"Of course—I see with your eyes, and with mine too. That's the strangeness—and the beauty. Oh, Vance, how did you do it? I'm so glad!" She stood up and drew nearer. It was as if achievement were shining down on him. "You must go on—you must give up everything to finish this." He nodded, speechless, and she stood looking about the shadowy room. "And of course you must do your work here. You've made this place yours, you know. And you must be quiet and undisturbed. I'll arrange it for you." She sat down again, leaning toward him across the table. "But this is only a beginning; tell me how you mean to go on."

Chapter 6

Halo Tarrant's eleventh-hour decision not to sail with her husband was due to a trifling domestic quarrel; so most people would no doubt have called it—though she sometimes wondered how it was possible, in any given case, to say in advance what would turn out trifling and what ominous in the world of sentiment.

She had, or imagined she had, been looking forward eagerly to the trip; to the interesting people they would see, the excitement of playing even a small part in the literary world of London and Paris, and all the inducements which change offers to the young and the unsatisfied. Then, suddenly, a link had snapped in the chain holding her to Tarrant, and they stood miles apart, hardly visible to each other.

Queer that life should be at the mercy of such accidents! But in this case circumstances had been tending for some time to unsettle her husband's moral atmosphere, which was not at best a stable one. The New Hour was not taking hold as they had hoped. Subscriptions were not increasing. That, they were told, was natural: the first year of a new periodical is always critical. More disquieting was the fact that book shops and newsstands were not sending in heavier orders. There had even been a falling off in the sale of the last numbers, and the editorial programme for the rest of the year was hardly brilliant enough to revive the demand. The situation was not unusual; but that was precisely what made it mortifying to Tarrant. Halo had already learned that in her husband's scheme of life half successes were almost worse than failures. He had taken hold of the moribund journal and put new life into it; and if it were to languish again in his hands—if somebody else's failure were to become his—the situation would be much more humiliating (and more difficult for his vanity to account for) than if he had started a new enterprise and not made it a success.