Her exit, a tempestuous one, left Mazie and Kelly alone and forlorn. Poor Harry Kelly collapsed in his swivel chair, while Mazie hovered around the desk like a gadfly. "Unless you give her what for," she warned him, "_you’ll_ never travel on asphalt." He looked up and feebly waved her away. "What can I do?" he said plaintively. "Just jawing back won’t help matters." "No," said Mazie scornfully. "Jawing back won’t. But how about knocking her down and jumping on her with both feet? Gee, if I had your strength for five minutes! I tell you what, my frazzled Gorilla, if you don’t mop up the floor with her this very minute, she’ll make a doormat of you for the rest of your life." Her tone was slighting, and there was bark in the dose she administered. For a second, he straightened up. Then he shook his head at her, slumped again, and buckled down to the papers on the desk. Poor Harry! His muscle was willing, but his nerve was weak. *CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE* *I* The blow which Robert got between the eyes when he saw Janet and St. Hilaire together had left him shunned. And he was on the train speeding to Fontainebleau before he began coming to, a painful process of returning sensibility, beside which the pins and needles of a limb that had been asleep would have seemed the merest child’s play. The wild nomadic images that chased one another across the field of his consciousness! They racked his brain, his world-reforming brain, and limited his feverish introspection to one discovery, the startling discovery of how very much he was in love. Rather an awkward plight, he told himself, for a young man who had purposed the moral regeneration of mankind and in pursuit of this purpose had sworn to spurn fate, scorn death, and set his hopes above happiness and love. Especially love! Didn’t all the Dick Dudgeons and Devil’s Disciples begin by renouncing love? Indeed, didn’t they make this renunciation a cardinal point of honor? To think that even Cornelia had cautioned him against making an utter ass of himself about Janet! Cautioned him in vain. And Janet, too, had tried her hardest to warn him off by jibing at his poverty. This cruel kindness had almost worked; almost, but not quite. The poet, the lunatic, the lover—they were the embodiments of diseases (Shakespeare had said it!), diseases that resisted the most desperate remedies. Of course she preferred St. Hilaire to himself. Why not? According to his own theories, he should be the first to dub her an imbecile if she didn’t. When she needed sex to gratify desire, she had taken Claude by preference. Now that she needed a position, she would take St. Hilaire. And rightly so. He had nothing to offer her but his brains. Brains and no money! And that in the twentieth century, the triumphant mechanical century, in which any fool with a little low cunning and a good thick skin could make money by the bushel.