"Vance Weston—wake up, for the Lord's sake! Don't look as if you were trying to listen in at a gas pump… ."

He roused himself to the fact that he was in Rebecca Stram's studio, perched on a shaky platform, and leaning sideways in the attitude the sculptress had imposed on him… . "I must have been asleep… ." he mumbled.

The studio was an attic, self-consciously naked and untidy. Somebody had started to paint maps of the four quarters of the globe on the bare walls, but had got bored after Africa, and the fourth quarter was replaced by a gigantic Cubist conundrum which looked like a railway junction after a collision between excursion trains but was cryptically labelled: "Tea and Toast for One."

A large black stove stood out from one wall, and about it were gathered, that December afternoon, a group of young men as self-consciously shabby as the room. The only exception was Eric Rauch, whose dapperness of dress seemed proof against Bohemian influences, and who smoked cigarettes undauntedly among a scornful cluster of pipes. He, and everybody else, knew that he was there only on sufferance, because he was one of the New Hour fellows, and might come in useful any day, and because Vance Weston, the literary hero of the hour, belonged—worse luck!—to the New Hour. Eric Rauch, in spite of his little volume of esoteric poetry, was regarded as a Philistine by the group about Rebecca's stove, the fellows who wrote for the newest literary reviews and the latest experimental theatres. But they knew it was all in the day's work for Rebecca to portray the last successful novelist, and as poor Weston was owned by the New Hour, they had to suffer Rauch as his bear leader.

Above the stove they were discussing This Globe, Gratz Blemer's new novel, and Vance, roused out of his dream of Pondicherry, indolently listened. At first these literary symposia had interested and stimulated him; he felt as if he could not get enough of the cryptic wisdom distilled by these young men. But after ten or fifteen sittings to Rebecca, about whose stove they were given to congregating, he had gone the round of their wisdom, and come back still hungry.

He knew exactly, beforehand, what they were going to say about This Globe, and was bewildered and discouraged because he did not see how they could possibly admire it as much as they professed to if they also admired Instead. And of that fact there could be no doubt. Instead had taken as much with the Cocoanut Tree crowd as with what they contemptuously called the parlour critics. It was one of those privileged books which somehow contrive to insinuate themselves between the barriers of coterie and category, and are as likely to be found in the hands of the commuter hurrying to his office as of the wild-haired young men in gaudy pullovers theorizing in the void about Rebecca's stove.