"Look, here's the Ecole des Beaux Arts," she said aloud. "We'll be in the Boulevard St. Germain in a minute."
III
Whilst he obediently turned his gaze from the sparkle of the arc lights and the glitter of the shops and streets, his thoughts were preoccupied by her puzzling manner. She was friendly, of course. Janet was always that. An equable, agreeable temper was the very essence of her. But what was this disconcerting aloofness of hers which was cleaving the air between them! Her generous eyes and her low clear voice were sending out vibrations that penetrated to his very soul; yet her mind was stubbornly withholding the confidence which in the old Lorillard days she had given him without reserve. What did the paradox of her behavior mean? Was this a new Janet at the opposite pole to the candid, unaffected Janet of Barr and Lloyd? He supposed that the Claude episode might furnish the answer. Had it changed her spiritually for the worse as it had changed her physically for the better?
Well, that episode had certainly changed him, though not precisely in any way that he could have predicted. Changed him! For one thing it had opened his eyes to the fact that he had been a good deal of a prig, as his Outlaw acquaintances were so fond of intimating. He blushed to recall his ex cathedra pronouncements on the subject of free love. With what assurance he had asserted that he did not object to free love as a matter of prejudice but only as a point of expediency. Hypocrite! The very reverse had been the case. When Janet ran away with Claude, the Old Adam had risen within him and almost smothered him with possessive emotion.
Like any common jealous man! To be sure, he had stoutly told himself that the Claude adventure made no difference in his estimate of Janet's worth. Absolutely none. She was, as always, a prize for any man. For any man? Well, he himself, on the sole ground that his life's work might suffer, would not consider himself eligible for the prize. That was how he had put it. That was where the prig had shown the cloven hoof.
Still, he could say this for himself. When he had met Janet face to face again, all these piffling considerations of expediency had instantly, along with his vulgar prejudices, gone by the board. The moment he set eyes on her in Paris, he felt himself at one with her as he had never felt at one with any other human being (save perhaps a certain long-lost friend of his own sex).
The cause was not far to seek. Janet could pull the trigger that released and expanded his faculties as no one else had ever been able to do. In her presence, not merely his better self, but his more adventurous self, his more aspiring self, his more poetic self, and his more heroic self—the several Roberts that other people were too dull to perceive, or too futile, ignorant, or base to cultivate—all these craving selves came into their own and grew in stature. What was a previous love affair, what were a dozen previous love affairs, in the teeth of this miracle? Claude Fontaine! One look into the depth of Janet's eyes, and all theories, prejudices, principles, expediencies, and conflicting emotions went up in smoke.
Meanwhile, Janet's thoughts had been taking a very different shape.
She did not know that Robert had never seen the long letter to Cornelia in which she had described her journey with Claude and had given her European address. Cornelia had withheld this letter from Robert for reasons scarcely admitted to herself; and what Cornelia did not admit to herself she was little likely to admit to an interested friend. In fact, in her letter to Janet and in casual conversations since their recent reunion, Cornelia had so often allowed it to be inferred that Robert had had access to the letter, that she ended by making this convenient inference herself.
Not unnaturally then, Janet reasoned that Robert's failure to communicate with her had been deliberate. What dovetailed with this conclusion was the memory of his dictum on free love. How well she remembered the relentless words: "I can never have anything to do with free love or with a woman who has had a free lover. It would defeat my purpose in life."