In this 1932 sequel to Hudson River Bracketed, Halo Tarrant defies convention by leaving her husband and sailing for Europe with her lover, the novelist Vance Weston. In her mind, her love for him and her willingness to nurture his genius are enough to sustain the relationship. But Vance is often weak and immature, and his chance meeting with a woman from his past will test the bond with Halo

genre : Fiction & Fantasy

9 hour and 17 minute

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The Gods Arrive

Edith Wharton

Published: 1932

Categorie(s): Fiction

Source: http://gutenberg.net.au About Wharton:

Edith Wharton (January 24, 1862 – August 11, 1937) was an American novelist, short story writer, and designer.

Also available on Feedbooks Wharton:

- The Age of Innocence (1920)

- Ethan Frome (1911)

- The House of Mirth (1905)

- Summer (1917)

- Twilight Sleep (1927)

- The Custom of the Country (1913)

- The Touchstone (1900)

- The Valley of Decision (1902)

- The Children (1928)

- Sanctuary (1903)

Copyright: This work is available for countries where copyright is Life+70.

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> The gods approve

>

> The depth and not the tumult of the soul

> Sunt aliquid manes.

>

> —Propertius

Part 1

Chapter 1

One of the stewards of the big Atlantic liner pushed his way among the passengers to a young lady who was leaning alone against the taffrail. "Mrs. Vance Weston?"

The lady had been lost in the effort to absorb, with drawn-up unseeing eyes, a final pyramidal vision of the New York she was leaving—a place already so unreal to her that her short-sighted gaze was unable to register even vaguely its towering signals of farewell. She turned back.

"Mrs. Vance Weston?"

"No—" she began; then, correcting herself with a half-embarrassed smile: "Yes."

Stupid—incredibly! But it was the first time the name had been given to her. And it was not true; she was not yet Mrs. Vance Weston, but Halo Tarrant, the still undivorced wife of Lewis Tarrant. She did not know when she would be free, and some absurd old leaven of Lorburn Puritanism (on her mother's side she was a Lorburn of Paul's Landing) made her dislike to masquerade under a name to which she had no right. Yet before her own conscience and her lover's she was already irrevocably what she called herself: his wife; supposing one could apply the term irrevocable to any tie in modern life without provoking Olympian laughter. She herself would once have been the first to share in that laughter; but she had to think of her own situation as binding her irrevocably, or else to assume that life, in its deepest essence, was as brittle as the glass globe which the monkeys shatter in the bitter scene of Faust's visit to the witch. If she were not Vance Weston's for always the future was already a handful of splinters.

The steward, handing her a telegram, and a letter inscribed "urgent," had hurried away on his distribution of correspondence. On the envelope of the letter she read the name of her lawyer; and as he was not given to superfluous writing, and as telegrams were too frequent to be of consequence, she opened the letter first. "Dear Mrs. Tarrant," she read, "I am sending this by hand to the steamer in the hope of reaching you in time to persuade you not to sail. I have just heard, from a safe source, that your husband knows of your plans, and is not disposed to consent to your divorcing him if you persist in leaving the country in the circumstances of which you have advised me." (She smiled at this draping of the facts.) "Indeed, I suspect he may refuse to take divorce proceedings himself, simply in order to prevent your re-marrying. I should have tried to see you at once if I were not leaving for Albany on professional business; but I earnestly beg you, if my messenger reaches you before you are actually off … "

