The only hope lay in returning as often as he could to this silent room, and trying to hack a way through the dense jungle of the past. But he was not sure it would be possible. He was aware that Mrs. Tracy, though she made no comment, wondered at his meetings with Miss Spear at the Willows, and at the permission given him to range among the books. He had spent two whole days there since his lunch at Eaglewood, and on this second day no one had come down from the "big house," as Mrs. Tracy called it, to let him in, and he had been obliged to go back to Paul's Landing and ask her for the keys. "I don't know as I ought to," Mrs. Tracy had said as she handed them over; and then: "Oh, well, I suppose it's all right if they say so." She referred to the Spears as "they," with a certain tartness, since she had learned of Vance's having lunched at Eaglewood. "Well, I never! Mebbe some time they'll remember that Upton and Laura Lou are related to them too." Vance felt that in asking for the keys he had vaguely offended her, and he was sorry; but he could not give up the books.

New York had completely vanished from his thoughts. He had the sense to understand that, to a boy like himself, New York could offer no opportunity comparable to this. He must learn something first—then try his luck there. When he had found himself, at the Eaglewood lunch table, seated next to the literary critic whose name, in his confusion, he had not caught, he had acted at once on the deep instinct which always made him seize on what was meant for his own nourishment, in however new and unfamiliar surroundings. Here, at least, he said to himself, was an editor—a journalist! He had no idea if The Hour were a daily (as its name seemed to imply), or some kind of highbrow review (as he feared); but whatever it was, it might give him his chance—and here he was sitting next to the very man who had the power to open its columns to him.