But I'm running ahead of my story.
As we feared, rumor and gossip about us soon had free rein on board the "Baronia." Poor Claude had to bear the brunt of this annoyance and of the Captain's anger too. That Claude and a lady were together on the voyage had certainly been a secret, but a secret to which the old sea-dog was a party. The Captain's sense of propriety was not outraged by the secret. It was outraged only when the secret became a matter of common knowledge. And he did not permit a feeling of delicacy to restrain his indignation against his fellow conspirators.
What happened on the "Baronia" was trifling compared to the furor of our landing at Southampton. We were met by "all the latest London papers" filled with the wildest details of our "elopement." That is the way they featured our experiment over here. It was described as the elopement of a young multimillionaire with a poor plebeian stenographer, an elopement carried out in the teeth of a tyrant father with invincibly aristocratic prejudices. Shades of the Barrs and their Mayflower ancestry!
Worse remained behind. The English reporters promptly spotted Claude. You can't be six feet two in your socks and have the airs and graces of Prince Charming, without being conspicuous even amongst a crowd of first-class passengers on a fifty-thousand-ton liner. When the newspaper men plied poor Claude with questions, I began to weaken at the knees. But Claude was a trump. He kept his most nonchalant air, gave cleverly evasive answers, and even begged one of his tormentors for a cigarette quite in the style of the imperturbable villain of a screen play. Then a battery of motion picture men turned their cameras on us. Mark Pryor and the British captain swooped down to the rescue at this critical moment, which was very lucky for us, as we had just about exhausted our nerve (to say nothing of our nerves).
We stayed in London barely forty-eight hours. In spite of our assumed names we were bundled out of three hotels, thanks to the curiosity of reporters who kept after Claude as though he were a ticket-of-leave man. I had supposed that only American journalists hounded people, but evidently the London tribesmen have taken a leaf out of the New York book in the matter of pitiless persistence. Claude felt so harassed, outraged and persecuted that he could not get out of London fast enough. He saw a reporter in every strange face and lived in constant dread of another forced interview until we were safely across the Channel.
And now I had better answer the question that I know is uppermost in your mind.
We have been living as a married couple! Now it's out. Your Janet, the bold and fearless advocate of free unions, has been masquerading as a wife, a timorous and trustful, cowering and respectable wife, differing from other wives only in being a fraud.
It's a terrible comedown, a sickening fall from grace, isn't it?
But what else could I have done, short of leaving Claude entirely?
You see, Cornelia, the stark fact was that we couldn't get accommodations anywhere except by pretending that we were married. Had we declined to make this pretense, we couldn't have remained together at all unless we adopted all sorts of secret, underground, time consuming devices. It was a choice between the pretense and the secrecy—a Hobson's choice, so far as I could see.