"Well, he wanted to borrow Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. He'd never heard of them till today. Or of Tchehov or the moderns, of course … It appears someone in the office said something about 'the Russians,' and as soon as he'd finished his work he rushed to the public library; but it was closed, so he came here. Rather sweet of him, I thought. He didn't say how d'ye do, or any of the useless things. He just said: 'Who are the Russians? I want to read them. Have you got them?' And went off with his arms full." She sank back in her cushions, and closed her lids on the picture. The fire crackled companionably, and Tarrant's cigar smoke wove its soothing cloud about their silence. Even with her eyes shut she could guess that something was slowly breaking down the hard crust of his resentment. Expediency … uncertainty … it didn't matter… . After an interval he said, more to himself than her: "Well, I suppose he was right not to let that blackguard raise hell in the office… . Only it goes against me when a man seems to show the white feather… ."

"Ah, but you … " his wife murmured; and opened her eyes to meet his gratified smile.

But his face was not the one on which her gaze rested. Her vision was turned inward. There had happened to her, suddenly, what may happen at any stage, however late, in the acquaintance, even the intimacy, between two people: she had seen Vance Weston that afternoon—really, literally seen him—for the first time. Before that, her glance—curious, then interested, then admiring—had merely brushed him with a glowworm spark. She had caught, as it were, glimpses of him in the blur of himself; rifts and gleams; a bit here, a bit there, of the outward accidents of his appearance. Now, all at once, she possessed him as a whole, seemed to discern behind his fluid features the power which had built them. Uneven, untrue to itself, as his face appeared, with its queer mixture of maturity and boyishness, instability and power, she suddenly beheld it in the something which harmonized these contradictions and bound him together like a strong outline. Was that perhaps what genius was? And this boy with the tumbled brown hair, the resolute lines of brow and nose, the brooding impulsive lips and the strident untutored voice—was this the way genius was cut? … Her heart missed a beat, as if it had paused with her mind to consider him. "It's like seeing him dead," she thought—so entirely had his face been stripped to the essentials. And she reminded herself, with a shiver, that one never forgot a single lineament of a face one had seen dead… . "It's more than I bargained for," she murmured, and then: "Coward!"

She pulled herself up to the surface of her eyes, and gave her husband back his smile.