He slipped out of the gallery and found himself below in the street. The weather had changed, it had grown very cold, and the skyscrapers flung down a rough wind into the tunnel-like thoroughfares at their base. Vance remembered the March snowstorm on the Hudson, which had come after just such a mild spell; and that led him to wonder if Laura Lou had got safely home before the change. Her pretty coat with the blond fur was only a summer garment, put on because it was her best; and she mustn’t catch another cold, he reflected. But his mind was too full of excited thoughts for that one to dominate it. He was at once too happy and too anxious to dwell for long on anything; and he turned westward and struck into the park, to try to walk his jostling ideas into order.
The encounter with Bunty Hayes had disgusted him profoundly. That kind of slovenly good-nature was merely a caricature of the superficial tolerance, the moral apathy, of most of the people he came in contact with. Nothing mattered to any of them except to get on, to shove a way through and crowd out the others. There was Hayes, a man who had reason to hate him—or thought so—who loved his wife, and must therefore be jealous of him, and yet in whom the primitive emotions were so worn down by the perpetual effort to get on, to gain an inch or two in the daily struggle, that they could be silenced at will whenever it was to his interest. As Vance tramped on against the stinging wind his anger subsided also, but for a different reason. Hayes, the human fact, was being gradually absorbed, transubstantiated, into the stuff of his book; was turning from a vulgar contemptible man into a grotesque symbol of the national futility. … And then Vance began to examine his own case. He had not complied, he had tried to stand on his feet, to defend his intellectual integrity. And where was he? What was he? The flattered and envied author of the newest craze, a successful first novel; yet in himself an unhappy powerless creature, poor, hungry, in debt, the bewildered bondslave of the people he despised, the people who sacrifice everything and everybody to getting on.
And in thus summing up his case he had left out the central void: the blank enigma of his marriage. He could hardly remember now the gleams of joy which Laura Lou’s presence had shed on their early days. He had imagined that she shared all his ideas, whereas she was merely the sounding board of his young exuberance. Now the delusions and raptures were all gone. If he and she could have had a house of their own, instead of having to live in one room, how often would he have sought her out? All that remained of his flaming dream was a cold half-impatient pity. He supposed, vaguely, that the real meaning of marriage, the need that upheld it as an institution in spite of all revolts and ironies, was man’s primitive craving for a home, children, a moral anchorage. Marriage had brought him none of these. What sense was there in living in one room with an idle childless woman whom he had long since forgotten though she was always there? He despised himself for yielding to their enforced propinquity, and giving her what her soft endearments asked as carelessly as if she had been the casual companion of a night.
He sat on a bench in the park and revolved these world-old riddles till the cold drew him to his feet, and he turned homeward, heavy and confused as when he had started.
Laura Lou must have got back long before him. She would be waiting at home, perhaps resenting the fact of his not having stayed with her at the gallery. He swung along impatiently, trying to put out of his mind the secret well of joy that fed him: the thought of the quiet evening with Mrs. Tarrant and his book. … Since he had rung her up that evening, more than a month ago, he had been with her perilously often, meeting her at dinners, at informal studio parties, sometimes going with her to the theatre or to a symphony concert. To be with her nearly every day, to share with her all his artistic and intellectual joys, to carry to her every new experience, every question, every curiosity, had become an irresistible need. She had drawn him back to the frank footing of friendship, and skilfully kept him there. But they had not yet had another long evening alone by the lamp, and now he felt that he must pour out his whole soul to her or have no peace.
Laura Lou was huddled up close to the radiator, which gave out but little warmth on Mrs. Hubbard’s third floor. She had tossed her hat and coat on the bed, and wrapped her stooping shoulders in the bedquilt.
“Well,” Vance said, with hollow gaiety, “where the devil did you run away to? I hunted for you all over the place.”
She lifted a face in which triumph struggled with resentment. He saw that for some reason she was annoyed with him, yet for another pleased. “Oh, I got tired staying round there with all those strange people; and I couldn’t bear to look any longer at that hateful thing.”
“What hateful thing?”
“That awful bust. How could you let them show such a thing? It made me sick to see it.”
“Didn’t you like it? It’s been a good deal admired,” he muttered, piqued by her tone.
“Why, Vanny, can’t you see they’re only laughing at you when they tell you that?”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“Why,
