After Vance had finished reading, Halo Tarrant sat silent. The library was very still. Only one lamp was lit, on a low table near Vance’s armchair; the rest of the room hung remote and shadowy about them, except when a dart of flame from the hearth woke up a row of books here and there, or made the flanks of a bronze vase glitter like a wet rock.

Vance’s heart was beating hurriedly. His voice was hoarse with excitement; he could not have read any longer without breaking down. In his agitation he did not dare to lift his eyes to his listener’s, but sat fumbling mechanically among the pages on his knee. Since the first paragraph he had been more and more certain that her verdict would be unfavourable.

“Well —?” he questioned at length, with an uneasy laugh. He could hardly endure the interval that elapsed before she answered. His throat was parched, and little prickles ran all over his skin. He felt as if she would never speak.

“I think you ought to take more time over it,” she said. “The canvas is much bigger than you’re used to — and the subject is so new. There are things in it that I like very much; but there are bits that seem incomplete, undigested. . . . I’m sure you can do the book; but you must give yourself time . . . lots of time. Can’t you put it away for a few months and turn to something else?”

Her verdict was exactly what he had expected, yet it filled him with unreasonable discouragement. She always lit instantly on the flaws of which he himself was half conscious, even in the heat of composition, the flaws he hoped she would overlook, but knew in advance that she would detect; and for this reason he lost his critical independence in her presence, and swung uneasily between elation and despondency.

“Yes, I know. It’s a failure,” he muttered.

“How can you tell, when only a few chapters are written? And in them there’s so much that’s good. That first impression of the heartless overwhelmingness of New York — it’s been done so often, but no one has seen it and felt it exactly as you have. . . . And the opening scene in the little western town — all that’s good too, except that perhaps — ” she paused, lifting her eyes doubtfully to his, “perhaps when you did that part you’d been reading The Corner Grocery a little too attentively,” she concluded with her hesitating smile.

He smiled too: it felt like a dry contraction of the muscles. “Too much of the sedulous ape, you mean?”

“Well, you seem to be struggling against crosscurrents of influence. But you’ll work out of them when you really get into your subject.”

“Trouble is it’s not my subject,” he broke in nervously; but she continued: “Not yet, perhaps; but it will be if you’ll only give yourself more time.” He looked up and met her scrutinizing eyes. “You look terribly tired, Vance. Can’t you drop the book for a few months?”

She made the suggestion gently, appealingly, in her most tranquil and compassionate voice. Yes, he thought, stirred by sudden exasperation: that was the way with people to whom material ease was as much a matter of course as the air they breathed. It was always an unwholesome business for the rich and poor to mix; the poor ought to keep to their own kind.

“Drop it?” he echoed with a laugh. “Well, that wouldn’t be exactly easy. Your husband has agreed to let me off my monthly article so that I can keep all my time for the novel; and now you advise me to drop the novel! What I’ve got to do is to finish it as quickly as I can, and let it take its chance. I’m doomed to write potboilers — if ever I can learn the trick!”

She paled a little. He saw that his words had hurt her, and he was glad they had. She continued to look at him earnestly, with her narrowed wistful gaze.

“You never WILL learn the trick; I’m not afraid for you.”

He laughed again — she was preposterous! “Oh, well, I didn’t come here to talk business,” he said irritably. “What I wanted was your opinion — now I’ve got it. And as it’s exactly the same as mine I’d throw the book into the fire if I could.”

She received this in silence, sitting quite still, as her way was when she was turning over anything in her mind. “Vance,” she said abruptly, “when you brought me these last chapters you didn’t feel like that about them. You had faith in them an hour ago. You mustn’t let my chance suggestions influence you; no artist should care so much for what people say . . . .”

He jumped up, the pages on his knee scattering to the floor. “Care what people say? I don’t care a damn what people say. . . . It’s only what you say,” he broke out with sudden vehemence.

A little flash of light ran over her face: her only way of blushing was this luminous glow on her pallor. “But that’s even more unreasonable . . .” she began.

“Oh, God, what’s reason got to do with it? You’ve been the breath of life to me all these months. If you cut off a fellow’s oxygen he collapses. . . . Don’t talk to me about not caring what you say! There’d be nothing left to me then.”

The silence of the dusky room seemed to receive and reverberate his words as the shadows caught and intensified the wavering gleams of the fire. Vance leaned against the mantel and stared down with blind eyes at the scattered pages of his manuscript. For a while — a long while, it seemed to him — Mrs. Tarrant did not move or look up.

“There’d be your genius left to you,” she said, still motionless in her corner.

He laughed. “I sometimes think my genius is a phantasm we’ve manufactured between us. When I’m not with you I don’t believe in it — I don’t believe in anything when I’m not with you.”

“Oh, Vance, don’t — don’t blaspheme!”

“Blaspheme! The only blasphemy would be to say that you’re not the whole earth to me!”

Still she did not move; and her immobility held him spellbound on the hearth. “That’s too much to be to anyone,” he heard her murmur, and immediately afterward: “All I’ve wanted was to help you with your books . . . .”

“My books? My books?” He moved a step or two nearer to her, and then stood checked again by her immobility. “What do you suppose books are made of?” he cried. “Paper and ink, or the marrow of a man’s bones and the blood of his brain? But you’re in my books, you’re part of them, whether you want to be or not, whether you believe in them or despise them, whether you believe in me or despise me; and you’re in me, in my body and blood, just as you’re in my books, and just as fatally. It’s done now and you can’t get away from me, you can’t undo what you’ve done: you’re the thoughts I think, and the visions I see, and the air I breathe, and the food I eat — and everything, everything, in the earth and over it . . . .”

He broke off, startled by his own outburst. He who was in general so tongue-tied, to whom eloquence came only with the pen, what power had driven this rush of words from him? Some fiery fusion of his whole being, the heightening and merging of every faculty, seemed to have unloosed his tongue. And it was all as he had said. He and his art and this woman were one, indissolubly one in a passionate mutual understanding. He and she understood each other — didn’t she know it? — with their intelligences and their emotions, with their eyes, their hands, their lips. Ah, her lips! All he could see now was the shape of her lips, that mouth haunted by all the smiles that had ever played over it, as if they were gathered up in her like shut flowerbuds.

“Didn’t you know — didn’t you know?” he stammered.

She had risen and stood a little way off from him. “About you —?”

“About you and me. There’s no difference. IS there any difference?”

He moved closer and caught her hands in his. They lay there like birds with their wings folded; birds that are frightened, and then suddenly lie still, with little subsiding palpitations. He was trying to see her face, to trace it line by line. “One of your eyebrows is a little higher than the oth............