"Here, goose!" she cried, coming swiftly down from her high horse. "Here's Janet's letter. You'd better read it through before you quarrel with me about it."
He took it happily and obediently, she getting little pleasure from such an easy victory.
While he read it, she reflected once more that she could not afford to lose him. She set small store by his doglike devotion and, though he had recently obtained an excellent position as physical trainer in a fashionable men's club, she considered him vastly beneath her. That he was physically a veritable Borghese Warrior was wholly offset by the fact that he was socially little better than a superior handicraftsman. In her eyes, that is to say, he had his points, but they were not the points of a polished gentleman.
Yet he was the one friend left to her in Kips Bay, the one friend whose constancy to her was undeviating and unimpaired.
Cornelia's decline from glory had proceeded rapidly since the departure of Janet. The renaissance of flat Number Fifteen as the social and artistic center of the Lorillard tenements had been shortlived. That renaissance (which Cornelia tried to believe was of her own making) had really begun with Janet's advent. While it lasted, the Outlaws and their cohorts had paraded back, with all flags flying, and had restored the flat to the pinnacle of importance which it had occupied when Cornelia, in the full flush of the Percival Houghton notoriety, had first settled down in Kips Bay. For a brief space Cornelia, glittering like the morning star, had been "the first lady of the model tenements," and had tasted again what she called life, splendor, joy.
But Janet had gone, and Claude had gone with her. As a direct consequence of Janet's flight, Robert had more and more often invented excuses for absenting himself from the Lorillard flats. Charlotte Beecher's visits ceased as soon as Robert's did, and Denman Page's as soon as Charlotte Beecher's. In its turn, the loss of Claude deflected a whole galaxy of feminine stars, including Lydia Dyson at the top of the scale and Mazie Ross at the bottom. And so on, ad infinitum.
Thus, almost in a week, the brilliance of Number Fifteen had been extinguished. Forever, or so Cornelia feared. True, her queenly state had ended in a burst of radiance, as a sky-rocket ends in a dazzling shower of gold. But this was cold comfort at best. Cornelia knew that, without some novel attraction, there was no hope whatever of recapturing the fickle homage of the model tenementers. And no such attraction was in sight. For once, no other adventurous young lady was ready or eager to step into Janet's shoes as Janet had stepped into those of Mazie Ross. Cornelia's stock had fallen to its nadir.
She felt deserted. In a mood of bitter, unreasoning resentment, she gave Janet full credit for dimming the splendor of Number Fifteen, the splendor she had never given her any credit for enkindling.
She was very angry with Janet on another score. This adventurous young lady, after a gorgeously romantic time abroad with Claude Fontaine, had apparently come a cropper, as her tirade against free love sufficiently betrayed. Reading between the lines, Cornelia fancied that she detected a veiled reproach. It was as if she were being held responsible for pointing out the step that had landed the writer in disaster. Cornelia repudiated this responsibility and was intensely irritated by the reproach.
What, hadn't she and Janet threshed out the whole question of sex in the most open and aboveboard fashion? And hadn't she drawn a sharp line between free love as she sincerely advocated it for the sake of a woman's rights, and free love as it was practiced among the Outlaws and in Greenwich Village for the sake of a woman's pleasure or gain? She had told Janet (and told it with some feeling) that many young women nowadays regarded free love as simply a very convenient antidote against man's growing disinclination for matrimony. It was a new bait for the old trap, and a very successful bait, too, as numberless marriages growing out of free unions attested. In Greenwich Village marriageable girls used this bait by instinct; in Kips Bay they used it with cool professional dexterity, as a surgeon uses a knife.