Poor Frenside! It was natural, she thought, that his own inability to stick to a job should add venom to his comments on the instability of others. “Everything I touch turns cold on my hands,” he had once confessed; and that had been the fate of The Hour. After a dazzling start it had grown querulous, faddish, and then dull; one could feel the creeping chill of inanition as one turned its pages. Subscribers fell off, and the owners, discouraged, offered the paper for sale. Frenside, understanding his own share in the failure, resigned, and went back to freelance articles for various newspapers and reviews. It was nonsense, he said, his acting as literary adviser to anybody, when his honest advice would almost always be: “To the wastepaper basket.” The Hour languished along, unread and unbought, for another year; then it occurred to Tarrant to pick it up as a bargain, and once purchased it acquired in his eyes the importance inherent in anything that belonged to him. “Funny—perhaps what I was really meant for was to be an editor,” he said to his wife, with depreciatory smile which disguised such a fervour of self-esteem. “Not a very dazzling career—I suppose I might have looked rather higher; but it may give me the chance to make myself known. …”
“Of course, Lewis; it’s what I’ve always wanted for you.”
“It is? You’ve thought—?” he began with his look of carefully suppressed avidity.
“Why, for a man who wants a hearing, and has something new to say, I can’t imagine a better chance than an open arena like The Hour.” She could reel off things like that as long as he wanted them; and besides, she did think, had forced herself to think, after his various unsuccessful experiments, first in architecture, then in painting, that letters might really be his field. Not creative work, probably (though she knew he aspired to be a novelist), but literary criticism, literary history, perhaps—provided he had the patience to pursue any line of investigation far enough. “If only he hadn’t any money!” she sometimes found herself reflecting, confronted with the bewildering discovery that abundance may hamper talent as much as privation does. “But what is talent made of, then?” she wondered. “Is it really like some shoddy material that can’t stand either rain or sun?”
Frenside still mused by the fire. “Yes; I shouldn’t wonder if Tarrant made something out of The Hour, if only he gets the right people for the routine work.” It was unusually generous of Frenside to say that; yet Halo tingled with resentment.
“You mean he’ll never have the perseverance himself?”
“My dear child, don’t make me out worse than I am. I mean exactly what I say. Every business enterprise is built on drudgery—”
“Yes, and he’s too brilliant. He is brilliant, Frenny.” She stood looking at her old friend with confident insistent eyes; it always fortified her faith in her husband to impress it on others. And really she did believe in The Hour, and in what he and she were going to make of it. …
The door opened, and there he was, slender, distinguished, handsomer than ever, she thought, as her eyes challenged the calm face under which she knew such a hunger for approbation burned.
“Hallo, Frenside—” Lewis Tarrant nodded to his wife and strolled up to the fireplace with his unhurried step. “Cold as the devil outdoors.” He bent over the flame, stretching his nervous transparent hands to it. (“With hands like that,” Halo mused, “why isn’t he a poet?”)
Tarrant dropped into an armchair near the tea-table. “No—a cocktail, please. I’m frozen to the marrow. Cursed climate!”
She handed him the cocktail, and in passing laid her hand on his shoulder. “You’re tired, Lewis—you’ve been overworking.” It did her good to be able, in all sincerity, to rebuke him for that!
“Well, it is hard work—straightening things out. But I think I begin to see my way.” He spoke with the cold sparkle of voice and face which was his nearest approach to enthusiasm. “By the way, though—it wasn’t all just hacking and hewing. I’ve made a find.” He picked up a bundle of papers he had thrown down, and extracted from them a copy of The Hour.
“What about this, Frenside? I never heard of it before—it must have come out while we were honeymooning, Halo.”
The word startled her, on his lips. Was it all so long ago that he seemed to be speaking a dead language? She shook off the chill and put out her hand for the review—an old number, as Lewis said, battered from long kicking about in the office. “What? Oh—this: ‘One Day’? A story, is it?” She wrinkled her brows over her shortsighted eyes. “Lewis! Why, it’s by that boy: the Tracys’ cousin. The one …” She broke off, and felt the colour rising to her temples. Vance Weston—she had not thought of Vance Weston since her marriage. Yet what a score he had against her! She had never been able to acquit herself of that; if ever the chance to do so arose, how gladly she would seize it! She bent above the page, curious, excited, with the little half articulate murmurs of the born reader. “How queer that I never heard of this. … Yes, it came out the winter we were in
