"Janet's a little fool," was Cornelia's laconic comment as she folded up the letter.
Under Kelly's persuasive service, she attacked breakfast. Between mouthfuls she epitomized the contents of the letter, a proceeding that she punctuated with caustic exclamations. At the end, Harry Kelly expressed much sympathy with Janet's predicament.
"She has made her bed; she'll have to lie in it," said Cornelia.
This was a far cry from the line Cornelia used to take when she told Janet that "marriage is either a vulgar sex deal or a legalized debauch;" or when she declared in lyrical accents that "a free union is the golden key to the garden of spiritual love." Her sentiments on this subject had undergone dilution since Harry Kelly with his athletic build, fair prospects, and standing offer of marriage had become a fixture in Number Fifteen.
But then Cornelia had never really had the courage of her radical opinions. Beneath her advocacy of new forms of sex relationships there lurked a strong affection for the old forms. Essentially, her instincts fitted her for the orderly virtuous days of bustles and bust pads, not for these latter days in which established conventions were being summarily overhauled. For her, the time was decidedly out of joint.
It had been so since her affair with Percival Houghton, the artist who had "stolen her soul." This affair had been an accident of conduct and circumstances, and not, as she always declared, a logical outcome of her character and convictions. And it was as a result of this accidental episode that she was now an irritable, spiteful, new-fangled woman instead of the old-fashioned wife and mother (of seven children) that she should have been.
Some dim perception of all this stirred in the head of Harry Kelly the ex-Harlem Gorilla. Kelly's mentality fell far short of his bodily development. Still, he was no fool, and he rightly guessed that Cornelia was unfair to her former protegee. He did not approve of Janet's flight with Claude. But he had seen too much of life in the Lorillard tenements to be easily scandalized. Moreover, his fondness for Janet disposed him to put the blame, if any, on her lover. Like many amiable persons, he reserved his moral censure exclusively for people he did not know or did not like.
"The poor kid's down on her luck," he ventured gingerly. "It's not up to us to hurry the post-mortem."
"Down on her luck! With a man like Claude at her side?" cried Cornelia, the words curving by slow ascent to an unmusical top note.
"Claude's a grand looking man, that's true. But I've known many a grand looking man who was no better than a four-flusher when you had to share your bunk with him."