Tarrant, that evening, got home late and out of humor. His lateness ought in reason to have annoyed his wife, for they were off to Eaglewood the next day for Christmas, and many holiday questions were still unsettled; but she met him with her vague short-sighted smile and the air of one whom nothing in the world can annoy.

At dinner she ascribed his sulkiness and taciturnity to strained nerves and the effort not to betray himself before the maid. The first number of the New Hour — they had accepted Frenside’s rechristening — was to appear on the second of January, and the intervening week was a bad time for readjustments. No wonder the editor was on edge.

Over coffee and his cigar he broke out. What did she suppose? That damned protégé of Frenside’s — that Middle–Western yahoo . . . Weston, yes . . . had been turning the office into a beer garden. . . . Yes, this very afternoon. Outrageous . . . Why, a drunken fellow came in and tried to fight him . . . and, well, the fact was Weston funked it . . . luckily, or they might have had the police there . . . and the other man would have made mincemeat of him. . . . Disgusting business . . . he’d told Weston what he thought of it. . . . Over a woman, of course . . .

“A woman?” Halo echoed, startled. “Why, he’s only just married, isn’t he?” Well — there you had it, her husband’s shrug emphasized. He was that sort, was Frenside’s little pet. . . . Messing about with women before his honeymoon was over . . . The cigar drew less well than usual; Tarrant stood up and paced the floor angrily. Disgusting . . . he wouldn’t have it, he repeated. Good mind to sack the fool on the spot . . . a coward too, that was the worst of it. He threw the cigar into the fire, and groped nervously for another . . . .

Halo, leaning back in her deep armchair, looked up at him with indolent curiosity. “Lewis, aren’t you just simply overworked — overwrought?” she suggested.

“Just simply —?”

“I mean haven’t you let your nerves get the better of you? You look dead beat.” She made a friendly gesture toward the opposite armchair. “Sit down and light your cigar. Who told you this preposterous yarn anyhow?”

“Preposterous yarn?” He paled with anger, and she saw her mistake. “No one told me — no one had to. I was there. In the front row — saw the ruffian slap Weston’s face, and Weston turn the other cheek. Precisely.”

Halo mused, perplexed but still unperturbed. “But the fact that the ruffian was drunk — isn’t that the reason?”

“Why Weston wouldn’t fight?”

“Not in your office, at any rate. Put yourself in his place.”

But Tarrant knew of few places worthy to put himself in. “Thank you, my dear. I don’t happen to have lowdown blackguards trying to fight me.”

“I should have thought any man might, accidentally.” She paused and reflected. “Anyhow, it doesn’t seem to have bothered young Weston much,” she let drop with a retrospective smile.

Through Tarrant’s fresh cloud of cigar smoke she saw his suspicious flush. “I don’t know how much it bothered him; but he looked pretty thoroughly ashamed of himself.”

“He got over it quickly then. He’d forgotten all about it when he was here just now.”

Tarrant swung round in surprise, and she continued, in the tone of leisurely narrative: “About an hour ago. He dashed in on his way to the train, staggering under his mother-in-law’s Christmas bundles. He’d called on very particular business. You’ll never guess . . .”

“Why should I?” Tarrant growled.

“Try — ”

He answered by another shrug — this time of indifference.

“Well, he wanted to borrow Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. He’d never heard of them till today. Or of Tchehov or the moderns, of course . . . It appears someone in the office said something about ‘the Russians,’ and as soon as he’d finished his work he rushed to the public library; but it was closed, so he came here. Rather sweet of him, I thought. He didn’t say how d’ye do, or any of the useless things. He just said: ‘Who are the Russians? I want to read them. Have you got them?’ And went off with his arms full.” She sank back in her cushions, and closed her lids on the picture. The fire crackled companionably, and Tarrant’s cigar smoke wove its soothing cloud about their silence. Even with her eyes shut she could guess that something was slowly breaking down the hard crust of his resentment. Expediency . . . uncertainty . . . it didn’t matter. . . . After an interval he said, more to himself than her: “Well, I suppose he WAS right not to let that blackguard raise hell in the office. . . . Only it goes against me when a man seems to show the white feather . . . .”

“Ah, but YOU . . .” his wife murmured; and opened her eyes to meet his gratified smile.

But his face was not the one on which her gaze rested. Her vision was turned inward. There had happened to her, suddenly, what may happen at any stage, however late, in the acquaintance, even the intimacy, between two people: she had seen Vance Weston that afternoon — really, literally seen him — for the first time. Before that, her glance — curious, then interested, then admiring — had merely brushed him with a glowworm spark. She had caught, as it were, glimpses of him in the blur of himself; rifts and gleams; a bit here, a bit there, of the outward accidents of his appearance. Now, all at once, she possessed him as a whole, seemed to discern behind his fluid features the power which had built them. Uneven, untrue to itself, as his face appeared, with its queer mixture of maturity and boyishness, instability and power, she suddenly beheld it in the something which harmonized these contradictions and bound him together like a strong outline. Was that perhaps what genius was? And this boy with the tumbled brown hair, the resolute lines of brow and nose, the brooding impulsive lips and the strident untutored voice — was this the way genius was cut? . . . Her heart missed a beat, as if it had paused with her mind to consider him. “It’s like seeing him dead,” she thought — so entirely had his face been stripped to the essentials. And she reminded herself, with a shiver, that one never forgot a single lineament of a face one had seen dead. . . . “It’s more than I bargained for,” she murmured, and then: “Coward!”

