The Love Chase

A young man of twenty-seven, a dashing Count d'Orsay type, was sitting astride a chair in flat number fifteen, one of the three-room flats in the Lorillard model tenement houses. He was alone in the room but evidently not in the flat, for he was directing animated remarks at one of two closed doors that flanked a projecting china cupboard.

"It's to be a masked ball, Cornelia," he was saying, "and I'm going as the head of John the Baptist."

Two feminine voices, one from behind the door, laughed merrily. Much pleased, the young man continued:

"Or I might go as a Spanish cavalier. The costume in Whistler's painting of 'Henry Irving as Philip II' would suit me to a T."

"Claude, I know what you're thinking of," returned a well-pitched voice behind the right door. "You're not thinking of the part of Philip II, but of the part of Don Juan, in which you expect to be irresistible."

"Gee," added kittenish tones behind the door. "It'd be a good sight better if he went as a penitent friar."

"Leading you attired as Salome, I dare say."

"Oh, no, I mean to go as St. Cecilia."

Claude burst into mocking laughter.

"You'd need seven and seventy veils for that part, Mazie," he said.

When he subsided, the same languid, purring tones replied from the left.

"Say, Claude, you have got a head. But so has a pin."

"Naughty kitten, showing its claws in company!"

"Lothario!" cried Cornelia, from the right. "No quarreling before supper."

"Oh, I need a little excitement to give me an appetite," said Claude.

He got up, walked around the room several times and then stopped in front of the left door.

"I wish you'd hurry up, Mazie."

"Mary, I'm on my fourth step," purred her voice in reply.

"I can fairly see you dressing."

Through Mazie's door came a coloratura shriek.

"In my mind's eye, that is," added Claude, after a pause.

Resuming his seat he addressed the right door again.

"Cornelia, shall we go to the Turk's or to the Spaniard's?"

"I'm sorry, Lothario, but I've got a date with 'Big Burley' for tonight."

"Hutchins Burley? Then have a good time!"

As his skeptical inflection belied his words, Cornelia asked for an explanation.

"Hutch is in a devil of a temper," declared Claude grimly, "because Rob covered him with ridicule at the Outlaw Club."

"Leave it to Robert Lloyd!"

This exclamation from the right door was followed by a peremptory command from the left.

"Say, wait a moment--I can't hear you, Claude--and I can't find my garter."

Ignoring Mazie's cries of distress, Claude proceeded to explain to the right door that Burley's temper had been ruffled that afternoon at a meeting of the Outlaws, a club for young radical and artistic people which they all belonged to, and which, since the recent signing of the armistice, had more than trebled its membership. Friction had arisen from the contact of two facts: the need of money to provide the club with larger quarters, and the proposal to hold a public masked ball as an easy means of raising the money.

Hutchins Burley, who had organized the Outlaws, sponsored this proposal, but some of the members opposed it on the ground that, in the existing state of public opinion, a radical club might get a black eye from the improprieties or the hooliganism that outsiders could practice under cover of the masks. "Big Burley" had flattened out most of the opposition with his usual steam-rollering bluster, the Outlaws, like more timid gentry, being victims of a popular superstition that a noisy debater is always in the right.

Leading the minority, Claude had moved the substitution of a restricted costume ball for the free and easy masquerade. He was ably seconded by his friend Robert Lloyd, whose short satiric speech won over many supporters, so many that "Big Burley" fairly swelled with the venom of frustration. Claude assured Cornelia that, if a narrow majority had not finally declared itself in favor of the masked ball, Burley would certainly have exploded. As it was--