He stopped short, and looked at her with the injured eyes of a child who had expected compassion and gets a box on the ear.

"You've destroyed a fine thing—a great thing, perhaps. It's an act of vandalism, as much as slashing a picture or breaking a statue—things people get arrested for," she continued recklessly.

"I—I? Destroyed—? But, Halo, you haven't even been listening. You think I tore up the manuscript? It was that damned fool who—"

"Yes, because you hurt him, wounded his pride as an artist. You don't know what it is to respect other people's work, the creation of their souls… . You don't know anything about anything, unless it happens to yourself!"

She saw the beads of perspiration come out again on his forehead, and while he felt for his handkerchief she knew he was anxiously asking himself how he was to go through another painful discussion so soon after the previous one. Usually he required twenty-four hours to recover after he had given somebody hell—and here was his own wife, who knew better than anyone else how sensitive he was, how heavily he had to pay for every nervous strain, and who was ruthlessly forcing him into a second scene before he had recovered from the first!

But Halo felt no pity. The sight of her husband's discomfiture only exasperated her. Often and often she had helped him back to self-esteem after one of his collapses; to do so was almost as necessary to her pride as to his, as long as they were to go on living together. But she was far past such considerations now, and pushed on without heeding. "You've destroyed something rare … something beautiful… ." She could only uselessly go over the same words.

Suddenly Tarrant's face became attentive. "You thought as well of the book as all that?"

"I thought great things of it—" The only thing that relieved her indignation was to rub into him the value of what he had lost. He should at least feel it commercially, if there was no other way of making him suffer.

He was looking at her rather shamefacedly. "Really, you might have dropped a hint of all this before… ."

"I read the chapters only a little while ago; and Vance didn't want me to form an opinion till he'd got on further, or to say anything about it."

"Saying anything about it hardly applies to telling me—your husband, and his editor."

"I've no doubt he would have shown it to you if you'd asked him."