Cornelia’s hour with Robert had come. She lost no time in giving him to understand that his arrival in Paris had, to put it mildly, been inopportune. Not that it was his fault. Naturally, he couldn’t very well have foreseen the rapidly approaching crisis in Janet’s life. But there it was! M. St. Hilaire, a man of parts and of wealth, was anxious to marry Janet, who had just begun to see that the match was greatly to her advantage. Here was Janet’s golden opportunity to redeem the past— "To redeem the past or to redeem Monsieur St. Hilaire?" "Don’t be flippant, Cato. You know very well what I mean." "I’m quite serious. _Redeem_ is a curious word to use in connection with Janet. It implies atonement for sin. Did you apply this word to your own case after your return from England to the model tenements?" She stared at him icily. Did he intimate that Janet’s affair with Claude Fontaine was spiritually comparable to her affair with Percival Houghton? She would show him the difference. True, she had believed in free love ("a hundred years ahead of my time, Cato!") and Janet had followed suit. But when she, Cornelia, had taken up the gauntlet against the irrational knot, she had let herself be pilloried for her convictions. Had Janet done as much? Let his own fairness be his tutor. Not that she held Janet to blame. Oh, no. She would have Robert know that he and his principles had been the disturbing influence in Janet’s destiny. This had been the case in Kips Bay. She feared it would again be the case in Paris. "I the disturbing influence? Absurd, Cornelia. When did I ever demand that you, or Janet, or anybody else live up to my vaunted principles?" "Cato, there’s something about you, some Satanic magnetism, that gives you a strange hold upon a woman’s soul. It makes her strive to appear before you always in her loftier, sublimer flights, to put on her Sabbath character, so to speak." "Why do you call this Sabbath magnetism _Satanic_?" "Because it’s unnatural to ask a woman to assume her Sabbath character seven days a week. She’s bound to come to grief." She assured him that this Satanic faculty of his was what caused him to pique or fascinate women, though it seldom inspired them with passion. And, in the long run, it always threw them out of gear. As in the case of Janet! What had his intoxicating mixture of visionary theories and expedient compromises done for her in the Claude Fontaine affair? It had brought her out at the pitifully small end of the horn. "I may remind you, Robert, that _I_ was ready to ruin myself for Percival Houghton, ready to stand, upright and reckless, facing the world with him. _I_ didn’t go slinking from one hotel to another, as his pretended _wife_."