"I’d like to speak to Mrs. Jerome alone for a few minutes," she said. "Would you very much mind?" "Oh, by no means," replied Cornelia, trying hard to be superior and authoritative. "Make any arrangements you like to suit your own interests. Never mind the Maison Paulette. Don’t think that _I_ shall stand in your light." And as she went out, unabashed, she offered the flowery remark that she had only done her poor best to follow the impulses of her heart, her sole desire having been to help both Janet and Mrs. Jerome to a mutual understanding, in the absence of which any joint project they might embark on would be only too likely to suffer shipwreck. *IV* Mrs. Jerome drew Janet down to a place beside her on the leather settee. "Now, my dear," she said, "I’d just as soon you didn’t dig up ancient history. Unless it’s going to relieve your mind. But I shan’t be any the wiser for it when you’ve finished, trust me. Why, if you told me that you were a new version of the Old Nick himself, one look into your lovely gray eyes would convince me that it wasn’t true." None the less, Janet, not wishing to sail under false colors, gave a very short résumé of her life from the time she went to the Lorillard tenements in Kips Bay to the day she left M. St. Hilaire. Throughout this narrative, Mrs. Jerome’s round little face was sphinx-like, becoming animated only at the point of Janet’s separation from Claude. "He left you in the lurch, then?" she had interposed, much affected. "Oh, no, he would have kept on providing for me," said Janet, evasively, and after a moment’s hesitation. Nobody had really believed the story that she had left Claude. Even Robert appeared to take the reverse for granted. Perhaps, on the whole, she had better fall into a view that people would be sure to adopt in any case, and that she was almost beginning to adopt herself. "But of course you didn’t let him," said Mrs. Jerome. "No." "Good. We mustn’t be under any obligation of that sort to the selfish sex. Now don’t worry about the matter any more. You’re a plucky girl, my dear. Keep your pluck, and your pluck will keep you." Mrs. Jerome added that she hoped Claude Fontaine had not behaved any worse than Janet had represented. She knew the young man. Who in New York didn’t? As regards possible criticism, Janet should be comforted with the reflection that glass houses made the whole world kin, human architecture being nowhere complete without them. Why, most of the girls in the Younger Set had lost their heads over Claude, which was all they had had a chance to lose. She herself, meeting him once at a costume ball of the Junior League, had been knocked silly by his dashing airs and Apollo curls, not to mention the best pair of calves she had ever beheld. "So you see, my dear, an old woman can be quite as feeble-minded as a debutante. Nobody has ever had a monopoly of making mistakes."