"Who is she, pray?"
"Don't you remember the girl who created a scandal by running away with Percival Houghton, the English artist?"
"Who already had a wife and children in England?"
"Yes, that was Cornelia Covert. You may recall that she was one of my school friends, when we lived in McDonough Street."
"Don't remind me of her past," said Mrs. Barr curtly. "Her present is bad enough. Ring for Laura, please. How did Janet come to know her? Through Robert Lloyd, perhaps. Has she been meeting him again, too?"
"No. It came about in this way. Cornelia left Mr. Houghton not long after their elopement. Or, more likely, he left her. At all events she returned to New York. She was brazen enough to celebrate the occasion. She invited Janet—Janet, though I was her classmate—to a big party in the Lorillard tenements."
"If I remember aright, Janet asked you to go with her?"
"Yes. But I declined as soon as I heard that tenement artists, movie actors and other queer people like Robert Lloyd were to be present at the affair."
"The party was given, so Janet assured me at the time, by some society woman."
"It was held in Miss Lucy Chandler Duke's studio. I did not know then that the Chandler Dukes were radicals as well as millionaires. And, as Janet begged me very hard not to tell you the particulars, I kept the matter a secret."