Charlotte protested with all her soul against being dragged to Kips Bay. Now that Robert could earn an honest living, why didn't he rent a lodging in a decent locality instead of consorting with the Outlaws who—what with their talk of wrongs, their love of dirt, and their smell of tobacco—were tiresome enough to bore Mephistopheles himself.
"The Outlaws parted company with me long ago," replied Robert, putting up a vigorous defence. "It is not they who lure me back."
He said that the Outlaws were, after all, not the whole of Kips Bay. They were the most picturesque element in the population, but they were only a tiny fraction of the total. True, they behaved in every respect as though no other element besides their own existed. Wasn't this, however, merely a proof that they were New Yorkers to the manner born? It was, in fact, undeniable that there were plenty of simple, self-respecting toilers in Kips Bay, plenty of them right in the very citadel of Outlawry, the Lorillard model tenements themselves. Nay, candor compelled the admission that there were even "rich but honest" toilers in the Kipsian district—to be specific, in the new "art colonies" planted around Sutton Terrace and Turtle Bay Gardens.
He had found this out after the dispersal of Cornelia's set. Force of circumstances having obliged him to look out into the Kips Bay that extended beyond the model flats, he had learned how parochial, in their assumptions about the district, the Outlaws had been.
"The fact is," he added, "I often think it's a hankering after the paths of rectitude and respectability that makes me enjoy a Lorillard flat—for short stretches only, needless to say. Anyhow, the older I get and the more I study the flibbertigibbet Bohemian in his lair and the heavy-footed Bourgeois in his, the more I'm struck with the bond between them."
"The bond, Robert!" exclaimed Charlotte. "Call it a touching point, common ground, but don't call it a bond."
"Well, it's a hidden bond. For the irregular doings of the strait-laced people and the comparatively regular doings of the gypsies show me how Bohemian the Bourgeois is, and how Bourgeois the Bohemian."
"What Robert says reminds me forcibly of a passage in Gulliver's Travels," interposed Mark Pryor. "I mean the passage in which the horses, the noble highborn creatures that govern, move about stark naked, whilst the Yahoos, the loathsome human creatures that live like beasts, yearn to cover their shame with rags and strings of beads."
"For the matter of that," continued Robert, "look at our little group here. We've all lived and worked quite contentedly in the thick of Kips Bay. Yet there's nothing in our daily behavior at which a Philistine of the deepest dye would turn a hair. Where, in fact, could one find a more incurably respectable lot of people—always counting out Lydia who, I believe, is still a member in good standing among the Outlaws?"
"Look here, old boy!" Lydia called out. "Are you attacking or defending me?"