The rivalry, such as it was, followed a very human course. Robert, as an outgrowth of his work with Janet took to promoting her education in contemporary thought and political theory. Claude, not to be behindhand, made the most of his special knowledge of art as well as of his wide first-hand acquaintance with the men and events that figured picturesquely in the ruling social and political rings of Washington and New York. In the matter of books, Claude generally took the cue from Robert. The latter would lend her works by Shaw, Wells, Bennett, Galsworthy, Bertrand Russell, Anatole France, Barbusse, Romaine Rolland; Claude would follow suit with the latest fiction by Robert W. Chambers or Rupert Hughes, his authors ranging as high as Rudyard Kipling, Maeterlinck or Barrie. One would take her to a symphony concert in Carnegie Hall, the other to a Sunday Pop in the Hippodrome. Robert held out invitations to a Theater Guild’s play by Masefield or Andreyev, Claude would counter with an evening at a revival of Florodora or San Toy. If Janet accompanied Robert to a Labor Mass Meeting at Cooper Union or to a radical Cameraderie at the Civic Club, she was sure, soon after, to be escorted by Claude to a Titta Ruffo recital in Aeolian Hall or to a midnight cabaret in Moloch’s Den off Sheridan Square. To Janet, who had broken with the Barrs of Brooklyn and who was as much on pleasure as on emancipation bent, it was not Robert’s offer that usually seemed the happier one. Not the least of Claude’s advantages was the fact that he moved in Kips Bay as a representative of the great forces of finance and fashion. He reflected the high lights of that glittering social system of which he was a favorite child. Direct and intimate was his contact with the celebrities of the day—the bankers and politicians, the diplomats and society leaders, the cabinet set in Washington, and the inner opera box set in New York. These were his real people; the Lorillarders were merely the people among whom he was sowing his radical wild oats. In short, Claude was one of the persons "in the know." He knew a good deal more about the personages whose names were on everybody’s tongues than the public knew or the newspapers thought fit to print. He could tell about the opera soprano of the first magnitude whose attacks of hysterical jealousy would cause the curtain to be held down between the acts for forty minutes, while the poor director tore his hair in desperation. He could laugh at the "mystery" of the appointment of a certain mediocre woman teacher to a superintendency in the city’s schools, the mystery vanishing upon his inside story of how the lady in question "had been good" to Big Jim Connolly, a local political boss. And he could explain the connection between the failure to float a certain foreign loan and the omission of a well-known financier’s wife from the group of guests invited to meet the Prince of Wales.