“Yes, we’ve come. I hate these performances; but I wanted to see you battling with the waves, and I made Frenny come too.” How fine and slender and aloof she managed to look among them all, and how his blood instantly caught step with hers! “Well, this is fame—how do you like it?” she bantered him.
He shrugged. “I guess it’s a good page for Loot.”
She nodded delightedly. “You see I was right! I told you you must see it all. But where’s Laura Lou? Surely she was with you a minute ago?”
“Yes. But she’s gone.”
“Gone?”
“With Mrs. Pulsifer. I think they’re in the other room.”
Their eyes met, and Mrs. Tarrant laughed. “I’ve noticed signs of uneasiness in Jet lately. She realizes that she made a bad mistake last year about your short story, and I hear she now talks of founding a First Novel prize. She’s probably telling Laura Lou all about it.”
Vance laughed too; and then they turned together to the bust, which Mrs. Tarrant had not yet seen. She studied it thoughtfully for a long time; then, as other visitors crowded her away, she turned back to Vance. “I didn’t think that Stram girl had it in her. She has caught a glimpse of you, Vance—a glimpse of what you’re going to be. Don’t you think so, Frenny?”
“Well, I’m sorry to think that our young friend’s going to have a goitre,” said Frenside gloomily.
“Oh, dear—what a pity you can’t like anything that isn’t photographic! Artistically, you know,” she explained to Vance, “Frenny’s never got beyond the enlarged photograph of the ’eighties, when people used to have their dear ones done twice the size of life, with the whiskers touched up in crayon.”
Vance echoed her laugh. He echoed it because certain inflections of her voice were always laughter-provoking to him, and he would have thought anything funny if her eyes and her dimple had told him it was. But in reality he did think the bust queer, and had never understood why Rebecca had given him a swollen throat, and big lumps on his forehead, as if he’d been in a fight and got the worst of it. And he remembered too, with a pang, the colossal photograph which Grandma Scrimser had had made of Grandpa after his death, with the hyacinthine curls and low-necked collar of his prime, a photograph which the family had all thought so “speaking” that even Mrs. Weston dared not grumble at the expense. … Still, Vance, since then, had had a glimpse of other standards, and as he studied through Halo’s eyes the rough clay head with tumbled hair and heavy brooding forehead he began to see that under her surface mannerisms Rebecca Stram had reached down to his inner self, that the image seemed, as Halo said, to body forth what he was trying to be.
“It oughtn’t to have been done till after I’ve pulled off Loot,” he said, trying to hide his satisfaction under a joke.
“Oh, but it’s a proof that you will pull it off,” Halo rejoined; and then other people came up to them both, and swept them apart. He found her again at last, seated alone in a corner, and as he sat down beside her she said: “Who was that ridiculous man who was bragging about having known you when you were a boy?”
Vance’s dormant indignation against Bunty Hayes flamed up again. “Oh, he’s the manager of ‘Storecraft.’ He was just doing a blurb for the show.”
“Obviously. But where on earth did you know him?”
Vance hesitated. “I ran across him at Paul’s Landing. He used to go round with Upton Tracy.”
“Oh, I see.” She made a little grimace and rose to her feet. “Well, I’m going. I only came here to see you. I mean Rebecca’s you,” she corrected herself with a smile.
“Not yours?” he asked, flushing.
“No, I’d rather see him some evening quietly at home. When are you going to bring me your next chapters?”
“Any time,” he stammered, whirling with the joy of it; and she named a date which he of course accepted, as he would have accepted any other, at the cost of breaking no matter what other engagements. His head was light and dizzy with anticipation as he watched her vanish with Frenside in the throng.
When he roused himself from the spell he remembered that Laura Lou was somewhere in the gallery. He went back to look for her, but she was nowhere to be found, and at last he concluded, though half incredulously, that she must have gone off with Mrs. Pulsifer. It was very unlike her—but he had discovered that Laura Lou was often unlike herself, and that he really knew next to nothing of the secret springs of her actions and emotions. He did not think of this for long; his heart and brain were still full of the thought of Mrs. Tarrant. He was to see her again in two days: “a quiet evening,” she had said. That meant, he and she alone under the lamp, in that still meditative room which was like no other that he knew: a room of which the very walls seemed to think. And they would sit there alone together, while the logs crackled and fell, and he would read his new stuff to her, and she would sit motionless
