Thoughts of luggage labels and deck chairs vanished from Halo’s mind. Into their place there stole a cold insidious dread of what was coming, of what her husband was going to say, and she was going to feel about it. “Nonsense, Lewis,” she exclaimed. “I don’t believe he ever said anything like that.”
Tarrant laughed. “We all know you think he can’t do wrong. But I suppose you’ll admit he did ask for the money, if she says so?”
Halo pondered. She had forgotten herself and Tarrant in the shock of a new distress. “Poor fellow—I wonder why he wanted it so badly.”
“Well, I own I’m less interested in that. What I care about is that he’s fairly dished us, and that we were banking on the prize to give us a boost at the end of the year. With a new review it would have made a lot of difference. But the idea of considering us is the last that would enter his head.”
“I suppose it is, if he wanted the money as much as that; and he must have, to dream of asking Jet Pulsifer.”
“Oh, I don’t know. I daresay it’s rather in his line. That kind of man, when he sees a woman’s gone on him …”
“He’s not that kind of man!” Halo exclaimed. She also stood up, trembling with an unaccountable dismay. “What reason did he give—didn’t she tell you?”
“Oh, the usual one, I believe. Hard up—wife ill, or something—they always tell the same story. To think the fool had only to sit tight and let her go on admiring him!”
There was a long silence. Tarrant stopped his nervous pacing and returned to his armchair, throwing himself into it with a groan of impatience. “That prize was ours!”
“Ours?”
“Well—isn’t he our discovery?” He laughed. “Yours, if you prefer. You’re welcome to it. I hold no brief for blackmailers.”
She looked at him with astonishment. He had suddenly crowded Vance Weston out of her mind and taken possession of its centre himself. “Blackmailers?” she repeated. She said the word over slowly, once or twice. Then: “But, Lewis, if he’s that, what are we? What’s the New Hour?”
Tarrant threw back his handsome head and returned her look with faintly raised brows of interrogation, and a glance which declared resignedly: “Ah, now I give up!”
“What are we,” his wife went on, “who knew what Jet was, and put the boy in her way, and worked up her imagination about him, all to …” She broke off, vexed with her own exaggerated emotion, yet unable to control it.
Tarrant’s tone, in contrast, grew profoundly quiet. “All to—what?”
“Steal the prize for our paper.”
He looked at her, still with arched ironic brows. “That’s what you call it? Stealing?”
“Don’t you? We began to throw that boy in Jet’s way months ago—began in this very house, and at your suggestion.” (Oh, of course, he interjected, he knew she’d end by putting all the blame on him.) “No, I don’t,” Halo continued. “I keep my share; and it’s a big one. But I see now that we ought both to be ashamed—far more ashamed than Vance. And I am—I’m revolted. If that’s the way literature is produced, it had better cease altogether. If it has to be shoved down people’s throats like Beauty Products and patent collar buttons it shows our people don’t really want it; that’s all!”
Tarrant leaned back, and stretched his hand out for a cigar. “Did you ever really think they did?”
Her colour rose. “I suppose I didn’t think at all—I just rushed ahead with the crowd. But now …”
“Well—now?”
“Now it seems to me there’s only one thing we can do to save our souls—we must lend the boy that money.”
Tarrant paused attentively in the lighting of his cigar. “We
—?”
“You,” she corrected herself, crimsoning. Something, perhaps involuntary, in the inflection of his voice seemed to imply that, where there was a question of bestowing money, the plural pronoun could hardly be current between them. But his next retort brushed aside the implication.
“We—I? Lend him the money? What on earth are you talking about? He gets us into a damned mess, and we reward him for it?” She was silent. “Is that your idea of it?” he insisted.
She murmured with a shrug: “I suppose it’s your idea of my idea.”
“Ah, and what is yours, if I’ve misinterpreted it?”
“That the fault is all ours, and that we ought to expiate.”
“Expiate!” He smiled. “You talk like an old-fashioned Russian novel. …” He paused a moment, and then added: “I had no idea you were such an idealist. … Well, it’s getting late,” he continued, standing up with a shake of his long body. “I’ve got to throw some last things into my trunk, and we’ll postpone this discussion till we’re on board.”
Halo felt a sudden blur before her eyes. “Lewis!” she exclaimed.
He turned back, irritated, impatient to make an end, and as the two stood looking at each other Halo saw, in a revealing flash, how immeasurably far apart they were—had always been, perhaps. It was as if she had been walking in her sleep, and had now abruptly opened her eyes on the edge of a sheer drop. Yet what was there in this paltry wrangle to throw such a glare into the depths?
Tarrant stood waiting. He looked drawn, tired, exasperated. It was no time for reasonable explanations; he hated tactlessness, and she was being tactless. Yet speak she must—speak (she said to herself) before they were so far apart that he was out of hearing. …
“Well?” he repeated.
“Lewis … you’re not going to understand. …”
“Understand what?”
“Why I say what I’m going to say—”
“Lord! How portentous! What are you going to say?”
“That our talk