Halo Tarrant lifted her eyes from the letter. No; she was not actually off. The decks were still in the final confusion of goodbyes; friends and relatives were lingering among the passengers till the landing gong should hurry them ashore. There was time to dash down to her cabin, collect her possessions, and descend the gangplank with the other visitors, leaving a note of explanation for the companion she was abandoning. For his sake as well as her own, ought she not to do it? What she knew of her husband made her ready enough to believe that a headlong impulse of reprisals might make him sacrifice his fixed purpose, his hope of happiness, a future deliberately willed and designed by himself, to the satisfaction of hurting and humiliating her. He was almost capable of wishing that she would go away with Vance Weston; the mere pleasure of thwarting her would be keen enough to repay him. He was a man who grew fat on resentment as others did on happiness … For an instant her old life rose before her. This was the man she had lived with for ten years; he had always been what he was now, and she had always known it. The thought frightened her even now—she had to admit that he could still frighten her. But the admission stiffened her will. Did he really imagine that any threat of his could still affect her? That she would give up a year, perhaps two years, of happiness, of life—life at last!—and sit in conventual solitude till the divorce, conducted with old-fashioned discretion and deliberation, permitted him to posture before his little world as the husband who has chivalrously "allowed" an unworthy but unblamed wife to gain her liberty? How quaint and out-of-date it all sounded! What did she care if she divorced him or he divorced her—what, even, if he chose to wreak his malice on her by preventing any recourse to divorce? Her life had struck root in the soul-depths, while his uneasily fluttered on the surface; and that put her beyond all reach of malice. She read the letter twice over, slowly; then with a smiling deliberation she tore it up, and sent the fragments over the taffrail.

As she did so, she felt a faint vibration through the immense bulk to which her fate was committed. It was too late now—really too late. The gong had sounded; the steamer was moving. For better or worse, she had chosen; and she was glad she had done so deliberately.

"We're off!" she heard at her side, in a voice of passionate excitement. She turned and laid her hand on Vance Weston's; their eyes met, laughing. "Now at last you'll have your fill of the sea," she said.

He shook his head. "Only a week … "

"Ten days to Gibraltar."

"What's that you've got?"

With a little start she looked down at her hand. "Oh, only a telegram. The steward brought it. I forgot … "

"Forgot what?"

"Everything that has to do with that dead world." She made a gesture of dismissal toward the dwindling cliffs of masonry. "The steward called me Mrs. Vance Weston," she added, smiling.

He responded to her smile. "Well, you'll have to get used to that."

They both laughed again, for the mere joy of sipping their laughter out of the one cup; then she said: "I suppose I ought to open it … "

"Oh, why? Now we're off, why not drop it into the sea as a tribute to old Liberty over there? We owe her a tribute, don't we?" he said; and she thought, with a little thrill of feminine submission: "How strong and decided he seems! He tells me what to do—he takes everything for granted. I'm the weak inexperienced one, after all." She ran her finger carelessly under the flap of the telegram.

Now that they were off, as he said, it did not much matter whether she opened her telegrams or threw them to the waves. What possibility was there in her adventure that she had not already foreseen, agonized over and finally put out of mind as inevitable or irrelevant? With that last letter she had tossed her past overboard. Smiling, brooding, still thinking only of himself and her, enclosed in the impenetrable world of their love, she opened the telegram under their joint gaze.

They read: "Happiness is a work of art. Handle with care." The message was unsigned, but no signature was necessary. "Poor old Frenny!" Her first impulse was to smile at the idea that any one, and most of all an embittered old bachelor like her friend George Frenside, should think it possible to advise her as to the nature or management of happiness. Her eyes met Vance's, and she saw that they were grave.

"I suppose he remembered something in his own life," Vance said.

"I suppose so." It made her shiver a little to think that some day she too might be remembering—this. At the moment, happiness seemed to have nothing to do with memory, to be an isolating medium dividing her from the past as completely, as arbitrarily, as this huge ship had detached her little world of passengers from the shores of earth. Suddenly Halo recalled having said to Frenside, in the course of one of their endless speculative talks: "Being contented is so jolly that I sometimes think I couldn't have stood being happy"; and his grim answer: "It's a destructive experience."

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Poor Frenside! Poor herself! For she had not known then what happiness was, any more (she supposed) than he did. Destructive? When the mounting flood of life was rumouring in her ears like the sea? As well call spring destructive, or birth, or any of the processes of renewal that forever mantle the ancient earth with promise.

