It was his first opportunity for a quiet talk with Frenside, and he saw at once that there was nothing to fear if one really had something to say to him. Vance had plenty to say; the difficulty was that he did not quite know where to begin. But before he had done floundering Frenside had taken the words out of his mouth and was formulating his problem for him, clearly, concisely. He did not harangue him, but put a series of questions and helped Vance to answer them, so that even when Frenside was talking Vance seemed to be listening to himself.

"Yes—it's a bad time for a creator of any sort to be born, in this after-war welter, with its new recipe for immortality every morning. And I suppose, for one thing, you're torn between the demands of your publishers, who want another Instead, and your own impulse, which is to do something quite different—outside it, beyond it, away from it. And when you add to that all the critics (I believe they call themselves) knocking down their own standards once a day, and building up others to suit their purblind necessities—God, yes, it's a tough old vocation that will force its way through that yelping crowd, and I don't wonder a youngster like you is dazed by it."

Vance listened attentively. "I'm not dazed, though, not exactly. I said I couldn't see around me and outside of me. But there's a steady light somewhere inside of me… ."

"Yes, I believe there is," Frenside nodded. He drew at his pipe, crossed one leg over another, and finally said: "I'd have given a gold mine to have that light, at your age."

The blood rushed to Vance's forehead. "Oh, but you—"

"No, not that. But I'm straying from the subject: which is, plainly, what had you better do next?"

"Well, yes, that's so."

"And the obvious answer: 'Follow your impulse,' is no use when you have a hundred impulses tugging at you from the inside, and all that clatter of contradictory opinion from the outside, eh?" Frenside considered again. "The trouble with you is that you're suffering from the self-distrust produced by success. Nothing is as disintegrating as success: one blurb on a book jacket can destroy a man's soul more surely than the Quarterly killed Keats. And to young fellows like you, after you've made your first hit, the world is all one vast blurb. Well, you've got to stuff cotton in your ears and go ahead… ."