The situation was without precedent in the history of the Outlaws of Kips Bay. Even more unprecedented was Cornelia’s acceptance of the situation. But this compliance of hers was in no wise dictated by generosity or affection, as some innocents conjectured. Cornelia was simply shrewd enough to see that Janet was the magnet which had drawn back to Number Fifteen its departed splendor and had restored to herself the position of the first lady of the Lorillard tenements, a position she greatly prized. One question that Cornelia put to Hercules was: Had Janet’s repugnance for housework merely kept pace with her growing appetite for women’s rights, or was Robert Lloyd at the bottom of all the mischief? How should the mute and glorious Hercules reply to a purely rhetorical query?—Cornelia favored the second explanation, a fact which boded Robert no good. *III* Although Robert had in no sense entered the lists as one of Janet’s suitors, Cornelia instituted comparisons between him and Claude, never to the former’s advantage. She took occasion to contrast Claude’s noble bearing and look of sovereign strength with Robert’s simpler and frailer appearance. She dwelt on the cosmopolitan aura that clung to Claude, his subtle atmosphere of wealth, breeding and high social origin, the amalgam of gorgeous qualities that offered so much more than Robert’s radical connections and straitened financial circumstances. Her trump card was to call attention to Claude’s free and easy response to the Lorillard conception of the rights of women and to offset this picture with an allusion to Robert’s prudent reservations on the same subject. If these comparisons were of an offhand and haphazard sort, nothing was thereby lost in effectiveness. Far from it. They glorified Claude by what was carelessly said: they damaged Robert by what was carefully left unsaid. Although unaware of the Machiavellian promptings of which she was the innocent cause, Janet became dimly conscious of the conflict already sensed by Robert, the conflict between her work (which was bound up with Robert) and her love affair (which was somehow bound up with Cornelia as well as with Claude). She felt the tug of Robert one way and the tug of Claude and Cornelia the other way, without fully grasping the difference in the two directions or the final significance of either goal.