"The money?" Frenside looked surprised. "Why, you ought to be raking in royalties by now. I don't suppose you got much out of the New Hour for your serial? No, I thought not. The highbrow papers can't pay. But the book; why it's been out three or four months, hasn't it? It was a good deal talked about while it was coming out in the review, and you ought to have had a handsome sum on the advance sales, and another instalment after three months. I understand that's the regular arrangement for fiction—I wish it was for book-reviewing," he added mournfully.

Vance was glad of the opening; but for Frenside's question he would never have had the courage to mention his material difficulties, though it was partly with that object that he had called. But he felt the friendliness under the old man's gruff interrogations, and his anxiety burst from him. No, he said, he'd had no such privileges. The publishers, Dreck and Saltzer, to whom Tarrant had bound him for three years for all book publication, had been visibly disappointed by Instead. They didn't think the subject would take, and even if it did, they said the book was too short for big sales. There's nothing a publisher so hates to handle as a book—especially a novel—that doesn't fit into the regulation measures. Instead was only forty-five thousand words long, and Mr. Dreck told Vance he didn't know a meaner length. He'd rather have an elephant to handle like Ulysses or American Tragedy, than a mouthful like that. When readers have paid their money they like to sit down to a square meal. An oyster cocktail won't satisfy 'em. They want their money's worth; and that's at least a hundred thousand. And if you try charging 'em less, they say: "Hell, what's wrong with the book for it to sell so cheap? Not an hour's reading in it, most likely." So Dreck and Saltzer had halved the percentage previously agreed on, on the plea that the book wasn't a novel anyhow—nothing under ninety thousand is; and there had been no advance royalties, and there would be no payment at all till June. Of course, they said, if Vance had pulled off the Pulsifer Prize it would have been different. As it was, there was nothing in it for them, and they took the book only to oblige Tarrant.

Frenside listened attentively. When Vance had ended, he said: "From a business point of view I suppose they were right—before the book came out. But now? It's had a big sale, or so they say in their advertisements; and they wouldn't keep on advertising it if it hadn't. Can't you ask them to make you an advance, even if it's not in the bond?"