She pulled herself up to the surface of her eyes, and gave her husband back his smile.

The first number of the New Hour made a hit. The New York publishing world rang with the figures of its sale; and the crown of its success was “Unclaimed,” the quiet story by the young author no one had heard of. A war story too — fatal handicap! But everyone agreed that it sounded a new note. The public was fed up with new notes, yet dared not praise anything without applying that epithet to it (so Frenside explained). “But it is a new note; I saw it at once when he brought me the thing,” Tarrant grumbled, adding impatiently: “If it depended on you to give a new author a start —!”

“Where’s my lantern?” Frenside mocked; but the sting of his mockery was submerged in the warm tide of praise which met Tarrant wherever he went. He was acutely proud of his first editorial achievement, and his gratified pride transformed him in his wife’s eyes. “I’ve always known he was cleverer than anybody else — all he needed was a chance to show it,” she thought, her hungry imagination clutching at every substitute for belief in him. Yet in an inner fold of her heart something whispered: “How much I would rather believe in him against everybody!”

Tarrant had said one day, in a burst of satisfaction: “I think you ought to invite that Weston boy here; we ought to have a party for the New Hour’s first birthday. People are beginning to ask about him; they’re already wondering about the Pulsifer Prize — ” and Halo, rousing herself from an indolence she could hardly explain, had echoed: “Oh, if you think so — certainly.” In reality, she had relegated the thought of Vance to the back of her mind. After all, it was her husband who had resuscitated The Hour, not Vance Weston. But that was the way of the world: people fastened on one good thing in a review — a new review especially — and talked as if that were the principal, if not the only, reason for its popularity. Whereas the real credit belonged to the editor, the guiding and selecting mind, in this case to the man who had discovered Vance Weston and made him known, as he would in future discover and make known many others. Halo flamed with impatience at the public’s obtuseness . . . .

“Oh, but of course you must . . . you must let me introduce him. . . . Of course he won’t think anything of the kind . . . .” Mrs. Tarrant, slim and animated in her black dress, with lacy wings floating with the motions of her arms, moved away from the hearth, where she had been standing beside an exaggeratedly tall young woman whose little head drooped sideways from a long throat, and whose lids were cast down in deprecation on the rich glitter of her gold brocade.

“Oh, Halo, no . . . I don’t know . . . Won’t he think . . .? I do want to be so utterly aloof and impartial . . . .”

“Well, but you will, my dear. You don’t suppose every young writer who’s introduced to you in the course of the winter will imagine you’re sampling him for the Pulsifer Prize?”

“How absurd, Halo! When of course it’s ALL in the hands of the committee. . . . But I do so want to preserve my complete serenity, my utter detachment . . . .” Mrs. Pulsifer flung the words after her in a series of staccato cries.

Halo laughed, and moved through the groups of guests scattered about her library to the corner where Vance Weston, his back to the company, stood in absorbed contemplation of the bookshelves. Until he had entered the room a few minutes earlier she had not seen him since he had come to borrow her Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, and now, in the noise and sparkle of her first evening party for the New Hour, he had become once more an exterior, episodical figure, not the being whose soul had touched hers that other evening. She even reflected, as she approached him: “He’s shorter than I remembered; his shoulders are too heavy . . . he gets into fights about women . . . .” as if retouching an idealized portrait abruptly confronted with the reality.

“Vance,” she said, and he turned with a start of surprise, as though he had imagined himself alone. Halo smiled: “This isn’t the Willows, you know — I mean,” she hurried on, fearing he might misinterpret the allusion, “you’re at a party, and lots of the people here want to know you; first of all, Mrs. Pulsifer.”

“Mrs. Pulsifer —?” he echoed, his eyes coming back from a long way off and resting on his hostess in slow recognition.

“The prize-giver. Over there, in the gold-coloured dress. Come — poor Jet’s not alarming; she’s alarmed.”

“Alarmed?”

Halo slipped her arm through his. “Frightfully shy, really. Isn’t it funny? She’s in terror lest every author who’s introduced to her should ask for the prize — yet she wants them all introduced!”

“But isn’t the prize given by a committee?”

“Yes. Only she likes to look the candidates over. Come!”

It amused her to introduce Vance to people. It was the first time she had seen him in a worldly setting, and she was interested in watching the effect he produced — especially the effect on Mrs. Pulsifer. On the whole, giving parties for the New Hour might turn out to be great fun. She was only sorry that her young lion, in his evening clothes, looked unexpectedly heavy and common . . . .

Vance hung back. “What’s she like?” he asked, as if his decision depended on that.

“Like? I don’t know . . . .” Halo hesitated. “You see, she’s not an actual person: she’s a symptom. That’s what Frenny and I call the people who are everything in turn. They catch things from another kind that we call germ-carriers, people who get every new literary and artistic disease and hand it on. But come: she’s awfully nice, really.”

Vance still hesitated. “Do you think I’ll like her?” he asked oddly; and Halo laughed and wrinkled her shortsighted eyes. “Does one have to — at parties?”

“I don’t know, I’ve never been to a party before — like this.”

“Well, the important thing is that she should like you.”

“Why?&............