Cornelia’s heroics would have amused Robert but for the jibe flung at Janet. Thank heaven, Janet never declaimed about having faced a whole world or having ruined herself for anyone. After listening to such windy phrases, who would not be biased towards any course that seemed right to Janet and wrong to Cornelia? He hung on her lips with rapt absorption, hoping by this look of intenseness to mask his thoughts. In this hope he was deceived. "Why on earth don’t you marry Charlotte Beecher?" she cross-questioned him abruptly. "I don’t know." "You don’t know! Do you suppose a girl with position, wealth and brains turns up every day in the week? A girl who really _wants_ you! I’m sure I can’t imagine _why_ she does." "Nor can I." She repeated her question. Had he given Charlotte Beecher up merely because she loved him so much more than he loved her? He couldn’t very well answer this question in the affirmative. So he said: "Charlotte is a very intellectual girl, the most intellectual girl I know. She never met a man whom she regarded as her equal in point of brains until she met me. The regard was mutual. She mistook her admiration for love. I might have made the same mistake—if I hadn’t met you." "You can’t blarney me, Cato," she said, highly flattered none the less. "It’s too late in the day!" "I mean it, Cornelia. Meeting you, made me alive to the full force of the attraction between the sexes." "It is the one thing needful," said Cornelia, in low siren tones. "For without it, love is as the dry stubble." "I, too, used to think so," replied Robert, turning a cold douche on this sentiment. "We’ve all had that notion rammed down our throats since childhood. But can we be certain that sexual attraction is the only road to love? The poets assure us that pity is a famous short-cut. In the case of very young people, _all_ roads seem to lead to love. For older folk, mutual admiration may be as good a road as any. Speaking for myself, I’m still considering a proposal to Charlotte Beecher—" "Oh, you’re still considering her? And Janet is still considering M. St. Hilaire. For ice-cold calculation, give me a one-hundred per cent enthusiast like you or Janet." "Are you suggesting that Janet is so well-suited to me that I ought to propose to her?" She rose, with a growing sense of contempt for him. If he did anything so insane—and he was doubtless capable of it—the results would be on his own head. He had already made a mess of his newspaper career, he had been too proud to cultivate the Fontaine influence, he had gratuitously antagonized his only well-to-do relation in California, even now he could barely make a hand-to-mouth living out of his connection with the radical press. And he actually proposed to lengthen this catalog of disasters! Well, he’d better remember one thing. His friends could pull him out of a hole, but not out of a bottomless abyss.