"Come back to the States with me, Janet," she continued. "You’ll see what we women can do when we put on steam. You shall make an independent place for yourself in New York, besides helping other women to do the same. And by and by some suitable countryman of ours will come along, and we’ll have you nicely married off." *V* _We’ll have you nicely married off_. Left alone, Janet had to pull herself together after the shock of these words. Everybody seemed determined to get her married. Claude, Pryor, Cornelia, Robert. And now Mrs. Jerome, too! Clearly, even people who were extremely well disposed towards her, had it at the back of their minds that she had lost credit with her fellow-men. And that nothing short of marriage could restore her to full public esteem! This was a situation she would have to reckon with. But how comical it was to have marriage urged upon her as though it were a kind of penance she must do in order to regain her standing! Penance! She was driven to admit that it really would be something like an act of penance to marry M. St. Hilaire. Still, would she feel this way if she hadn’t met Robert again? Would she? Scarcely. It was Robert’s turning up that had caused M. St. Hilaire to appear in the light of a penitential infliction. There were two courses open to her, and staying with Cornelia was not one of them. No, she recoiled from fashionable dressmaking and all its shows, and the atmosphere of the Maison Paulette with its lurking vapors of parasitism and prostitution grew more oppressively sickening every day. True, the big establishment was an amusing novelty at first, when you saw only the surface glamor. Nor was it half bad to help Harry Kelly to train the manikins, so long as you supposed that this training merely equipped them to wear expensive frocks in the salon or at the races or at the opera. But when you found out that every one of these dainty girl models expected confidently to become the mistress of some rich merchant or politician, your zest for the work oozed away. Not that you saw much difference between the kept mistresses who exhibited the Paulette garments and the kept wives who purchased them. But you began to look upon the whole traffic in dresses as a symbol of woman’s enslavement to man and of man’s enslavement to the dollar sign. And you observed how this traffic changed everybody connected with it for the worse. (Everybody except poor Mazie, who had experienced a revulsion of feeling against the ghost of her Ziegfeld "Follies" self—unluckily too late to do her any good.) You watched the crude boyish cynicism of Harry Kelly turn into a morose pessimism, and in Cornelia you felt the growth or stiffening of all that was grasping and cruel. As Janet saw these metamorphoses, she realized that the house of Paulette was a house of bondage. It was not an institution with which a free-spirited woman would wish permanently to throw in her lot.