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"I wonder what it feels like to remember," she said obscurely. Vance's smile met hers. "How extraordinary!" she thought. "Nothing that I say to him will need explaining … " It gave her a miraculous winged sense, as though she were free of the bonds of gravitation. "Oh, Vance, this—it's like flying!" He nodded, and they stood silent, watching the silvery agitation of the waters as the flank of the steamer divided them. Up and down the deck people were scattering, disappearing. Rows of empty deck-chairs stood behind the lovers. The passengers had gone to look up their cabins, hunt for missing luggage, claim letters, parcels, seats in the dining-saloon. Vance Weston and Halo Tarrant seemed to have the ship to themselves.

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It was a day of early September. Wind-clouds, shifting about in the upper sky, tinged the unsteady glittering water with tones of silver, lead and rust-colour, hollowed to depths of sullen green as the steamer pressed forward to the open. The lovers were no longer gazing back on the fading pinnacles of New York; hand clasped over hand, they looked out to where the sea spread before them in limitless freedom.

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They had chosen a slow steamer, on an unfashionable line, partly from economy, partly because of Halo's wish to avoid acquaintances; and their choice had been rewarded. They knew no one on board. Halo Tarrant, in the disturbed and crowded days before her departure, had looked forward with impatience to the quiet of a long sea-voyage. Her life, of late, had been so full of unprofitable agitation that she yearned to set her soul's house in order. Before entering on a new existence she wanted to find herself again, to situate herself in the new environment into which she had been so strangely flung. A few months ago she had been living under the roof of Lewis Tarrant, bound to him by ties the more unbreakable because they did not concern her private feelings. She had regarded it as her fate to be a good wife and a devoted companion to her husband for the rest of their joint lives; it had never occurred to her that he would wish a change. But she had left out of account the uneasy vanity which exacted more, always more, which would not be put off with anything less than her whole self, her complete belief, the uncritical surrender of her will and judgment. When her husband found she was not giving him this (or only feigning to give it) he sought satisfaction elsewhere. If his wife did not believe in him, his attitude implied, other women did—women whom this act of faith endued with all the qualities he had hoped to find in Halo. To be "understood", for Lewis Tarrant, was an active, a perpetually functioning state. The persons nearest him must devote all their days and nights, thoughts, impulses, inclinations, to the arduous business of understanding him. Halo began to see that as her powers of self-dedication decreased her importance to her husband decreased with them. She became first less necessary, then (in consequence) less interesting, finally almost an incumbrance. The discovery surprised her. She had once thought that Tarrant, even if he ceased to love her, would continue to need her. She saw now that this belief was inspired by the resolve to make the best of their association, to keep it going at all costs. When she found she had been replaced by more ardent incense-burners the discovery frightened her. She felt a great emptiness about her, saw herself freezing into old age unsustained by self-imposed duties. For she could not leave her husband—she regarded herself as bound by the old debt on which their marriage had been based. Tarrant had rescued her parents from bankruptcy, had secured their improvident old age against material cares. That deed once done would never be undone; she knew he would go on supporting them; his very vanity compelled him to persist in being generous when he had once decreed that he ought to be. He never gave up an attitude once adopted as a part of his picture of himself.

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But then—what of her? She tried not to think of her loneliness; but there it was, perpetually confronting her. She was unwanted, yet she could not go. She had to patch together the fragments of the wrecked situation, and try to use them as a shelter.

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And then, what would have seemed likely enough had it not been the key to her difficulty, had after all come to pass. An infirm old cousin died, and her will made Halo Tarrant a free woman. At first she did not measure the extent of her freedom. She thought only: "Now I can provide for my people; they need not depend on Lewis—" but it had not yet dawned on her that her liberation might come too. She still believed that Tarrant's determination to keep whatever had once belonged to him would be stronger than any other feeling. "He'll take the other woman—but he'll want to keep me," she reasoned; and began to wonder how she could avoid making her plea for freedom seem to coincide with her material release. To appear to think that her debt could be thus cancelled was to turn their whole past into a matter of business—and it had begun by being something else. She could not have married anybody who happened to have paid her parents' debts; that Tarrant had done so seemed at the time merely an added cause for admiration, a justification of her faith in him. She knew now that from the beginning her faith had needed such support … And then, before she could ask for her freedom, he had anticipated her by asking for his; and, so abruptly that she was still bewildered by the suddenness of the change, she found herself a new woman in a new world …

