Vance walked away with a conquering step. Frenside had set his blood circulating. “I believe you’ve got the stuff in you” — when a man like Frenside said it, all the depths cried out in answer. “Loot — Loot — Loot — a big American novel; that’s what I’ve got to do,” Vance sang, almost shouted to himself, as he trudged homeward in the dusk.

He had spoken the plain truth when he told Frenside that nothing mattered but his work. When that possessed him it swept away all material miseries, poverty, debt, the uncertainty of the future, the dull dissatisfactions of the present. He felt that he could go without food, money, happiness — even happiness — as long as the might within drove him along the creative way. . . . “That’s a man to talk to,” he thought, tingling with the glow of Frenside’s rude sincerity. He was dead right, too, about a thing like Instead being a sideshow, about the necessity of coming to grips with reality, with the life about him. Vance brushed aside the vision of his East Indian novel — the result of a casual glance at a captivating book called The French in India — and said to himself: “He’s right, again, when he says I ought to go into society, see more people, study — what’s the word he used? — manners. I read too much, and don’t brush up against enough people. If I’m going to write Loot I’ve got to get my store clothes out of pawn.” He laughed at the idea . . . .

His dream was cut short by the vision of Laura Lou waiting for him in the dismal bedroom of the place where they boarded. They had begun life in New York in a decent rooming house, recommended by Vance’s old friend, the manager of Friendship House. It was clean, hygienic, not too dear; in fact, would have suited them exactly if, as cold weather came on, Laura Lou’s colds had not so often prevented her going out for her meals. She tried preparing their food on an electric cooker, but the dishes she produced were unpalatable and indigestible, and the woman who kept the house objected to the mess that resulted. So they had moved to their present quarters, far over on the West Side, in a leprous brownstone survival of an earlier world. When Vance entered the greasy hall a smell of canned soup and stale coffee told him that dinner had begun. “I do wish Laura Lou would go down without waiting for me,” he thought impatiently; but she never would, and on the days when he was late, and she had to eat her food cold, she always ended up with a sick headache. He reflected with a grin, as he sprang up the stairs, that the people he was going to describe in Loot — the dress-clothes people — were at that hour still dawdling over tea and cocktails, as he and Mrs. Pulsifer had done, in that circular panelled room with the flowers and the dove-coloured armchairs, to which he had never again been admitted. . . . Dinner, in that world, was two or three hours off, down the vista of a brilliant night . . . .

In the letter rack Vance found some letters, and pocketed them without a glance. He guessed at once what they were: offers from editors and publishers tempted by the success of Instead and making proposals which, hard up as he was, he would have to refuse. Neither Tarrant nor the publishers Tarrant had imposed on him would consent to let him off his bargain, or to increase by a dollar the contracts made with him. He couldn’t see what there was “in it” for them; his indifference to his own work, once it was finished and he had turned to something else, made him underrate the prestige that Instead had conferred on the New Hour, and he ascribed to editorial obstinacy Tarrant’s natural desire to make the best of his opportunity. For another two years every line that Vance wrote was tariffed in advance and belonged to the New Hour, and then to Dreck and Saltzer. Yet write he must, without a pause, or he and Laura Lou would starve. For himself he would have preferred starvation; but for Laura Lou he must at least provide such sustenance as Mrs. Hubbard’s table offered. Mrs. Hubbard, his landlady (for obvious reasons called “Mother” by her boarders), was very particular about the character and antecedents of the guests she received; the latter understood that the social fastidiousness entailed by her being the widow of a southern colonel made it impossible for her to be equally particular as to the food she provided. “If I have to overlook a blemish I’d rather it was in the mutton than in the moràl of the ladies and gentlemen I receive in my home — in the late Colonel Hubbard’s home,” said Mrs. Hubbard, who was persuaded that “moràl,” a word she often used, was French for morals. The late colonel had been vice-consul in a French colonial port, and Mrs. Hubbard prided herself on her French.

Vance, springing upstairs, pushed open the door of the room into which he and Laura Lou and their humble possessions (including the fetish dove) were crowded. “Hullo,” he flung ahead of him gaily. “Sorry I’m late; I’ve been working out a big new idea for a novel.”

