Oh, but what folly! Of course, if she was really to help him with his work, all those other ideas must be put aside and forgotten. And she did so want to help him; it was her greatest longing, the need of her blood. The thought of it fed her lonely hours, filled her empty life—or nearly filled it. And she hoped he would feel the same longing, the same urgent necessity, and would come back to her soon for more companionship, more encouragement… . Perhaps she had not encouraged him enough, that last evening, about his work, that is. It was well to remember that authors, even the least fatuous and the most intelligent of them, were nervous, irritable, self-conscious: the slightest unfavourable criticism flayed them alive. In that respect certainly (she smiled) Tarrant seemed qualified to join the brotherhood. But poor Vance's sensitiveness was of a different kind, the result of inexperience and humility. Under it she always felt an inarticulate awareness of his powers; his doubts, she was sure, concerned only his aptitude for giving those powers full expression. She could almost picture him, in some glorious phase of future achievement, flinging down his pen to cry out like a great predecessor: "My God, but this is genius—!"

She was thus softly pondering, in a mood of moral beatitude, when Tarrant turned up with his usual nervous: "I'm not late, am I? Well, put off dinner a few minutes, will you?" And now here he was again, fresh from his dressing room, brushed, glossy, physically renovated, but nervously on edge and obviously in need of consolation… . Goodbye to her moral beatitude!

Since their one quarrel about Vance Weston—the quarrel which had resulted in Halo's deciding not to accompany her husband to Europe—the young man's name had seldom figured in their talk. The unexpected success of Instead had been balm to Tarrant's editorial vanity, and Halo had not suspected that there had been a subsequent difference between the two men till the evening, a few months previously, when Vance had told her of his asking Tarrant to raise his salary or annul their contract. She had suffered bitterly on hearing of this, but she had suffered in silence. She could not give Vance the clandestine help she would have wished to; she had neither money of her own, nor means of raising any. And she knew it would only injure him if she betrayed his confession and appealed to her husband's generosity. Tarrant had no generosity of that kind; he would simply have said: "I suppose he's been trying to borrow of you now, after failing to pull it off with Mrs. Pulsifer"; and if he had said that she thought she would have got up and walked out of his house—forever.