"I’m glad you do. We were very good pals, weren’t we?" "Yes, and I hope we still are. Anyhow, I want to speak of something I heard about you from Mark Pryor." "What was that?" "Pryor seems to have kept in touch with Cornelia right along. You know Pryor." "Not a sparrow falleth but his eye doth see," she quoted. "Exactly. He has been keeping tabs on this rich Alsatian. And, by the way, I ought to mention that he repeated to me what you told him about Monsieur St. Hilaire." "That’s a nice way to treat my confidence," said Janet, seriously annoyed. "Pryor of all people. And I took him to be the only original human clam!" "Well, I think he was fully justified—" "In what way, I’d like to ask?" "Please don’t make me go into that now, Janet. The thing I’m driving at is this. Pryor heard that you were on the point of—of forming a free alliance with this Alsatian gentleman. Chiefly to escape Cornelia and this horrible business of clothes." "You’ve been misinformed," she retorted coldly. "Not about the clothes. I _do_ loathe them. But I’ve no intention of forming a free alliance with anybody. Certainly not with Monsieur St. Hilaire. Why should I? I don’t love him. But I don’t mind telling you that he has asked me to marry him." "Oh, then, that’s what you’re considering?" "Yes," she said concisely. And "put that in your pipe and smoke it," added a defiant glance from her half-parted long-lashed eyes. If he had any notion of playing the medieval knight, plunging through fire and water for the damsel in distress, she would spoil that chivalrous pose in a jiffy. "Janet, I don’t understand you," he said, with quite unnecessary vehemence. "You said you wouldn’t marry Claude, your reason being that you loved him. Now you say you will marry Monsieur St. Hilaire, and your reason is that you don’t love him." His eyes added: "You are inexplicable, exasperating, maddening—and yet adorable: in short, you are Janet." The bus came to a full stop, and a few minutes later they were in the concert hall. *V* The concert was one of a special series given by an orchestra from Rouen. Janet’s attention had been drawn to the series by two circumstances. One was that a third of the members of the orchestra were women. The other was that the inclusion of women in a first-class orchestra had plunged musical circles into a controversy which the newspapers eagerly seized upon and played up with caricature or abuse, satire or eulogy, according to the partisanship, but never the merits of the case. Robert knew nothing of this controversy until he ventured on a remark during the first intermission. "The tone and workmanship of the orchestra are splendid," he said. "I don’t feel qualified to judge, but it strikes me that the women are doing every whit as well as the men."