"Oh, then—then I can tell you." He noticed, with that odd detachment which sometimes came to him in emotional moments, that her eyelids trembled slightly, as people's lips tremble when they are agitated. She seemed conscious of it, for she turned her head away without speaking.

"You were going to tell me," he reminded her.

She looked at him again, gently, attentively, as if her eyes were feeling the way for her words. "It begins so far back—the day we went up Thundertop. That day I made up my mind I must marry Lewis." She stopped. It was the first time Vance had ever heard her allude to her marriage. He had poured out all his secret misery to her on the night when he had sought her out to reproach her for having forced her way into Laura Lou's room. She knew the whole history of his married life, but no allusion to hers had ever escaped her, and he had imagined that she avoided the subject lest her confidences should complicate Vance's relations with her husband.

After a moment she continued: "But what's the use? People do what they must—what they think they must. It's all bound up with my family history—it's too long to tell. But Lewis was generous to them at a time when I couldn't be, and that held me fast… . You understand?"

Vance understood. He thought of the generosity of Laura Lou, who had lavished her all on him, and had held him fast.

"Life's such a perplexity and a waste," she pursued—"or at the time it seems so. There were so many times when I knew I was utterly useless to Lewis, and when I imagined I could have helped you if I'd been free. And now, all of a sudden, everything's changed… ." She put her hand on his. "Could I help you still—?"

"Yes."

"Vance!" She sat silent, and he laid his other hand on hers. At length she began to speak more connectedly, to tell him of two almost simultaneous events in her life—the sudden death of the old Miss Lorburn of Stuyvesant Square, who had left her the Willows, with more money than she could have hoped for, and the discovery that the tie between Tarrant and herself had become as irksome to her husband as to her. The latter announcement was no surprise to Vance, for at the New Hour office the jokes about the Pulsifer First Novel Prize had been coupled with a good deal of gossip about the donor and Tarrant. Vance recalled his own experience with Mrs. Pulsifer, and felt a recoil of disgust.