Eric Rauch walked away with Vance, and as they reached the street Vance’s bruised soul spoke out. “Hearing those fellows talk I don’t see what they can find in my book.”
“Why, they have a good time reading it. They crack their teeth over their own conundrums, and now and then they just indulge in the luxury of lying back and reading a real book.”
“But they believed in Fynes last year.”
“Sure. And they believed in you till Gratz Blemer came along. What you’ve got to do now is to go Blemer one better—do your big New York novel in his style,” Rauch ended with a laugh, as their ways parted.
Vance was going home; but he felt within himself a dammed-up flood of talk, and as he reached Washington Square it occurred to him that Frenside lived nearby, and might sometimes be found at that hour. Vance did not often see Frenside nowadays. The latter seldom came to the New Hour, and Vance as seldom went to Mrs. Tarrant’s, where the old critic was most often to be met. Vance’s relation with the Tarrants had shrunk—by his own choice—to business intercourse with Tarrant at the office. Some native clumsiness had made it impossible for him, after he came to New York, to work out a manner, an attitude, toward Halo Tarrant. Other fellows knew how; took that sort of thing in their stride; but he couldn’t. The art of social transitions was still a mystery to him. He remembered once hearing his grandmother (rebuked by Mrs. Weston for bad management and extravagance) say plaintively: “Why, daughter, I presume I can go without—but I can’t economize.” Vance understood that: morally and materially, he had never known how to economize. But he could go without—at least he supposed he could. …
Halo, who had heard of their arrival in New York from her husband, had written a friendly little note to Laura Lou, asking her and Vance to lunch; and Laura Lou, after a visible struggle between her irrepressible jealousy and the determination to prove to Vance that she had never been jealous (how could he have thought so, darling?)—Laura Lou had decided that they must accept.
They did, and the result was disastrous. From the first moment everything had bewildered Laura Lou and roused her inarticulate resentment. She was used to Halo—didn’t care a straw what she thought of anybody or anything. … Hadn’t she seen her, for years, coming and going at the Willows? They were distant cousins too—Halo needn’t have reminded her of that in her note! But she had never seen Mrs. Tarrant in this setting of New York luxury and elegance; she had never met Tarrant, who at once struck her as heartless and sardonic; she had never seen people like the other guests, men young and elderly, all on a footing of intimacy with their hosts, and talking carelessly, allusively, easily, of people and things that Laura Lou had never heard of. … She did not confess a word of this to Vance; she did not have to. Her face was like a clear pool reflecting every change in a shifting sky. He could measure, partly from his own memories, partly from his knowledge of her, the impact of every allusion, every unexpected gesture or turn of phrase of the people about her. The mere way in which the lunch was served was something to marvel at and be resented—didn’t he know? (“Caviar? That what you call it—that nasty gray stuff that smelt like motor grease? No, I didn’t touch it … When I watched you eating it I thought you’d be sick, sure. …” and so on.) For the rest, she took the adventure as something completely matter-of-course and not worth discussing, and remained coldly surprised, faintly ironic, and indifferent. Is that all?
her attitude seemed to say. But how well he knew what was under it!
Since then he had never been back to Mrs. Tarrant’s. What was the use? Not to see her at all was less of a privation seeing her like that. … She had sent him, a few days later, a note asking how the novel was getting on, and when he was coming to read the next chapters to her; and he had not answered. He did not know how to excuse himself from going to see her, and was resolved to avoid the torment of renewing their friendship. So the months passed, and they did not meet. …
He cared only for his work now, or so he told himself. It was his one refuge from material and moral conditions so stifling and embittering that but for that other world to escape to he would have borrowed a revolver and made an end. … But his work too was becoming a perplexity. By the time he had finished Instead forty subjects were storming at the gates of his imagination and clamouring for embodiment. But his first encounter with the perplexing contradictory theories of the different literary groups to which the success of his book introduced him, all the wild currents and whirlpools of critical opinion in New York, had shaken his faith in himself; not in his powers of exposition and expression, which seemed to grow more secure with every page he wrote, but in his choice of a theme, a point of view, what the politicians called a “platform.” It had never before occurred to him that the artist needed any, except that to which his invisible roots struck down, in the depths ruled by The Mothers; but these fellows with their dogmas and paradoxes, their contradictory pronouncements and
