He cared only for his work now, or so he told himself. It was his one refuge from material and moral conditions so stifling and embittering that but for that other world to escape to he would have borrowed a revolver and made an end… . But his work too was becoming a perplexity. By the time he had finished Instead forty subjects were storming at the gates of his imagination and clamouring for embodiment. But his first encounter with the perplexing contradictory theories of the different literary groups to which the success of his book introduced him, all the wild currents and whirlpools of critical opinion in New York, had shaken his faith in himself; not in his powers of exposition and expression, which seemed to grow more secure with every page he wrote, but in his choice of a theme, a point of view, what the politicians called a "platform." It had never before occurred to him that the artist needed any, except that to which his invisible roots struck down, in the depths ruled by The Mothers; but these fellows with their dogmas and paradoxes, their contradictory pronouncements and condemnations, though all they said seemed so on the surface, excited his imagination and yet unsettled it. "What I need is a good talk with somebody outside of it all," he thought, his mind instinctively turning to Halo Tarrant; but it turned from her again abruptly, and he concluded: "A talk with a man—much older, and with a bigger range. Somebody who'll listen to me, anyhow—" for that was what his contemporaries would never do.

He read "In" on the dingy card under Frenside's doorbell, and ran upstairs to his door. Frenside, in a haze of pipe smoke, let him in, and Vance found himself in a small shabby room. A green-shaded lamp made a studious circle of light on a big table untidily stacked with books and reviews, and an old steamer chair with a rug on it was drawn up to a smouldering fire. Frenside looked surprised, and then said: "Glad you've come," and signed to Vance to take the seat opposite him. "Well, how are you standing your success?" he enquired, settling down into his deck chair.

"Oh, I don't think much about what's done," Vance answered. "It's the thing ahead that bothers me." He paused, and then asked: "Can I talk to you?" and the other pushed out his thorny eyebrows and answered: "Try."

"Well—it's this way. I'm not a bit like that fellow in the hymn. One step isn't enough for me. And I can't seem to see beyond; I'm in a fog that gets thicker and thicker."

Frenside leaned back with half-closed lids and seemed to take counsel of his pipe. "Creative or doctrinal?"

Vance smiled. "Oh, chiefly doctrinal, I guess."

"Well, that's not mortal. Out with your symptoms." And Vance began.