George Frenside was an institution at Eaglewood, and wherever else the Spears set up their tents. His short stocky figure, his brooding Socratic head, his cigar and eyeglasses, figured among Halo's earliest recollections, and she had always seen him as she saw him now: elderly, poor, unsuccessful, and yet more masterful, more stimulating, than anyone else she had known. "A fire that warms everything but itself," she had once defined him; but he had snapped back: "I don't warm, I singe."

Not a bad description of his relation to most people; but she, who knew him so well, knew also the communicative glow he could give out, and often wondered why it had never lit up his own path.

She was familiar with Frenside's explanation: the critical faculty outweighed all others in him, and, as he had often told her, criticism won't keep its man. He saw (he also said) the skeletons of things and people: he was a walking radiograph. God knows he didn't want to be—would rather not have had a decomposing mind. But it was the one allotted to him, and with it he had lingered on the outskirts of success, contributing fierce dissections of political and literary ideas to various newspapers and reviews, often refusing to write an article when it was asked for—and especially when a good sum was offered for it—and then suddenly dashing off a brilliant diatribe which no one wanted, and which came back to him from one editor after another. He had written, a good many years earlier, a brief volume of essays called Dry Points, which had had a considerable success in the limited circle of the cultivated, and been enthusiastically reviewed in England. This had produced a handsome offer from a publisher, who asked Frenside for a revolutionary book on education: a subject made to his hand. The idea delighted him, he wanted the money badly, he had never before had the offer of so large a sum; and he sat paralyzed by the completeness of the opportunity. One day he found a title which amused him—The Art of Imparting Ignorance—and that was the only line of the book he ever wrote.

"It's one of the surest signs of genius to do your best when you're working for money," he told Halo. "I have only talent—and the idea of doing a book to order simply benumbed me. What the devil can I do but keep on hack-writing?" But even that he did only intermittently. Nevertheless, he held jealously to his pecuniary independence, and, though he frequently accepted the hospitality of the Spears, and of a few other old friends, he was never known to have borrowed a penny of any of them, a fact which Halo Spear's own brief experience led her to regard as unusual, and almost unaccountable. But then, she thought, there was nothing about George Frenside that wasn't queer, even to his virtues… .