She was present, with the other principals of the Maison Paulette, the night that Robert arrived. Her heart beat faster when she set eyes on him again. He seemed perfectly collected (too perfectly collected!) though very cordial. How was she to tell, amidst so much handshaking and greeting that his heart was beating time with hers? The thing she was most conscious of was that one look of his mobile brown eyes had given a strangely different twist to her adventure with Claude Fontaine. For the first time in her experience she felt uncomfortably on the defensive. She resented this novel sensation. She regarded it with hostility, as though it were some treacherous thread that crossed her homespun integrity. To think that Robert should be its agent! Or could she be mistaken? No. It appeared that even the most charitable of human beings liked to see you in sackcloth and ashes, and looking remorseful, conscience stricken, punished. Well, she had not given Cornelia the satisfaction of looking so, nor Harry Kelly, nor Mazie Ross, nor anybody. And Robert should be no exception. With defiant vigor she resolved that, as she had no cause to acknowledge remorse, fifty Roberts should not make her acknowledge it. There was little time that night for an interchange of news. Next morning, the machinery of the Paulette establishment, too big to be suspended for a mere visitor, automatically began its daily grind. In the course of the day Janet caught fleeting glimpses of Robert, little more. Cornelia kept him under her wing and guarded him as carefully as though he were a crown jewel. She went so far as to relieve Harry Kelly of the half-hour’s treat he had promised himself, the treat of showing Robert the sights of the great Maison. Cornelia not only undertook the ceremony herself; she protracted the ritual far beyond her husband’s intentions. Cato’s complete mentor, that was what she blandly constituted herself. All that poor Hercules could do was to leave his work once in a while, dash hastily to whatever quarter of the building his wife had conducted Robert, slap the visitor gently on the back, and fling a gloomy monosyllable at him by way of showing his good will. He insisted that Robert was too thin, and trotted out his famous formula. "You don’t breathe deep and down enough, old boy. Fill your lungs and your belly with good fresh wind, or you’ll never travel on asphalt." Cornelia had ceased to shudder at the inelegant word. But Mazie, happening to pop in at the moment, promptly caught it up and used the occasion to favor the two men with a fusillade of flippant, slangy phrases, not forgetting to add several thinly veiled impudences directed at the mistress of the house before the latter had time to expel her.