeks, until the afternoon on the recreation pier, the memorable afternoon that had begun with the long talk about free love, and had ended in the model tenement with Robert's kiss and Claude's sulky fit of jealousy.
VI
On the morning after this fateful day, Janet had to go to the Howard Madison Greys' to return some finished manuscripts.
She had gone there for this purpose some two or three times a week, since the last arrangement with Mr. Grey. On these occasions, the playwright himself met her. And usually he spun out the interview as long as possible, due regard being had to the prudent Mrs. Grey who, hovering watchfully in the background, reminded Janet of a quiet but overcautious museum attendant.
Mrs. Grey would frequently contrive to come into the room for the undisguised purpose of glancing at or even criticizing Janet's typewriting. The expectation of such a visit made Janet, on this particular day, decidedly nervous. For, what with her distraction by Claude's anger, and a sudden crotchiness that had overtaken the typewriter, her papers bore the glaring evidence of innumerable corrections and erasures.