"You needn't marry me, Robert. Only treat me just as you'd treat a man. Don't you remember that you promised you would? You promised on the pier in Kips Bay, when your heart was a free and a fetterless thing."
She concentrated all her magic upon him, upon his pale thoughtful face and discerning hazel-brown eyes. But look! The eyes were not hazel-brown—they were a flashing blue! And these were not the mobile sensitive features of Robert, but the bold virile features (somewhat distorted by angry passion) of Claude.
"What!" he cried. "Marry you here—here in Brussels—after all I've suffered on your account? Serpent! Shall I never escape your sting?"
Hovering somewhere in the background, a thin-edged female with horn-rimmed spectacles took a malignant joy in fanning the flames of his rage.
Claude wrenched both her hands loose and flung them off, the violence of the action sending her prone to the floor.
II
Janet sat up in bed and shook back the tangles of her nut-brown hair.
What a horrible nightmare!
All on account of the rumpus started last night by the thin-edged female with the horn-rimmed spectacles.
Not in Brussels, but in New York. Not in the Grand Hotel, Boulevard Anspach, but in the Susan B. Anthony House, Park Avenue, Mrs. R. H. L. Jerome's new apartment house for self-supporting professional women with children.