“On shaking Artie so smoothly.  Trust you to do the right thing at the right time, and in the right way.  You’re a beauty, Jen, and no mistake,” laughed Ross.  “I never saw your like.  You really must marry a title—­Madame la Duchesse!  And nobody’s on to you but me.  You aren’t even on to yourself!”

Janet drew up haughtily and swept into her bedroom, closing the door with almost coarse emphasis.

CHAPTER XII

ARTHUR FALLS AMONG LAWYERS

Arthur ended his far from orderly retreat at the Auditorium, and in the sitting room of his suite there set about re-forming his lines, with some vague idea of making another attack later in the day—­one less timid and blundering.  “I’d better not have gone near her,” said he disgustedly.  “How could a man win when he feels beaten before he begins?” He was not now hazed by Janet’s beauty and her voice like bells in evening quiet, and her mystic ideas.  Youth, rarely wise in action, is often wise in thought; and Arthur, having a reasoning apparatus that worked uncommonly well when he set it in motion and did not interfere with it, was soon seeing his situation as a whole much as it was—­ugly, mocking, hopeless.

“Maybe Janet knows the real reason why she’s acting this way, maybe she don’t,” thought he, with the disposition of the inexperienced to give the benefit of even imaginary doubt.  “No matter; the fact is, it’s all up between us.”  This finality, unexpectedly staring at him, gave him a shock.  “Why,” he muttered, “she really has thrown me over!  All her talk was a blind—­a trick.”  And, further exhibiting his youth in holding the individual responsible for the system of which the individual is merely a victim, usually a pitiable victim, he went to the opposite extreme and fell to denouncing her—­cold-hearted and mercenary like her mother, a coward as well as a hypocrite—­for, if she had had any of the bravery of self-respect, wouldn’t she have been frank with him?  He reviewed her in the flooding new light upon her character, this light that revealed her as mercilessly as flash of night-watchman’s lantern on guilty, shrinking form.  “She—­Why, she always was a fakir!” he exclaimed, stupefied by the revelation of his own lack of discernment, he who had prided himself on his acuteness, especially as to women.  “From childhood up, she has always made herself comfortable, no matter who was put out; she has gotten whatever she wanted, always pretending to be unselfish, always making it look as if the other person were in the wrong.”  There he started up in the rate of the hoodwinked, at the recollection of an incident of the previous summer—­how she had been most gracious to a young French nobleman, in America in search of a wife; how anybody but “spiritual” Janet would have been accused of outrageous flirting—­no, not accused, but convicted.  He recalled a vague story which he had set down to envious gossip—­a