She made the suggestion gently, appealingly, in her most tranquil and compassionate voice. Yes, he thought, stirred by sudden exasperation: that was the way with people to whom material ease was as much a matter of course as the air they breathed. It was always an unwholesome business for the rich and poor to mix; the poor ought to keep to their own kind.

"Drop it?" he echoed with a laugh. "Well, that wouldn't be exactly easy. Your husband has agreed to let me off my monthly article so that I can keep all my time for the novel; and now you advise me to drop the novel! What I've got to do is to finish it as quickly as I can, and let it take its chance. I'm doomed to write potboilers—if ever I can learn the trick!"

She paled a little. He saw that his words had hurt her, and he was glad they had. She continued to look at him earnestly, with her narrowed wistful gaze.

"You never will learn the trick; I'm not afraid for you."

He laughed again—she was preposterous! "Oh, well, I didn't come here to talk business," he said irritably. "What I wanted was your opinion—now I've got it. And as it's exactly the same as mine I'd throw the book into the fire if I could."

She received this in silence, sitting quite still, as her way was when she was turning over anything in her mind. "Vance," she said abruptly, "when you brought me these last chapters you didn't feel like that about them. You had faith in them an hour ago. You mustn't let my chance suggestions influence you; no artist should care so much for what people say… ."

He jumped up, the pages on his knee scattering to the floor. "Care what people say? I don't care a damn what people say… . It's only what you say," he broke out with sudden vehemence.

A little flash of light ran over her face: her only way of blushing was this luminous glow on her pallor. "But that's even more unreasonable … " she began.

"Oh, God, what's reason got to do with it? You've been the breath of life to me all these months. If you cut off a fellow's oxygen he collapses… . Don't talk to me about not caring what you say! There'd be nothing left to me then."

The silence of the dusky room seemed to receive and reverberate his words as the shadows caught and intensified the wavering gleams of the fire. Vance leaned against the mantel and stared down with blind eyes at the scattered pages of his manuscript. For a while—a long while, it seemed to him—Mrs. Tarrant did not move or look up.

"There'd be your genius left to you," she said, still motionless in her corner.