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All this she had meant to think over, setting her past in order before she put it away from her and took up the threads of the future. But suddenly she found herself confronted by a new fact which reduced past and future to shadows. For the first time in her life she was living in the present. Hitherto, as she now saw, her real existence, her whole inner life, had been either plunged in the wonders that art, poetry, history, had built into her dreams, or else reaching forward to a future she longed for yet dreaded. She had thought she could perhaps not bear to be happy; and now she was happy, and all the rest was nothing. She was like someone stepping into hot sunlight from a darkened room; she blinked, and saw no details. And to look at the future was like staring into the sun. She was blinded, and her eyes turned to the steady golden noon about her. Ah, perhaps it was true—perhaps she did not know how to bear happiness. It took her by the inmost fibres, burned through her like a fever, was going to give her no rest, no peace, no time to steady and tame it in her dancing soul.

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Chapter 2

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Halo had said: "Now you'll have your fill of the sea—" and Vance Weston had smiled at the idea that ten days could be enough of infinitude. Hitherto his horizon had been bounded by the prairies of the Middle West or walled in between the cliffs of the Hudson or the skyscrapers of New York. Twice only had he drunk of that magic, in two brief glimpses which had seemed to pour the ocean through his veins. If a lover can separate the joys of love from its setting, he felt a separate delight in knowing that his first days and nights with Halo were to be spent at sea.

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When his wife's death, and Halo Tarrant's decision to leave her husband, had brought the two together a few months previously, Vance had seen no reason for not seizing at once on their predestined happiness. But Halo felt differently. When she went to him with the news of her freedom she supposed him to be separated from his wife, and thought that he and she might resume their fraternal intimacy without offense to Laura Lou. Then, when she had run him to earth in a shabby outskirt of New York, she had discovered that he also was free, freed not by the law but by the fact that his young wife had just died in the tumble-down bungalow where Halo had found him. There she learned that there had been no lasting quarrel between Vance and Laura Lou, and that they had never separated. Expecting to find a deserted husband she had encountered a mourning widower, and had been paralyzed by the thought of declaring her love under the roof where Vance's vigil by his wife's death-bed was barely ended. Vance had hardly perceived the barrier that she felt between them. He lived in a simpler moral atmosphere, and was quicker at distinguishing the transient from the fundamental in human relations; but he would have felt less tenderly toward Halo if she had not been aware of that silent presence.

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"But she's there, dearest—can't you feel it? Don't you see her little face, so pleading and puzzled … as it was that day when she was angry with me for going to see her, and turned me out of her room—do you remember? Oh, Vance, it was all for love of you—don't I know? I understood it even then; I loved her for it. I used to envy her for having somebody to worship. And now I see her, I feel her near us, and I know we must give her time, time to understand, time to consent, to learn not to hate me, as she would hate me at this minute if you and I were to forget her."

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Vance had never before thought of the past in that way; but as he listened Halo's way became his, and her evocation of Laura Lou, instead of paining or irritating him, seemed like saying a prayer on a lonely grave. Such feelings, instinctive in Halo, were familiar to Vance through the pity for failure, pity for incomprehension, which glowed in his grandmother's warm blood. New York and Euphoria called things by different names, and feelings which in the older society had become conventionalized seemed to require formulating and ticketing in the younger; but the same fibres stirred to the same touch.

