"If this is praise, give me dispraise," she said, with a mischievous gleam in her eyes.
His senses were assailed by the tone and timbre of her voice. In self-protection he somewhat rudely remarked:
"The fact is I didn't come to Europe to tell you how beautiful you are."
"No, you came over on business," she said, drily. "You always do come on business. We all assumed that. You needn't fear that we're any of us flattering ourselves that you came specially to see him or her. You were sent as a delegate to some labor conference or other, weren't you?"
"Not as a delegate, but as a staff correspondent of the Confederated Press."
She learned that the Confederated Press was a new venture backed by several radical newspapers and designed to supply its clients with the news of the world, the straightforward news, before it was cooked or adulterated by the old established press services. Robert's assignment gave him an enormously valuable experience, although his position was not a lucrative one.
"That's what brought me to Geneva," he concluded. "But I came to Paris to see you."
Just before he left New York, he had seen Pryor, he told her. Of course Pryor had let out one or two startling bits of news gathered from the four quarters of the earth. About Hutchins Burley and Lydia Dyson—things he would tell her later. Pryor had all the town talk (Kips Bay talk) at his fingers' ends. The man was a regular human wireless station. Did Janet recall how he always spoke of information drifting his way? Well, it was from Pryor that he first had heard that Cornelia and the famous Madame Paulette were one and the same person.
"You see I'd lost complete track of Cornelia after she left the model tenements," he said. "I'm pretty sure that she wanted to sponge the Kips Bay connection clean off the slate. Naturally, my turning up now isn't in the least to her liking. I can feel that, in spite of her tremendous surface cordiality. But I had to come. Finding her was finding you."
("A pity you didn't look me up a little sooner," said Janet, to herself, not stopping to enlighten him as to the subtle cause of Cornelia's displeasure.)