Cornelia's assumption that she was entirely responsible for the change in Janet's outlook on life was without warrant. Yet she was so self-satisfied as scarcely to suspect that Robert had anything to do with the matter; and it was interest in the man rather than curiosity about the girl that caused her to question him about his previous acquaintance with Janet.
She learnt that Robert's mother was not a very distant cousin of Mrs. Barr, and that both ladies had spent their girlhood in the same Connecticut town, where they had been friends until Mrs. Lloyd married and went out West. When Robert left Los Angeles, he bore this relationship in mind and, on the strength of it, paid his respects to the Barrs soon after settling in New York.
Cornelia inferred that the young man's acquaintance with the Barrs had continued on a very superficial footing. Robert knew better than to undeceive her. As a matter of fact, he had repeated his visits to the Barr household for the simple reason that there had sprung up between himself and Janet a mental fellowship which the hostility of her mother, the timid aloofness of her father and the envy of her sister had been able to obstruct but not to destroy.
Janet had more than repaid him for the inhospitality of her relatives. She in turn amused, puzzled, inspired and electrified him. So much unsophistication in the midst of a guileful city, so much candor surrounded by pious make-believe, above all, so much eagerness for experience held in leash by a vegetating family routine, had filled Robert with the hope that he might play Pygmalion to her Galatea.
Galatea, however, did not exactly go into raptures over Pygmalion. Though her insurgent nature was full of silent sympathy with Robert, her instincts were so much under the bondage of the Barr atmosphere as to prevent her from fully estimating his worth. Still, she conscientiously followed up the leads he gave her. She made her first bewildered acquaintance with the new paintings, the new music and the new social sciences. She began to look forward to copies of the Republic, the Nation, the London Statesman; and she joined him in reading the great contemporary writers: Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Anatole France, Romain Rolland. In short, she ranged with silent delight through the new world of modernity that he opened up to her, though it had to be explored in an obstinate little way of her own.
As her unofficial pilot Robert was very happy and might long have held the post but for a fatal blunder. Mrs. Barr learned one day that he had tempted Janet to attend a performance of Shaw's "Blanco Posnet," given on a Sunday by the Stage Reform Players. According to Emily, her informant, this play was immoral, not to say blasphemous, as was proved by the refusal of the British censor to license its performance.
Such a flagrant breach of holy writ, family propriety and the Sabbath, raised a domestic tempest to which Janet deemed it wise to bend. Robert was forced to discontinue his visits. What he did not tell Cornelia was that, during the last two months, he had regularly met Janet at Brentano's, where she had formed the habit of browsing through the new books and magazines every Friday afternoon.
CHAPTER SIX
I
These facts Robert had his own reasons for hiding from Cornelia. To cut the cross-examination short, he walked up to a miniature portrait that hung on the wall over Cornelia's desk.