"Janet, you are a clip," said Mazie, with immense admiration. "Aren't you afraid of the future? Adventures can break a girl as well as make her. Look how they've broken me."
"Mazie, don't be a fool," said Janet, putting her arm around the sick girl. "You're not half broken yet. You're only a bit cracked. And for your comfort I'll tell you what Robert once said. He said nowadays everybody was a bit cracked—especially in the head."
"Where's the comfort in that?"
"Why, it's the cracked pitcher that goes longest to the well, goose. That's what I tell myself when I get the blues."
"Do you, too, get in a blue funk, sometimes? I don't believe it. I always think of you as being the twin sister of the man in the fairy tale, the man who couldn't be taught to shiver or shake. You're a wonderful girl, Janet. Still, I'd like to see a man come along some day and make you shiver and shake just a teeny-weeny bit. Perhaps Robert will."
"Ah, Mazie, do you think he'll try?"
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
I
She was present, with the other principals of the Maison Paulette, the night that Robert arrived. Her heart beat faster when she set eyes on him again. He seemed perfectly collected (too perfectly collected!) though very cordial. How was she to tell, amidst so much handshaking and greeting that his heart was beating time with hers?
The thing she was most conscious of was that one look of his mobile brown eyes had given a strangely different twist to her adventure with Claude Fontaine. For the first time in her experience she felt uncomfortably on the defensive.