The despair of youth overcame him. He felt a sudden loss of faith in himself, in his powers, in the intrinsic interest of things, in his capacity to drag through these next two years of poverty, drudgery, and mental hunger.

He asked the waitress if he could telephone. She said yes, and led him to the back of the room. He looked up a number and rang… . Suddenly he heard an answering voice, and repeated the number. "Yes," the voice said. He stammered: "I want to speak to Mrs. Tarrant," and the same voice, with a note of reproach, came back: "Why, Vance, don't you know me? Yes … I'm here… . Yes, come … come at once … do." He hung up, and turned back dizzily to the door. She was there, she was so close that he seemed to feel her light touch on his shoulder… . And she had been there, so near to him, all these months, and he had never once tried to see her. It seemed incredible, preposterous, the very core and centre of his folly. Why had he gone on starving when the banquet was spread and within his reach?

At the door of the Tarrants' apartment house his morbid sensitiveness to the visible world and its implications produced in him an abrupt change of view. It was long since he had entered one of those quiet commodious buildings, where everything bespoke conditions so different from those which imprisoned him. He recalled with compunction his outburst against Laura Lou. No wonder she had resented Mrs. Tarrant's visit—no wonder any advance from people living in ease and amenity seemed to the poor child like a deliberate condescension. Poor Laura Lou! If he could have given her a little cottage in a pleasant suburb, something of her own to be proud of and fuss over, it might have altered everything … As he stepped into the panelled lift and swung up to the top story he felt a gnawing anger against the unfairness of life, the cruelty of social conditions. He no longer remembered that when he had called up Mrs. Tarrant the thought of her had been a means of escape from his misery, that he had yielded to the urgent need of talking over his new book with her, and plunging once more into the healing springs of her sympathy. Now that he was on her threshold he felt only the blind desire to punish her—punish her for her tactless intrusion on his wife, for living as she lived, for being what she was, for not leaving him and Laura Lou alone to live and to be as they were doomed to, with or without her interference… .