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Vance and Halo, that spring evening, had parted after a long talk. Halo had gone to join her parents at Eaglewood, their country place above Paul's Landing; Vance had returned to his family at Euphoria, with the idea of settling down there for a year of writing, away from all the disturbances, material and moral, which had so long hampered his work. By the end of the year Halo would have obtained her divorce, his book (he was sure) would be finished, and a new life could begin for both. Vance meant to go on with the unfinished novel, "Magic," which had been so strangely stimulated by his wife's illness, so violently interrupted by her death. That sad fragment of his life was over, his heart was free to feed on its new hopes, and he felt that it would be easy, after a few weeks of rest, to return to his work.

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They had all been very kind at Euphoria. His father's business was recovering, though his spirits were not. A younger and more unscrupulous school of realtors had robbed Mr. Weston of his former prominence. Though he retained its faint reflection among his contemporaries he was a back number to the younger men, and he knew it, and brooded over the thought that if things had gone differently Vance might have been one of his successful supplanters. Lorin Weston would have liked to be outwitted in business by his own son. "I used to think you'd be a smarter fellow than I ever was," he said wistfully. "And anyway, if you'd come back and taken that job they offered you on the 'Free Speaker' you could have given me enough backing to prevent the Crampton deal going through without me. I was a pioneer of Crampton, and everybody in Euphoria knows it. But those fellows squared the 'Free Speaker' and so their deal with the Shunts motor people went through without me. And it's not much more'n three years ago that I sold that house your grandmother used to live in for less than what Harrison Delaney got the year after by the square yard for that rookery of his down the lane—you remember?" Vance remembered.

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"Oh, well," interrupted Mrs. Weston, in the nervous tone of one who knows what is coming, and has heard it too often, "there's no use your going over that old Delaney deal again. I guess everybody has a chance once in their lives—and anyhow, Harrison Delaney's waited long enough for his."

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"Well, he did wait, and I couldn't afford to. He smelt out somehow that Shunts Amalgamated were buying up everything they could lay their hands on down Crampton way; and he pocketed his million—yes, sir, one million—and sent for that girl of his, who was on some job over at Dakin, and the story is they've gone over to Europe to blow it in—gay Paree!" Mr. Weston jeered a little mournfully. "Well, son, I always kinder hoped when you'd worked the literature out of your system you'd come back and carry on the old job with me; and if you had I guess we'd be running Crampton today instead of the Shuntses."

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However, the Euphoria boom was not confined to Crampton, and Mr. Weston's improved situation enabled him to pay Vance's debts (though the total startled him), and even to promise his son a small allowance till the latter could get on his feet and produce that surest evidence of achievement, a best-seller. "And he will too, Vanny will; just you folks reserve your seats and wait," his grandmother Scrimser exulted, her old blue eyes sparkling like flowers through her tears.

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"Well, I guess father'll be prouder of that than what he would of a real-estate deal," Mae, the cultured daughter, remarked sententiously.

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"I will, the day he gets up to Harrison Delaney's figure," Mr. Weston grumbled; but he circulated Mrs. Scrimser's prophecy among his cronies, and Vance's fame spread about through Euphoria. The women of the family (his grandmother not excepted) took even more pride in the prospect of his marrying into one of the "regular Fifth Avenue families." "Well, if they wouldn't listen to me I guess they'll all be listening to you some day soon," Mrs. Scrimser said, humorously alluding to an unsuccessful attempt she had once made to evangelize fashionable New York. They all gloated over a snap-shot of Halo which Vance had brought with him, and his mother longed to give it to the "Free Speaker" for publication, and to see Vance, on both literary and social grounds, interviewed, head-lined and banqueted. But they were impressed, if disappointed, by his resolve to defend his privacy. He had come back home to work, they explained for him; one of the big New York publishers was waiting for his new book, and showing signs of impatience; and the house in Mapledale Avenue was converted into a sanctuary where the family seer might vaticinate undisturbed.

