Poor Frenside! It was natural, she thought, that his own inability to stick to a job should add venom to his comments on the instability of others. "Everything I touch turns cold on my hands," he had once confessed; and that had been the fate of The Hour. After a dazzling start it had grown querulous, faddish, and then dull; one could feel the creeping chill of inanition as one turned its pages. Subscribers fell off, and the owners, discouraged, offered the paper for sale. Frenside, understanding his own share in the failure, resigned, and went back to free-lance articles for various newspapers and reviews. It was nonsense, he said, his acting as literary adviser to anybody, when his honest advice would almost always be: "To the wastepaper basket." The Hour languished along, unread and unbought, for another year; then it occurred to Tarrant to pick it up as a bargain, and once purchased it acquired in his eyes the importance inherent in anything that belonged to him. "Funny—perhaps what I was really meant for was to be an editor," he said to his wife, with depreciatory smile which disguised such a fervour of self-esteem. "Not a very dazzling career—I suppose I might have looked rather higher; but it may give me the chance to make myself known… ."

"Of course, Lewis; it's what I've always wanted for you."

"It is? You've thought—?" he began with his look of carefully suppressed avidity.

"Why, for a man who wants a hearing, and has something new to say, I can't imagine a better chance than an open arena like The Hour." She could reel off things like that as long as he wanted them; and besides, she did think, had forced herself to think, after his various unsuccessful experiments, first in architecture, then in painting, that letters might really be his field. Not creative work, probably (though she knew he aspired to be a novelist), but literary criticism, literary history, perhaps—provided he had the patience to pursue any line of investigation far enough. "If only he hadn't any money!" she sometimes found herself reflecting, confronted with the bewildering discovery that abundance may hamper talent as much as privation does. "But what is talent made of, then?" she wondered. "Is it really like some shoddy material that can't stand either rain or sun?"

Frenside still mused by the fire. "Yes; I shouldn't wonder if Tarrant made something out of The Hour, if only he gets the right people for the routine work." It was unusually generous of Frenside to say that; yet Halo tingled with resentment.

"You mean he'll never have the perseverance himself?"

"My dear child, don't make me out worse than I am. I mean exactly what I say. Every business enterprise is built on drudgery—"