Vance's blood was up. "I don't understand. It was with your consent that I dropped the monthly articles to give all my time to my novel—"

"Oh, just so," Tarrant interrupted suavely. "And I presume you've got along with it fairly well, as I understand you've been negotiating privately to sell it to Lambart."

"It was Lambart who came to me. He offered to fix it up with Dreck and Saltzer. The price I had contracted for with them is so much below what I understand I have a right to expect that I couldn't afford to refuse."

"Refuse what? Are you under the impression that you can sell the same book twice over, to two different publishers? You signed a contract some time ago with Dreck and Saltzer for all your literary output for four years—and that contract has over two years more to run. Dreck and Saltzer have asked me for an explanation because it was through me that the New Hour was able to put you in the way of securing a publisher. They're not used to this way of doing business; neither am I, I confess."

Vance was silent. The blood was beating angrily in his temples; but, put thus baldly, he could not but feel that his action seemed underhand, if not actually dishonourable. Of course he ought not to have concealed from Tarrant and his publishers that he had authorized Lambart to negotiate for him. He saw clearly that what he had done was open to misconstruction; but his personal antagonism toward Tarrant robbed him of his self-control. "The price I was to get from Dreck and Saltzer wasn't a living wage—"

Tarrant leaned back in his chair, and drummed on the desk with long impatient fingers. His hands were bloodless but delicately muscular: he wore a dark red seal ring on his left fourth finger. With those fingers he had pushed back his wife's hair from the temples, where Vance had so often watched the pulses beat … had traced the little blue veins that netted them… . Vance's eyes were blurred with rage.

"Why did you sign the contract if you weren't satisfied with it?" Tarrant continued, in his carefully restrained voice. It was evident that he was very angry, but that the crude expression of his wrath would have given him no more pleasure than an unskilful stroke gives a good tennis player. His very quietness increased Vance's sense of inferiority.

"I signed because I was a beginner, because I had to… ."