Hudson River Bracketed

passed he found a table, ordered sausage and potatoes, with a cup of coffee, and devoured them ravenously. He was still young enough for anger and grief to make him hungry.⁠ ⁠… There was no one he knew in the place, and after he had satisfied his hunger he pulled out his letters and glanced over them. As he had expected, they were all on literary business. One important publisher, who wanted his next novel, asked him to call and see if, in the course of a talk, they could not devise some plan of adjustment with Dreck and Saltzer. Though Vance had no hope of this he was encouraged by the urgency of the request. How easy it would have been, he thought, to work his way through his two remaining years of bondage if only Laura Lou had not weighed down every endeavour⁠—if only he had been free and alone! But there was no use in going through that weary round again. He had had the chance of freeing himself and had refused it. How could a fellow tell beforehand where each act would lead, and what would be the next to grow out of it? Perhaps they were right, those chaps at Rebecca Stram’s, who said it was all a blind labyrinth, a disconnected muddle.⁠ ⁠…

The despair of youth overcame him. He felt a sudden loss of faith in himself, in his powers, in the intrinsic interest of things, in his capacity to drag through these next two years of poverty, drudgery, and mental hunger.

He asked the waitress if he could telephone. She said yes, and led him to the back of the room. He looked up a number and rang.⁠ ⁠… Suddenly he heard an answering voice, and repeated the number. “Yes,” the voice said. He stammered: “I want to speak to Mrs. Tarrant,” and the same voice, with a note of reproach, came back: “Why, Vance, don’t you know me? Yes⁠ ⁠… I’m here.⁠ ⁠… Yes, come⁠ ⁠… come at once⁠ ⁠… do.” He hung up, and turned back dizzily to the door. She was there, she was so close that he seemed to feel her light touch on his shoulder.⁠ ⁠… And she had been there, so near to him, all these months, and he had never once tried to see her. It seemed incredible, preposterous, the very core and centre of his folly. Why had he gone on starving when the banquet was spread and within his reach?

At the door of the Tarrants’ apartment house his morbid sensitiveness to the visible world and its implications produced in him an abrupt change of view. It was long since he had entered one of those quiet commodious buildings, where everything bespoke conditions so different from those which imprisoned him. He recalled with compunction his outburst against Laura Lou. No wonder she had resented Mrs. Tarrant’s visit⁠—no wonder any advance from people living in ease and amenity seemed to the poor child like a deliberate condescension. Poor Laura Lou! If he could have given her a little cottage in a pleasant suburb, something of her own to be proud of and fuss over, it might have altered everything⁠ ⁠… As he stepped into the panelled lift and swung up to the top story he felt a gnawing anger against the unfairness of life, the cruelty of social conditions. He no longer remembered that when he had called up Mrs. Tarrant the thought of her had been a means of escape from his misery, that he had yielded to the urgent need of talking over his new book with her, and plunging once more into the healing springs of her sympathy. Now that he was on her threshold he felt only the blind desire to punish her⁠—punish her for her tactless intrusion on his wife, for living as she lived, for being what she was, for not leaving him and Laura Lou alone to live and to be as they were doomed to, with or without her interference.⁠ ⁠…

The door opened on the softly lit anteroom. A maid took his hat and coat, and said: “This way;” and there she sat, by the fire in the library, alone. She wore something dark and lacy, through which her upper arms showed; and the sober book-lined room, with its shaded lamps, and a few lilylike crimson flowers in a tall jar, seemed a part of her, the necessary background to her aloof and reticent grace. Vance recalled the room in which he had left Laura Lou, and at the same moment, joined to that evocation, came the vision of this woman turning from him, with a careless pleasantry, in that other room at the Willows where he had cast his soul at her feet.⁠ ⁠… No, there could be no common meeting ground for him and Halo Tarrant; the conditions of life divided them too sharply. Material well-being, security from hunger and debt, made people callous and unfeeling, perhaps without any fault of their own. But he had been right in deciding not to see her again, and wrong in yielding to the impulse which had led him to her tonight.

“Vance⁠—how glad I am!” she said, rising and holding out her two hands in the old friendly way.

He stood near the door, bound hand and foot in coils of awkwardness and resentment. “You went to see my wife today,” he began, and stopped, not knowing how to go on.

Mrs. Tarrant raised her eyebrows slightly. “Yes. It was so long since I’d had any news of either of you. I thought she was not looking well the day she lunched here⁠ ⁠… and I wanted to see if there was anything I could do.⁠ ⁠…”

“No. There’s nothing you can do.”

He felt the surprise and pain in her eyes without daring to meet them. “I’m sorry,” she rejoined simply. “But I’m glad you’ve come this evening. Sit down, won’t you, Vance? I’m all alone⁠—Lewis is at a man’s dinner, and I thought I’d snatch a quiet evening with my books.”

Vance still hung in the