"And I am still. Good Heavens, Cornelia, why should I, of all people, doubt your words? Think of my situation. Here am I, alone after midnight in an apartment with a young and interesting martyr in the cause of free marriage. And what do we do? We discuss the subject of sex affinities, with a complete suspension of conventional reserve. Yet I couldn't so much as kiss you."
"Oh, couldn't you?" said Cornelia, in a half mocking, half challenging voice.
This tremendous talk, all about herself, had completely revitalized her spirits. She sat forward intent on Robert's every word, the movement causing her dress to fall low in front and show all her languid beauty at its best.
"No!" he said, gazing at her and striving hard to steady himself.
"How do you know?" she murmured, in scarcely audible tones.
"I know," asserted Robert firmly, returning to an almost inhuman perfection. "If I began to make love to you, I'd be turned out in a twinkling. But who would believe this? Not a soul. If you were to tell the facts to our fellow tenementers, they would laugh you to scorn, and if I were to tell them, they would send me to the Bloomingdale Asylum. Yet my virtue is quite safe with you, Cornelia."
"You hardly do yourself justice, Cato," she said, biting her lips, and adjusting the neck of her dress.
"Oh, men are more or less passive agents in these matters. I'm safe with you because your radicalism, with all its offshoots into free love, free thought and free religion is only skin deep. You are a fascinating instance in the flesh of the great modern feminist dilemma: the demand for independence and respectability coupled with the fatal longing to be a Cleopatra, 'one of the women of all time.'"
Piqued at his innuendoes, Cornelia was getting ready to launch an acrid retort, when the door bell rang. It was one of those vicious jangles with which only a policeman or a pedlar ventures to announce himself.
But the man who roistered into the apartment was Hutchins Burley.