He did not move. She too was silent for a moment; then her hand was withdrawn. “Come—we must say goodbye, Vance.”
He dropped his hands and leaned back, looking up at her. “I never thought about its ending,” he muttered.
“But it isn’t ending; why should it? You must stick to your job and carry it through; and then, when it’s done, you’ll be coming back regularly to the office—and I shall see you often, I hope. …”
“Not like this.”
“This has been good, hasn’t it? But when your book’s done, that will be lots better; that will be the best that could happen. …”
“I don’t care a curse about the book.”
She stood looking down at him, and a faint smile stole to her lips. “You ought to, if you say we’ve done it together.”
Again the tone of banter! She was determined to force that tone on him then. She was teasing him, ridiculing him, condescending to him from the height of all her superiorities: age, experience, education, worldly situation; and he, this raw boy, had sat there, forgetting these differences, and imagining that because he had suddenly discovered what she was to him, he could hope to be as much to her! He ached with the blow to his vanity, and a fierce pride forced him to feel no other ache. If she thought of him as a blundering boy, to be pitied and joked with, to hell with dreams and ambitions, and all he had believed himself to be!
“I guess I don’t know how to talk,” he grumbled out. “Better tie up to my writing—that your idea?”
She sat down beside him again, and while he covered his eyes from the glare of his own blunder he heard her, on another plane of consciousness, with other ears, as it were—heard her talking to him reasonably, wisely, urgently of his work, of the opportunities ahead of him, of what he was justified in hoping, of what his effort and ambition ought to be: all in an affectionate “older friend” voice, a voice so cool and measured that every syllable fell with a little hiss on the red-hot surface of his humiliation.
“You know how I’ve always believed in you, Vance. Oh, but that’s nothing … I’m nobody. But my husband believes in you too … believed in you from the first, before I’d read anything of yours; he’s proved his belief, hasn’t he? And Frenside—Frenside, who’s never pleased, never satisfied … And when they see what you’ve done now they’ll feel they were justified—I know they will. … Vance, you know artists always have these fits of discouragement … often just when they’ve done their best; it’s the reaction after successful effort. And this is your best so far, oh, so much your best! I’m sure something still bigger and better will follow; but meanwhile, dear boy, for your soul’s sake you must believe in this, you must believe in yourself. …”
For his soul’s sake he could not have looked up or changed his attitude. Her friendly compassion crushed him to earth, her incomprehension held him there. “If she’d only go,” he thought, “if only it was over. …”
The stillness was broken by the scraping of her pushed-back chair. He felt a stir of air as she moved, and heard, through interlocked hands, her footfall sink into the bottomless silence of the old house. A door closed. She had gone; it was over. …
XXXI
Vance continued to sit there. He had imagined he had suffered on the day when he had seen his grandfather down by the river with Floss Delaney: poor simpleton! That was a wound to his raw senses. He had escaped from it by writing it out and selling it to an editor. But now there was not a vein of his body, not a cell of his brain, not a dream or a vision of his soul, that was not hurt, disabled. … This woman who had kindled in him the light by which he lived had sat there complacently telling him that she believed in his work, that her husband and old Frenside believed in it … and had thought she was leaving him comforted!
But did she really think so? Or was all she had said only a protective disguise, the conscientious effort to repress emotions corresponding to his own? He had an idea she would be very conscientious, full of scruples he wasn’t sure he wholly understood. For if she hadn’t cared as much as he did, why should she have devoted all those hours to helping him? If it was just for the good of the New Hour, she was indeed the ideal wife for an editor! But no: those afternoons had been as full for her as for him. What was that phrase she had pointed out, in the volume of Keats’s Letters she had given him—about loading every rift with gold? That was what they had done to their hours together: both of them.
Suddenly, as he sat brooding, he heard a door open: then, after a moment’s delay, a step coming through the empty rooms. The carpets muffled it, the stealing twilight seemed to envelop it; but it was hers, hers surely—who else would have business there? She was returning, coming back to say all the things that were surging in his heart. … He sat still, not daring to look up.
The step drew nearer, reached the threshold, clicked on the parquet of the library. He started up and