As he spoke he remembered how often of late he had given the same reason for his unpunctuality, and how slight a spark of interest it roused in her. Did she believe him, even? Very likely not. She was becoming more and more resentful of the hours he devoted to Rebecca Stram; unless, indeed, she suspected him of using the sculptress as a screen, and secretly giving his time to “that woman” — who to her was still, and perhaps always would be, Halo Tarrant. For whatever cause, he saw at a glance that she nursed a grievance, a fact confirmed by her not replying to his remark. It was always a proof of resentment in Laura Lou to ignore what he said, and meet each of his conversational attempts by a totally irrelevant reply.

“The dinner bell rang ever so long ago,” she said, rising listlessly from her rocking chair.

“I could smell that fact as soon as I opened the front door,” he returned, his eagerness driven back on itself by her indifference. “Just let me wash my hands — ” and he began to throw down on the floor a pile of linen stacked in the washbasin.

“Oh don’t, Vance — it’s the laundry, just come home,” she exclaimed, stooping to pick up the scattered garments. “And this floor’s so dirty — ”

“Well, you’ve got a closet to keep things in,” he retorted, exasperated, as he always was, by her growing inertia, her way of letting their clothes lie about and accumulate in the cramped untidy room, rather than take the trouble of putting them where they belonged. But he was always ashamed of himself when he spoke to her impatiently, and to efface his retort he added, while he dried his hands: “Been out any this afternoon, old lady?”

“No.”

“Why not? A little walk would have done you good.”

“I didn’t feel like walking.”

It was their eternal daily dialogue. Why didn’t she ever feel like walking? In the early days she used to spring up the hillsides with him like a young deer — but now, day after day, she just sat in her chair, and rocked and brooded. He suspected her of thinking — not unnaturally — that in a city there was no object in going out unless you had money for shopping or the movies. She had never said so — she never complained of their lack of money; but she could not understand what else there was to do in a place like New York.

“Then you’ve stuck indoors again all day and not spoken to a human being? I hate your being always alone like that,” he said, dashing the brush irritably through his hair.

“I wasn’t alone.” She paused, and then brought out: “Not this afternoon, at least. I had a visitor.”

“A visitor? Well, that’s good.” He supposed it was one of Mrs. Hubbard’s other “guests,” though he knew that Laura Lou did not encourage their neighbourly advances, partly through shyness, partly, he suspected, through some fierce instinct of self~protection, the desire to keep him and their two lives absolutely to herself.

“Come along down. . . . Who was it?” he continued absently, passing his arm through hers.

She stood still. “It was Mrs. Tarrant.”

He stopped short also, in astonishment. “Mrs. Tarrant? She came to see you?”

“Yes.”

“Was the parlour empty? Could you see her there?” he questioned, evoking in a flash the strange unlikely scene, and the possibility of Mrs. Hubbard’s other ladies watchfully clustered about the unknown visitor.

“I don’t know. I sent word by the girl I was sick — and the first thing I knew she came up here.”

“HERE— Mrs. Tarrant did?” Vance stood gazing about him, as if brutally awakened to the sight of the room, its blistered faded paper with patches of a different design, their scanty possessions untidily tossed about, the slovenly intimacies of bed and washstand and night table.

“Well, why shouldn’t she? I didn’t ask her to.”

“I only meant, I should have thought you’d rather have seen her downstairs.”

Laura Lou’s lips narrowed. “I’d rather not have seen her at all.” When she spoke in that tone, between those level lips, the likeness to her mother, which had already peeped out at him now and again, suddenly took possession of her whole face. Vance looked at her attentively. It was no doubt because she had grown thinner in the last months, and lost her colour, that the resemblance affirmed itself in this startling way. Vance remembered what his grandmother had said about Mrs. Tracy’s prettiness and her pink silk flounces, when, on her bridal tour, she had visited her western relatives at Advance. He was chilled by the sense of life perpetually slipping by, and leaving its stealthy disfigurement on spirit and flesh. . . . What was the use of anything, with this decrepitude at the core?

“I didn’t ask her to come up,” Laura Lou repeated querulously.

“Oh, well, no matter. . . . What did she come for?”

‘To ask us to a party.”

“A party —?”

“She wants to give you a party. She says lots of people are crazy to see you. She said I oughtn’t to keep you so shut up. . . . She asked me to pick an evening . . . .” There was a curious ring of gratified pride under the affected indifference of Laura Lou’s voice.

“Well, did you?” Vance asked ironically.

“I said she’d better see you. I said I didn’t care about parties, but I’d never kept you from going.” She paused, and added rigidly: “I told her there was no use coming here to see you because you were always out.”

Vance received this in silence. What was there to say? Mrs. Tarrant had come to invite them to a party — had delivered her invitation in that room! Did she really th............