Other Lorillarders bound for the Outlaws’ ball now began to pass in and out of Cornelia’s flat. They were mostly young men and women who represented the various social strata found in the Kips Bay tenements. They brought with them gayety, laughter and high spirits, and spent their time circulating boisterously through the apartment, gossiping on the coming event, and comparing notes on the glamor and glitter of costumes modeled upon every conceivable suggestion of history, legend or myth. Janet was thrilled with the excitement, the infectious spirits and the easy camaraderie. She noticed that there was no chaperonage or standing on ceremony whatever, and she was struck with the entire absence of self-consciousness between the sexes. Young men and women went in and out as they pleased, helped themselves to Cornelia’s ice box and piano as fancy dictated, and bantered, flirted, kissed, or exchanged partners without stint or scruple. On the face of it, all concerned seemed in full accord with the scheme of "what’s mine is yours, and what’s yours is everybody’s." Nor could she help contrasting these cheerful faces, this genial abandon, this entire lifting of social constraint, with the gloomy looks, circumscribed permissions, and moral strait-jacketings of her Brooklyn home. With all their faults, Cornelia Covert and Mazie Ross appeared to suggest happiness and freedom as much as Mrs. Barr and Emily suggested gloom and repression. And the model tenements lost nothing in the comparison by having all the attraction of novelty. If at that minute, Janet had had to choose between a Paradise of Barrs on the one hand, and the flesh, the devil and the model tenements on the other, it is not to the Paradise of Barrs that she would have given the palm. While Janet met Cornelia’s friends in turn, and gave the men amongst them a new sensation on account of her artless candor, Mazie coquetted freely with the successive males that fluttered around her and displayed unlimited skill in extricating herself from sundry intemperate advances. Growing tired of this sport, she pushed her last admirer brutally off the tubs and said: "Cornelia, what’s the matter with Claude? He should have shown up ages ago." "Oh, Lothario rang me up about half past eight," said Cornelia sweetly. "He isn’t coming." "Isn’t coming! Why, he promised to be my escort," Mazie cried out in a harsh strident voice. Mazie’s voice was not her strong point. Whenever she opened her pretty mouth, she shattered many illusions. "Oh, he’s going to the ball. But he has changed his mind about coming here first. I suppose he doesn’t want any of you to know him by his costume." Mazie’s irritation was unbounded. "None of our crowd are keeping each other in the dark," she said. "What’s struck him? There’ll be plenty of strangers to play the devil with. If Claude has backed out, who’s to take us, old girl?" "Well, Robert’s here."