In Cornelia, Claude had a subtle and insidious agent on his side. If Janet gave a crushing refusal to one of Claude’s incitements to truancy, Cornelia would flash a reason in his favor as unanswerable as a sword. Or if Janet, persuaded, but not convinced, gave signs of an uneasy conscience, Cornelia was always ready to annihilate doubt with some apt quotation (or misquotation) such as "Work no further, pretty sweeting—youth’s a stuff will not endure." Naturally, this spasmodic holiday making was the cause of frequent delays in the performance of the work for the Guildsmen’s League. Janet tried to make up for lost time by working late at night, a practice that drew upon her the reproaches of Cornelia who alleged that it interfered with her sleep. Needless to say, Cornelia exhibited no compunction for the serious inconvenience that all this caused Robert. Far from it. She appeared to get a lively satisfaction from seeing his partnership bedeviled and his remonstrances ignored. As a fact, she feared that Robert’s influence over Janet was quietly undermining her own ascendancy. But what was there to justify this fear? Janet’s enthusiasm for the free life of the model tenements had not yet abated and her admiration for Cornelia’s talents was still very strong. But a straw showed Cornelia which way the wind was blowing. Janet was gradually but steadily cutting down the amount of housework she did in Flat Number Fifteen! The terms on which Cornelia chummed up with her successive companions always included an agreement to have the housework done, share and share alike. In practice, the adoring friend took over most of Cornelia’s share, at least while the friendship was in its early stages. As time went on and illusions were shattered, the unequal burden was slowly whittled away by the active partner until Cornelia’s shoulders stood in grave danger of having a full half of the cleaning and marketing thrust upon them. At this point, she generally unearthed a new adorer as well as excellent reasons for breaking with the old one; and then she started the whole cycle afresh. Like her predecessor, Janet had begun by doing far more errands, dishes and cooking, than a strictly fair division called for. At first, the respective proportions had stood at about three-quarters for Janet and one-quarter for Cornelia. After a few days of this arrangement, however, Janet had begun so to manipulate matters that her allotment fell rapidly to one-half. And the pendulum had swung gaily on. In fine, within a few months of her arrival, this new convert to modernity had reversed the original proportions so that they now stood at about three-quarters for Cornelia and one-quarter for Janet. If this was feminism—Cornelia confided to Hercules ("among the faithless, faithful only he")—it was feminism with a vengeance!