"Are you suggesting that Janet is so well-suited to me that I ought to propose to her?"
She rose, with a growing sense of contempt for him. If he did anything so insane—and he was doubtless capable of it—the results would be on his own head. He had already made a mess of his newspaper career, he had been too proud to cultivate the Fontaine influence, he had gratuitously antagonized his only well-to-do relation in California, even now he could barely make a hand-to-mouth living out of his connection with the radical press. And he actually proposed to lengthen this catalog of disasters! Well, he'd better remember one thing. His friends could pull him out of a hole, but not out of a bottomless abyss.
Really, did he believe in miracles? To put it bluntly: did he suppose that two failures added together made a success? Yes, two failures! He was an impecunious journalist or a discredited labor propagandist—which was it? And Janet! What had she to offer? A pirated soul (this to remind him of Claude Fontaine) and shattered prospects.
"Really, Cornelia, these phrases belong to the screen grade of fiction, not to the facts of the twentieth century."
Here Mazie interrupted with an urgent message from the exhibition room.
"Stay and talk to Robert," said Cornelia with frigid disdain. "He's a great salvager of damaged reputations."
Mazie looked inquiringly Robert's way, while Cornelia swept towards the door. In a mock-heroic tone, he explained:
"Cornelia says that Janet went wrong; therefore, unless M. St. Hilaire marries her, she'll be ruined for life."
Mazie caught the drift of the situation at once.
"Ruined!" she cried out, in a steaming torrent of slang. "Say, people in the States won't believe a girl is 'ruined' nowadays, even when she's committed to the House of the Good Shepherd. Ruined! Who's to ruin her? Why, the average American is such a hokey-pokey, near-beer, Sunday-school man of straw, he wouldn't ruin Cleopatra if she begged him on her bended knees! Take it from me. If Janet's people at the cemetery end of Brooklyn heard Claude described as the Duc de la Fontaine, they might give her the glassy eye. They might. They'll believe cruel things about a foreigner. But she mustn't let on that he's a gent from the U.S.A., or they'll think she's stringing them. Think! They'll know it. Why, my brown-eyed cherub, there's only one way a girl can go wrong in little old New York. And that's to have somebody break into her bank account."