"Cato, there's something about you, some Satanic magnetism, that gives you a strange hold upon a woman's soul. It makes her strive to appear before you always in her loftier, sublimer flights, to put on her Sabbath character, so to speak."
"Why do you call this Sabbath magnetism Satanic?"
"Because it's unnatural to ask a woman to assume her Sabbath character seven days a week. She's bound to come to grief."
She assured him that this Satanic faculty of his was what caused him to pique or fascinate women, though it seldom inspired them with passion. And, in the long run, it always threw them out of gear. As in the case of Janet! What had his intoxicating mixture of visionary theories and expedient compromises done for her in the Claude Fontaine affair? It had brought her out at the pitifully small end of the horn.
"I may remind you, Robert, that I was ready to ruin myself for Percival Houghton, ready to stand, upright and reckless, facing the world with him. I didn't go slinking from one hotel to another, as his pretended wife."
Cornelia's heroics would have amused Robert but for the jibe flung at Janet. Thank heaven, Janet never declaimed about having faced a whole world or having ruined herself for anyone. After listening to such windy phrases, who would not be biased towards any course that seemed right to Janet and wrong to Cornelia?
He hung on her lips with rapt absorption, hoping by this look of intenseness to mask his thoughts.
In this hope he was deceived.
"Why on earth don't you marry Charlotte Beecher?" she cross-questioned him abruptly.
"I don't know."