Vance had never before been confronted with so many exciting and stimulating questions. At first he tried to answer each in turn, going into the matter as fully as he felt it deserved, and seizing by the way on the new ideas it developed; but by the time he had said, with his slow shy drawl: "Why, I guess I haven't got far enough yet to have worked out any regular rules, but I seem to find … " or: "Well, sometimes I feel as if I had to have a lot of new faces and sights to start me going, and then again other times … " he noticed that his questioners either lost interest, or else, obeying some rule of behaviour unknown to him, felt they ought to give way to others with other riddles to propound. The result was that he had soon run the whole gauntlet of introductions, and found himself at a little table in the dining room, voraciously consuming cocktails and foie gras, and surrounded at last by familiar faces—as though he had swum through a bright tossing sea to a shore where old friends awaited him. Frenside was there, gruffly smoking and sipping, Eric Rauch, glossy and vivid in evening clothes, and Mrs. Spear, white-haired and affectionately wistful, murmuring: "How wonderful, Vance! To think the Willows should have led to this … " while Halo, flitting by, paused to introduce a new arrival, or to say, with a hand on his shoulder: "How does it feel to be It?"

Best of all was it, when everyone had gone but a few familiars, to draw up to the library fire, replenished with crackling logs, and listen to Tarrant and Rauch discussing the future of the New Hour, Frenside dropping his comments into the rifts of the talk, and Mrs. Spear saying, from the drowsy depths of her armchair: "But you simply mustn't do what they tell you, Vance—you must just drop everything and give yourself up to your novel. What's it to be called? Loot—ah, there's a whole panorama in that! Lewis, you must really give him his head; you mustn't tie him down to dates. Let him have all the time he wants. Remember, the Spirit bloweth where it listeth … and genius is the Spirit, isn't it, Frenside?"