"Well, I don’t blame him for getting enraged at the abuse of that horrible man," said Janet, sturdily defending him. "Nor do I. Once in a while a thunderbolt will strike the wicked as well as the good, won’t it? Claude was quite justified this time, no doubt." "How does he happen to come among the Outlaws, Cornelia? He doesn’t seem to belong to them exactly." "He doesn’t pretend to. He walks among us humble tenementers like a god among his creatures. Distinctly Like a god, Araminta. That’s the footing on which he associates with mere human beings." "Yet he’s hail fellow well met with Robert and Mazie and the others," protested Janet. "Ah, yes, but don’t let that deceive you. Jupiter was hail fellow well met with many a mortal, especially with many a mortal maiden. You remember that he visited one earthly princess in a shower of gold. That is what Claude does. He visits the model tenements in—or perhaps I should say with—a shower of gold. I mean," she added, "he doesn’t think of marriage with a girl on Mazie’s level. Nor with a girl on yours or mine." This shaft did not miss its mark. But it perplexed Janet more than it wounded her. "I thought that made no difference to you," she said, for she had already been favored with some of Cornelia’s destructive criticism of the institution of marriage. "It makes no difference to _me_," said Cornelia. "But in this stifling room I can’t explain myself as I’d like to. The spacious blue skies and the free pure air of the Hudson will be a more fitting background for the story I’d like to tell you. Put on your things, Araminta, and we’ll go for a charming ride." Janet dressed with promptness and pleasure. She appeared to have forgotten that Robert Lloyd had particularly said that he was coming about noon in order to take her home. Her friend did not remind her. The knowledge that Robert would go away in bitter disappointment robbed the outing of none of its zest, so far as Cornelia was concerned. Claude, too, had promised to drop in at Number Fifteen. This promise Janet bore well in mind. But as his visit was not to take place until late in the afternoon and there was thus no danger of missing him, she joined Cornelia with enthusiasm. *II* At the corner of Thirty-fourth Street and Second Avenue, where Kips Bay edges its dingy little proletarian stores into bourgeois respectability, the two young women entered a car bound for the West Twenty-third Street ferry. It proceeded at a jog trot along Second Avenue to Twenty-third Street where it struck the cross-town line west. Janet felt no annoyance at the snail’s pace from which the car never departed. Manhattan was still a novelty to her, and this section of the East Side was wholly new.