"How did he know … how did he know?" she murmured to herself. And the fact that he did know seemed warrant of future achievement.

"Halo, are you never coming?" her husband's voice called from the dining room. "You seem to forget that a hard day's work makes a fellow hungry… ."

At dinner he went into all sorts of details about his new printing contract, and his interviews in Boston, where he had gone to secure various literary collaborations. All that he said was interesting to Halo. She began to see that The Hour would bring a new breath of life into her world as well as her husband's. It would be exciting to get hold of the budding geniuses; and once she had let Lewis discover them, she knew they would be handed over to her to be tamed and amused. She had inherited her mother's liking for the company of clever people, people who were doing things and making things, and she saw the big room in which she now spent so many solitary hours peopled by a galaxy of new authors and artists, gathered together under the banner of The Hour.

"If only nobody calls it a salon Lewis won't mind," she thought.

There was so much to hear and to say that Vance Weston was not mentioned again till dinner was over and they returned to the library. Tarrant lit his cigar and settled down in his own particular easy chair, which had a broad shelf for his coffee cup and ashtray. "Well, how does it strike you?" he said, nodding in the direction of the manuscript.

"Oh, Lewis, you've discovered a great novelist!" She prided herself on the tactfulness of the formula; but enthusiasm for others was apt to excite her husband's suspicions, even when it implied praise for himself.

"Novelist? Well—we'll let the future take care of itself. But this particular thing—"

"I think it's remarkable. The simplicity, the unselfconsciousness… ."

"H'm." He puffed at his cigar and threw back his head in meditation. "To begin with, war stories are a drug in the market."

She flashed back: "Whose market?" and he replied, with a hint of irritation: "You know perfectly well that we can't afford to disregard entirely what the public wants."

"I thought you were going to teach it what it ought to want."

As this phrase was taken from his own prospectus it was too unanswerable to be welcome, and his frown deepened. "Little by little—certainly. But anyhow, doesn't it strike you that this story—which has its points, of course—is … well, rather lacking in relief? A trifle old-fashioned … humdrum? The very title tells you what it's about."