The publisher smiled the faint secret smile of initiation. That was just it: the New Hour wasn’t in any too healthy a state either. There too there might be something to be done: negotiations … If Mr. Weston would simply authorize him to act …
Vance hardly heard the suggestion. The statement with regard to the New Hour, coming to him with a shock of surprise, suddenly recalled the look on Mrs. Tarrant’s face when, the night before, he had blurted out that he was imprisoned by his contract with her husband. She had not answered; had not spoken at all: but her eager eyes and lips seemed drawn back, immobilized, and for the only time in their talk he felt between them an impenetrable barrier. … It was that, then! She knew the review was in a bad way, but pride, or perhaps loyalty to her husband, forbade her to admit it. She had merely said, after a moment: “The two years that are left will soon be over; then you’ll be free …” with a smile which seemed half ironic and half sympathizing. And they had passed on to other matters.
Yes, Vance said, rousing himself to answer Mr. Lambart, yes, of course he would authorize any attempt to buy him off … only, he added, Tarrant was a queer-tempered fellow … you never knew … The publisher’s smile flicked Tarrant away like a straw. “Gifted amateur … They can’t edit reviews …” He promised to let Vance know the result as soon as possible. “And now about the next novel,” he said, a ring of possessorship in his voice. The terms proposed (a third in advance, if Mr. Weston chose) made Vance’s blood drum in his ears; but there was a change of tone when he began to outline Loot. A big novel of modern New York? What—another? Tempting subject, yes—tremendous canvas—but there’d been so many of them! The public was fed up with skyscrapers and niggers and bootleggers and actresses. Fed up equally with Harlem and with the opera, with Greenwich Village and the plutocrats. What they wanted was something refined—something to appeal to the heart. Couldn’t Mr. Weston see that by the way his own book had been received? Why not follow up the success of Instead by another novel just like it? The quaintness of the story—so to speak—had taken everybody’s fancy. Why not leave the New York show to fellows like Fynes, and the new man Gratz Blemer, who couldn’t either of them do anything else, didn’t even suspect there was anything else to do? This Gratz Blemer: taking three hundred thousand words to tell the story of a streetwalker and a bootblack, and then calling it This Globe! Why, you could get round the real globe nowadays a good deal quicker than you could dig your way through that book! No, no, the publisher said—if Mr. Weston would just listen to him, and rely on his long experience … Well, would he think it over, anyhow? A book just like Instead, only about forty thousand words longer. If Instead had a blemish, it was being what the dry-goods stores called an “outsize”; the public did like to get what they were used to. … And if a novelist had had the luck to hit on something new that they took a shine to, it was sheer suicide not to give them more of it. …
It was an odd sensation for Vance, after so many months of seclusion, to find himself again in the harmonious setting of the Tarrants’ library, with friendly faces pressing about him and adulation filling the air like a shower of perfumed petals. … There were fewer people than at his former party at Mrs. Tarrant’s; there was no Mrs. Pulsifer, there were no ladies in gold brocade to startle and captivate. The men were mostly in day clothes, the few women in simple half-transparent dresses such as Mrs. Tarrant had worn that other evening when he had called her up and found her alone over the fire. Those women dressed like that when they were sitting at home alone in the evening! The fact impressed Vance more than all Mrs. Pulsifer’s brocades and jewels—made the distance seem greater between the world of Mrs. Hubbard’s third story and that in which a sort of quiet beauty and order were an accepted part of life.
Vance had tried to induce Laura Lou to come with him, but had not been altogether sorry when he failed. He had not forgotten their disastrous lunch at the Tarrants’, and he told himself that he hated to see his wife at a disadvantage among people who seemed blind to her beauty, and conscious only of her lack of small talk. But in fact it was only in her absence that he was really himself. Every situation in which she figured instantly became full of pitfalls. The Vance Weston who was her husband was a nervous, self-conscious, and sometimes defiant young man, whereas the other, the real one, was disposed to take things easily, to meet people halfway, and to forget himself completely in the pursuit of any subject that interested him. And here at the Tarrants’, as always, the air was full of such subjects, and of a cordiality which instantly broke down his lingering resentments. He felt this even in Tarrant’s handshake on the threshold. Tarrant, at the office, was an enigma to Vance. What he had heard of the difficulties of the New Hour had prepared him to find them reflected in his host’s manner; but apparently among these people business concerns were left behind after business hours, and Tarrant had never been so friendly and fraternal.
