"I'm not ashamed of the Houghton affair, as you call it," said Cornelia coldly. "Why should I be? It was one of those rare friendships that are quite beyond the perception of vulgar-minded, low-thoughted souls. What other people think of it concerns me very little."
She really believed this, although it was very wide of the mark.
"I know," she went on melodramatically, "of the spiteful gossip behind my back. I know of the scarlet colors in which my relations with Percival Houghton are painted by my enemies. Let them declaim against me! To a few real friends I have told the truth. They believe me, and that is all I ask."
She had in fact taken more than one friend into her confidence. It was a common saying in the Lorillard tenements that the token of admission to Cornelia's inner circle was the almost sacramental rite of receiving her account of the Houghton episode.
The corner stone of this account—the supreme article of faith!—was the point that she and Percival Houghton had rigorously abstained from sexual intimacy throughout their voyage together in the same stateroom. Not from moral scruples, be it noted, but from a desire to prove to the world that free love and the severest tax on self-restraint were perfectly compatible.
Cornelia held passionately to the delusion that her account was accepted in every jot and tittle. Robert knew that behind her back, most of her friends greeted it with a cynical smile and pronounced it a pardonable but much too elaborate invention. When some one referred to Cornelia's assertion that the voyage to England had involved no infraction of the seventh commandment, the women would say contemptuously: "If you're going to be killed for a lamb, you might as well be killed for a sheep." The men, more vulgarly, would exclaim: "What a shame if they wasted a chance like that!"
Hutchins Burley, in one of his most egregious moments, wagered any amount that Cornelia wasn't half as big a fool as her story made her out to be.
It was owing to these and other coarse pleasantries circulating at her expense that Robert wished he could make Cornelia look the facts in the face.
What he regretted most of all, however, was that she seemed entirely to misconstrue the visits of the many men who sauntered in and out of her rooms. They came with the expectation voiced by Oscar Wilde, that "she who had sinned once and with loathing, would sin again many times, and with joy." Clearly, they hoped to profit by the repetition. But this was a truth to which Cornelia was obstinately blind.
"You, Robert," she said, aggrieved at his silence, "used to be counted among those who believed."