Frenside, at this juncture, had the happy thought of suggesting that Tarrant should go over to London and Paris and look about him: personal contact with editors and authors abroad might lead, he thought, to something interesting. Tarrant, always exhilarated by any new plan, at once became buoyant and masterful. He declared he had always thought he ought to go; he was glad that, for once, his wife and Frenside had come round to his view. He was prepared, Halo knew, to face a pecuniary loss on the review for the first year or two, but not a loss of prestige. Being his review, it must be brilliant or vanish: a slow decline would be unbearable. But he was confident that great things would result from this journey, and that he would come home with a glittering list of contributors.

Whenever his faith in himself returned, his wife's revived with it, and the two hurried joyfully through their preparations. But on the evening before they were to sail Tarrant came home in a different humour. He and Halo were alone, and when they returned to the library after dinner he broke out at once: "Well, we're dished this time; I don't see that there's much use in sailing."

Halo roused herself out of her happy preoccupation. Hurry, confusion, sudden preparations of any sort, always amused and stimulated her; but they made Lewis nervous—and so did the mere reaction from optimism. She had learned to allow for that, and only echoed absently: "No use sailing?" while her real self remained absorbed in luggage labels, passports and deck chairs. At length her husband's silence told her that something more was expected of her, and still absently she added: "Why?"

As if her delay had reached to the extreme limit of his patience, his answer sprang back: "The Pulsifer Prize. That fool Weston has gone and lost it."

Halo shook off her travel dream with a start. What on earth, she wondered, could have set Lewis fretting about the Pulsifer Prize? But what was the use of wondering? She supposed that, after two or three years of marriage, there were times when most husbands seemed to their wives like harmless lunatics (when it wasn't the other way round, or perhaps reciprocal), and she answered, in a tone of good-humoured reminder: "Lost it? How could he, when it's not given until next November?"

Tarrant, with a shrug, threw himself back wearily in his chair, and she remembered, too late, that there was nothing he so loathed as being humoured. "My dear," he said, "what's the sense of that sort of talk? You're not really as simple as all that: you know perfectly well that the prize is given the minute Jet Pulsifer takes a shine to one of the candidates. And she had taken a shine to that silly ass."