Janet had more than repaid him for the inhospitality of her relatives. She in turn amused, puzzled, inspired and electrified him. So much unsophistication in the midst of a guileful city, so much candor surrounded by pious make-believe, above all, so much eagerness for experience held in leash by a vegetating family routine, had filled Robert with the hope that he might play Pygmalion to her Galatea. Galatea, however, did not exactly go into raptures over Pygmalion. Though her insurgent nature was full of silent sympathy with Robert, her instincts were so much under the bondage of the Barr atmosphere as to prevent her from fully estimating his worth. Still, she conscientiously followed up the leads he gave her. She made her first bewildered acquaintance with the new paintings, the new music and the new social sciences. She began to look forward to copies of the _Republic_, the _Nation_, the _London Statesman_; and she joined him in reading the great contemporary writers: Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Anatole France, Romain Rolland. In short, she ranged with silent delight through the new world of modernity that he opened up to her, though it had to be explored in an obstinate little way of her own. As her unofficial pilot Robert was very happy and might long have held the post but for a fatal blunder. Mrs. Barr learned one day that he had tempted Janet to attend a performance of Shaw’s "Blanco Posnet," given on a Sunday by the Stage Reform Players. According to Emily, her informant, this play was immoral, not to say blasphemous, as was proved by the refusal of the British censor to license its performance. Such a flagrant breach of holy writ, family propriety and the Sabbath, raised a domestic tempest to which Janet deemed it wise to bend. Robert was forced to discontinue his visits. What he did not tell Cornelia was that, during the last two months, he had regularly met Janet at Brentano’s, where she had formed the habit of browsing through the new books and magazines every Friday afternoon. *CHAPTER SIX* *I* These facts Robert had his own reasons for hiding from Cornelia. To cut the cross-examination short, he walked up to a miniature portrait that hung on the wall over Cornelia’s desk. "Why do you keep this picture of Percival Houghton enshrined here?" "Why not?" asked Cornelia, taken by surprise. "It is the only picture in the room," replied Robert, evasively. "The face is that of an esthete under the influence of paranoia. It positively stares one out of countenance. Whenever I enter the room, I feel as if I mustn’t take a seat until I’ve bowed before it thrice." "I’m not responsible for other people’s erratic feelings." Cornelia would have spoken with less acerbity if jealousy had prompted Robert’s remark. But his cool sardonic tone eliminated the theory of a jealous motive.