“Why Weston wouldn’t fight?”
“Not in your office, at any rate. Put yourself in his place.”
But Tarrant knew of few places worthy to put himself in. “Thank you, my dear. I don’t happen to have low-down blackguards trying to fight me.”
“I should have thought any man might, accidentally.” She paused and reflected. “Anyhow, it doesn’t seem to have bothered young Weston much,” she let drop with a retrospective smile.
Through Tarrant’s fresh cloud of cigar smoke she saw his suspicious flush. “I don’t know how much it bothered him; but he looked pretty thoroughly ashamed of himself.”
“He got over it quickly then. He’d forgotten all about it when he was here just now.”
Tarrant swung round in surprise, and she continued, in the tone of leisurely narrative: “About an hour ago. He dashed in on his way to the train, staggering under his mother-in-law’s Christmas bundles. He’d called on very particular business. You’ll never guess …”
“Why should I?” Tarrant growled.
“Try—”
He answered by another shrug—this time of indifference.
“Well, he wanted to borrow Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky. He’d never heard of them till today. Or of Chekhov or the moderns, of course … It appears someone in the office said something about ‘the Russians,’ and as soon as he’d finished his work he rushed to the public library; but it was closed, so he came here. Rather sweet of him, I thought. He didn’t say how d’ye do, or any of the useless things. He just said: ‘Who are the Russians? I want to read them. Have you got them?’ And went off with his arms full.” She sank back in her cushions, and closed her lids on the picture. The fire crackled companionably, and Tarrant’s cigar smoke wove its soothing cloud about their silence. Even with her eyes shut she could guess that something was slowly breaking down the hard crust of his resentment. Expediency … uncertainty … it didn’t matter. … After an interval he said, more to himself than her: “Well, I suppose he was right not to let that blackguard raise hell in the office. … Only it goes against me when a man seems to show the white feather. …”
“Ah, but you …” his wife murmured; and opened her eyes to meet his gratified smile.
But his face was not the one on which her gaze rested. Her vision was turned inward. There had happened to her, suddenly, what may happen at any stage, however late, in the acquaintance, even the intimacy, between two people: she had seen Vance Weston that afternoon—really, literally seen him—for the first time. Before that, her glance—curious, then interested, then admiring—had merely brushed him with a glowworm spark. She had caught, as it were, glimpses of him in the blur of himself; rifts and gleams; a bit here, a bit there, of the outward accidents of his appearance. Now, all at once, she possessed him as a whole, seemed to discern behind his fluid features the power which had built them. Uneven, untrue to itself, as his face appeared, with its queer mixture of maturity and boyishness, instability and power, she suddenly beheld it in the something which harmonized these contradictions and bound him together like a strong outline. Was that perhaps what genius was? And this boy with the tumbled brown hair, the resolute lines of brow and nose, the brooding impulsive lips and the strident untutored voice—was this the way genius was cut? … Her heart missed a beat, as if it had paused with her mind to consider him. “It’s like seeing him dead,” she thought—so entirely had his face been stripped to the essentials. And she reminded herself, with a shiver, that one never forgot a single lineament of a face one had seen dead. … “It’s more than I bargained for,” she murmured, and then: “Coward!”
She pulled herself up to the surface of her eyes, and gave her husband back his smile.
The first number of the New Hour made a hit. The New York publishing world rang with the figures of its sale; and the crown of its success was “Unclaimed,” the quiet story by the young author no one had heard of. A war story too—fatal handicap! But everyone agreed that it sounded a new note. The public was fed up with new notes, yet dared not praise anything without applying that epithet to it (so Frenside explained). “But it is a new note; I saw it at once when he brought me the thing,” Tarrant grumbled, adding impatiently: “If it depended on you to give a new author a start—!”
“Where’s my lantern?” Frenside mocked; but the sting of his mockery was submerged in the warm tide of praise which met Tarrant wherever he went. He was acutely proud of his first editorial achievement, and his gratified pride transformed him in his wife’s eyes. “I’ve always known he was cleverer than anybody else—all he needed was a chance to show it,” she thought, her hungry imagination clutching at every substitute for belief in him. Yet in an inner fold of her heart something whispered: “How much I would rather believe in him against everybody!”
Tarrant had said one day, in a burst of satisfaction: “I think you ought to invite that Weston boy here; we ought to have a party for the New Hour’s first birthday. People are beginning to ask about him; they’re already wondering about the Pulsifer Prize—” and Halo, rousing herself from an indolence she could hardly explain, had echoed: “Oh, if you think so—certainly.” In reality, she had relegated the thought of Vance to the back of her mind. After all, it was her husband who had resuscitated The Hour, not Vance Weston. But that was the way of the world: people fastened on one good thing in a review—a new review especially—and talked as if that were the principal, if not the only, reason for its popularity. Whereas the real credit belonged to the editor, the guiding and selecting mind, in this case to the
