With a horrible sense of the insecurity of life, and with a nameless dread more invasive and powerful than any he had ever known before, he reached the Maison Paulette about an hour later. He met one of the principal manikins at the door.
"Mademoiselle Janet? Hadn't he heard the tragic news? C'est si triste. The whole Maison was in mourning. Mademoiselle had departed that very noon with Mrs. R. H. L. Jerome, the great rich lady without a heart. Ah, comme c'est triste!"
III
The "Touraine" had been two days out from Havre in weather decidedly rough, before Robert got his sea-legs back again. Others on board were doubtless still deploring the pit of instability that lurks beneath the surface of things. But as a rule their reflections had an origin that was strictly physical. Robert, on his first brisk walk around the second-class deck, reasoned from premises of a very different nature.
For he had reached a point where he felt constrained to take a sort of inventory of himself, a mental stock-listing of his reverses, his prospects, and his altered outlook on affairs.
Not that his theories had changed in substance.
From first to last, his mind had been filled with a fierce impatience of the stupidity of man today and an unquenchable faith in a sanity to come. Evil; as he conceived it, was a by-product of human growth, and not, as Shelley conceived it, something imposed on man by a malignant external power on the fall of which the race would at once become perfect. In short, he believed that the incessant conflict of life was largely a struggle between high and low desires, with money and numbers on the side of Satan, and high-spirited intelligence on the side of the angels.
In America, to be sure, where achievements not open to a flat cash interpretation are passed by with a shrug or a vulgar joke, Robert's view of life had excited as much interest as a whisper in the wind. The few who gave his philosophy a brief attention had hastily dismissed it as a matter for milksops or imbeciles; on the fool who preached this philosophy they had bestowed a cynical pity, and on the failure who practised it, an amused contempt.
The failure who practised it! Robert knew that, judged by every standard save his own, he was a failure, a complete, incurable failure. He did not try to dodge this unanimous judgment. He despised it as much as he exulted in his own faith. To be exact, as much as he had exulted in his own faith.
For the blow that had knocked him galley-west in the office of the Maison Paulette had seriously shaken his self-confidence.