The crash came after supper, while Janet was out shopping with Harry Kelly, who had quickly become a steady visitor at his next-door neighbor’s flat. As a pretext, Cornelia chose the matter of Mazie’s easy friendship with Hutchins Burley, a friendship reported to have gone as far as was possible, since the recent ball. There was nothing new in the charge that Mazie practiced principles of varietism about which Cornelia simply theorized. The only novelty was that Cornelia now declared the charge to be a good excuse for parting company. Mazie thought it a poor excuse. On this difference of opinion there sprang up a tempestuous scene. Words flew high, and the checks that polite society imposes on candid criticism of one’s friends went completely by the board. The climax was reached when Cornelia offered the opinion that if Mazie wanted to become a vulgar little copy of Camille, that was her affair; but flat Number Fifteen was not the place in which to practice the part. In vain did Mazie reply with an unexpurgated review of Cornelia’s history. Cornelia was unmoved. And her languid, cadenced retorts floated serenely above Mazie’s torrent of invective like a violin obligato above the crashing brasses. It did not take Mazie long to pack her most necessary articles into a bag and go. On her way out, she said, with a good imitation of Cornelia’s sweetest tone: "Good bye, Cornelia. I’d like to stay long enough to tell your next dupe what a fraud you are. But what’s the use? She won’t thank me for it, as I suppose she has a crush on you, like I had once. Well, it’ll do her good to learn by experience. Finding you out, my dear, is such a complete education." By the time Janet and Harry Kelly returned, all was quiet along the Potomac. *CHAPTER ELEVEN* *I* For the next few weeks, Janet lived excitedly in the glamor of the Lorillard tenements. She could not well have imagined a bigger difference than that between the complete orthodoxy of the Barrs of Brooklyn and the complete heterodoxy of the model tenementers of Kips Bay. Her impression of the new life was put into words for her by Lydia Dyson, the author of "Brothers and Sisters," (then in its twenty-fifth big printing). Lydia, whose tall, thin form and pale olive skin lost none of their spectacular qualities by the snake-like movements she affected, the huge jet earrings she wore, or the gold-tipped cigarettes she smoked, assured Janet, in a rich Kentucky drawl: "We obey only one custom here, and that is to disobey all customs; we hold only one belief, and that is to hold no beliefs." Janet was fully persuaded that the first part of this statement was true and that the second part was a vast improvement upon the Barr regime.