It was Claude, however, and not Cornelia, that gave Janet’s friendship with Robert an importance that none of those concerned attached to it. Claude simply could not understand why Janet should refuse to neglect Robert’s League, whenever the work of the League stood in the way of their outings together. Economic independence, the reason advanced by Janet, was a reason he laughed at. The words meant hardly anything to one who from birth had been glutted with the thing itself. Surely a few beggarly dollars, more or less, did not adequately account for Janet’s readiness to cloister herself in Kelly’s bare and sunless study! Yet what other motive could there be, if not one of tender feeling on Robert’s part, or soft pity on hers? Still, the rivalry that actually sprang up between the two young men was not a rivalry in love, at least not in Robert’s sense of the word. For Robert was no fool. He was soon convinced that Claude and Janet had surrendered unconditionally to a mutual infatuation which he was in no position to challenge. Yet he had a magnetism of his own, a magnetism of the spirit rather than of the flesh. To this magnetism Janet responded. Why should he not claim the same title to Janet’s response in the one sphere that Claude laid claim to in the other? At all events, he meant to fight for what he considered his rights, regardless of Claude’s frowns or vanishing friendship. Between the two, Janet had a hard time of it. Claude professed to accept free love as a new and improved social principle, and praised her for holding it; yet he grew unmanageable the moment she gave the least hint of exercising this freedom in connection with any other man than himself. On the other hand, Robert rejected free love as a pernicious Greenwich Village or Lorillard tenement eccentricity, and even severely scolded her for entertaining it; yet his actions showed that she might love as many different men as madly as she pleased, without causing his friendship for her to undergo any really radical change. To cap the oddity of this contrast, she found that Robert’s unlimited tolerance, though socially much the more agreeable attitude, was not without its suggestion of tepidity of sentiment, a suggestion which piqued her not a little.