Vance, new at such transactions, stared a moment, not quite understanding.

"Keep free—keep free as long as you can," Frenside repeated, hobbling down with a heavy rap of his stick on each step. And Vance turned in to the office.

He found a cordial welcome from Tarrant. Everybody on the staff had read "Unclaimed," and great hopes were founded on its appearance in the coming number. Tarrant produced cigarettes and cocktails, and introduced Eric Rauch, the assistant editor. Eric Rauch was a glib young Jew with beautiful eyes and a responsive smile, who had published an obscure volume of poetry: Voodoo, and a much talked-of collection of social studies: Say When. For the first time Vance found himself talking with an author, and treated by him as one of the tribe. When Rauch said: "You've struck out on a new line," the praise rushed through Vance like fire, and he longed to hurry back to the hotel and tell Laura Lou. But what would it have meant to her?

After these agreeable preliminaries Tarrant looked at his watch, said: "Half-past one, by Jove—and I'm due at the Century, to lunch with old Willsdon." Willsdon, the historian, had promised The Hour an article on "A New Aspect of Benjamin Franklin," and Tarrant hurried off, saying: "You and Eric'll be able to fix up details. Come round again soon, won't you?"

Eric Rauch proposed that Vance should lunch with him at the Cocoanut Tree, a nearby lunchroom, and they walked there, Vance's steps dancing down the street as if the dull pavement were the seashore. Talking to a fellow like Rauch was something as new to him as his first sight of the ocean, and almost as exciting… .

At the Cocoanut Tree they met other fellows who were writing or painting, or doing something with the arts. To Vance, whose horizon had greatly widened in the interval since his first visit to New York, the names of two or three of the older men were familiar; but the ones Rauch took most seriously—vanguard fellows, he explained—who looked as youthful as Vance himself, the latter had never heard of. They all greeted him good-humouredly, and one, a critic named Redman, said: "See here, when are you going to give us a novel?"

"The Hour's going to see to that," Rauch rejoined briskly; and another young man, with bruised eyelids in a sallow illumined face, and a many-syllabled name ending in "ovsky," adjured Vance with ardent Slav gestures: "For God's sake tackle something big—colossal—cosmic—get away from the village pump … " while a shabbily dressed girl with a greasy mop of black hair and bold gay eyes pushed up to the table, exclaiming: "Eric, why don't you introduce me? I'm the sculptress Rebecca Stram, and I want to do your head one of these days," she explained to Vance.