As he turned the corner of his street he came upon a pedlar beating his horse. Horses were rare nowadays in New York streets, pedlars almost obsolete; but in this forgotten district both were still occasionally to be seen… . Vance stopped and looked at the load and the horse. The load was not very heavy: the horse was thin but not incapable of effort. He was not struggling against an overload, but simply balking, thrusting his shabby forelegs obstinately against the asphalt. Unknown to his driver, something was offending or torturing him somewhere—he had the lifted lip and wild-rolling eye of a horse in pictures of battlefields. And the human fool stood there stupidly belabouring him… . Vance's anger leapt up. "Here, you damned fool, let that horse alone, will you… ."

The man, astonished and then furious, cursed back copiously in Italian and struck the horse again. "Ah, that's it, is it?" Vance shouted. He caught the man by the arm, and remembering his Dante, cried out joyously: "Lasciate ogni speranza!" as he fell on him. The tussle was brief. He struck the whip out of the pedlar's hand, punched him in the face, and then, seeing the loafers assembling, and a policeman in the distance, suddenly remembered that it was Tarrant he had been thrashing, and shamefacedly darted away down the street to the shelter of Mrs. Hubbard's door.

Chapter 9

It was one of Tarrant's accomplishments to be able to go imperturbably through a scene where his advantage depended on his keeping his temper; but it was one of his weaknesses to collapse afterward, his overtaxed self-control abandoning him to womanish tremors, damp hands, and brittle nerves.

When he turned up that evening, his wife knew at once that he was in the throes of one of these reactions. Something had gone wrong again at the office. Of late, on such occasions, he had taken to seeking comfort in the society of Mrs. Pulsifer. Halo knew this and was faintly amused. She knew also that he was losing interest in the New Hour because it had not succeeded as he had hoped, and that he had begun to write a novel—probably under Mrs. Pulsifer's inspiration. An important Pulsifer Prize for First Novels was to be added to the one already established for the Best Short Story; and it was like Tarrant, to whom the money was utterly indifferent, to be tempted to compete for the sake of publicity. His restless vanity could never find sufficient pasturage, and as the years passed without the name of Lewis Tarrant becoming a household word on two continents (or even figuring in the English Who's Who), his wife noticed that his appetite for praise grew coarser.