From her point of vantage at the table, Cornelia surveyed her handiwork with a pious simulation of sadness, surveyed it, and found that it was not so bad. Janet blue and still, Kelly heavily anxious, Cornelia sweetly sanctimonious, such was the curious tableau that Robert saw when he came in, his slender frame and vigorous movements forming a direct contrast to the static spectacle before him. "Now, see what you’ve done, Cato!" declaimed Cornelia, in one of those complacent greetings which only she could make sublime. She fluttered Claude’s note aloft and called out the sender’s name for Robert’s information. Ignoring her, but grasping the import of the scene, Robert went over to Janet’s side and asked her in all simplicity whether he could be of any service whatever. But she, to hide her tears, turned decisively away from him. Robert gave her movement a totally different interpretation, drew back, and walked quickly out of the room. *III* The alarums and excursions for which Claude and Cornelia were responsible might well have monopolized Janet’s mind. But her thoughts were kept in flux by a thunderstorm which threatened her peace from another quarter. The new cloud on her horizon came from no less a person than Mrs. Howard Madison Grey, the wife of her employer. Mrs. Grey served Janet as a symbol, a symbol opposed to the Outlaws. The Outlaws were a convenient symbol of the world _within_ Kips Bay. Mrs. Grey was an equally pat symbol of the world without. It amused Janet to study her own reactions to these two symbols and to analyze her experiences with the moral codes symbolized. According to one of the primary conventions of the Outlaws, sex was anybody’s to have and nobody’s to hold; there was no recognized private property in sex. In Kips Bay, Janet had acted in the spirit (though not in the letter) of this convention. And the results had been disastrous. On the other hand, in the world beyond the model tenements, the right of private property in sex was absolute. In Mrs. Grey’s world, Janet had acted in the spirit and even in the letter of this convention. And again the results had been disastrous. The second disaster materialized slowly. Its point of departure was the visit paid by an ex-President of the United States to a performance of Mr. Grey’s third play, "The Great Reprieve." As originally written, this was a drama in which a Vermont Yankee resigns to a younger brother the girl he madly loves, after which lofty sacrifice he starts life anew in the Klondike, makes a fortune there, and later turns up for a brief visit to the old homestead. To his dismay he learns that the girl of his dreams has been left a widow and that, with poverty and distress staring her in the face, she has no choice but to take up the lot of an actress in the great Subway Circuit. Nothing but his hand in marriage can save her from the doom in store for her! And the curtain falls on the Great Reprieve.