Vance hesitated. Laura Lou was beginning to object to the number of sittings—beginning, he fancied, to suspect that they were a pretext; just as, under her mother's persuasion, she had suspected that his work at the Willows was a pretext for meeting Mrs. Tarrant. Oh, hell—to give one big shake and be free! "Yes, tomorrow," he rang out resolutely, as if Laura Lou could hear him, and resent his challenge… . When the sittings began he had begged her to accompany him to the studio. "When the Stram girl sees you she'll do you and not me," he had joked; and the glow of gratified vanity had flown to her cheeks. But she had gone with him, and nobody had noticed her—neither Rebecca nor any of the young men. The merely beautiful was not in demand in Rebecca's crowd—was in fact hardly visible to them. Or rather, they had forced beauty into a new formula, into which Laura Lou's obvious loveliness did not fit. And when she had murmured: "Why, you don't say … " or: "See here, I guess you're quizzing me," her conversational moves were at an end, and she could only sit, lovely and unperceived, in a cloud of disappointment. She never went back to Rebecca's.

Eric Rauch walked away with Vance, and as they reached the street Vance's bruised soul spoke out. "Hearing those fellows talk I don't see what they can find in my book."

"Why, they have a good time reading it. They crack their teeth over their own conundrums, and now and then they just indulge in the luxury of lying back and reading a real book."

"But they believed in Fynes last year."

"Sure. And they believed in you till Gratz Blemer came along. What you've got to do now is to go Blemer one better—do your big New York novel in his style," Rauch ended with a laugh, as their ways parted.