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Never before in Vance's troubled life had he worked with an easy mind. He had written the first chapters of "Magic" in an agony of anxiety. Fears for his wife's health, despair of his own future, regrets for his past mistakes, had made his mind a battle-ground during the months before Laura Lou's death. Yet through that choking anguish the fount of inspiration had forced its way; and now that he sat secure under the Mapledale Avenue roof, heart and mind at peace, the past at rest, the future radiant, the fount was dry. Before he had been at home a week he was starving for Halo, and stifling in the unchanged atmosphere of Euphoria. He saw now that the stimulus he needed was not rest but happiness. He had meant to send Halo what he wrote, chapter by chapter; but he could not write. What he needed was not her critical aid but her nearness. His apprentice days were over; he knew what he was trying to do better than any one could tell him, even Halo; what he craved was the one medium in which his imagination could expand, and that was Halo herself.

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For two or three months he struggled on without result; then, after a last night spent in desperate contemplation of the blank sheets on his desk, he threw his manuscript into his suit-case and went down to announce his departure to the family. He travelled from Euphoria to Paul's Landing as quickly as changes of train permitted; and two days later rang the door-bell of Eaglewood, and said to the Spears' old chauffeur, Jacob, who appeared at the door in the guise of the family butler: "Hullo, Jake; remember me—Vance Weston? Yes; I've just arrived from out west; and I've got to see Mrs. Tarrant right off … "

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That had happened in August; now, barely three weeks later, Halo sat at his side in a corner of the liner's deck, and the night-sea encircled them, boundless and inscrutable as their vision of the future. There was no moon, but the diffused starlight gave a faint uniform lustre to the moving obscurity. The sea, throbbing and hissing in phosphorescent whirls about the steamer's keel, subsided to vast ebony undulations as it stretched away to the sky. The breeze blew against the lovers' faces purified of all earthly scents, as if it had circled forever over that dematerialized waste. Vance sat with his arm about Halo, brooding over the mystery of the waters and his own curious inability to feel their vastness as he had once felt it from a lonely beach on Long Island. It was as if the sea shrank when no land was visible—as if the absence of the familiar shore made it too remote, too abstract, to reach his imagination. He had a feeling that perhaps he would never be able to assimilate perfection or completeness.

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"It's funny," he said; and when Halo wanted to know what was, he rejoined: "Well, when people tell me a story, and say: 'Here's something you ought to make a good thing out of, if what they tell me is too perfect, too finished—if they don't break off before the end—I can't do anything with it. Snatches, glimpses—the seeds of things—that's what story-tellers want. I suppose that's why the Atlantic's too big for me. A creek's got more of the sea in it, for people who want to turn it into poetry."

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She pressed closer to him. "That's exactly the theme of 'Magic', isn't it?"

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"Yes," he assented; and sat silent. "Do you know, there's another thing that's funny—"

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"What else is?"

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"Well, I used to think your eyes were gray."

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"Aren't they?"

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"They're all mixed with brown, like autumn leaves on a gray stream."

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"Vance, wouldn't it be awful if you found out that everything about me was different from what you used to think?"

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"Well, everything is—I mean, there are all sorts of lights and shades and contradictions and complications."

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"Perhaps I shall be like your subjects. If you get to know me too well you won't be able to do anything with me. I suppose that's why artists often feel they oughtn't to marry."

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"What they generally feel is that they oughtn't to stay married," he corrected.

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"Well—it's not too late!" she challenged him.

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"Oh, but they've got to marry first; artists have. Or some sort of equivalent."

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"You acknowledge that you're all carnivora?"

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He turned and drew her head to his cheek in the dimness. "I said perfection was what I hadn't any use for." Their laughter mixed with their long kiss; then she loosed herself from his arms and stood up.

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"Come, Vance, let's go and look at the past for a minute."

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"What's the past?"

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She drew him along the deck, from which the last of the passengers were descending to the light and sociability below; they retraced the ship's length till they reached a point at the stern from which they could see the receding miles of star-strown ocean. "Look how we're leaving it behind and how it's racing after us," Halo said. "I suppose there's a symbol in that. All the things we've done and thought and struggled for, or tried to escape from, leagued together and tearing after us. Doesn't it make you feel a little breathless? I wonder what we should do if they caught up with us."

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Vance leaned on the rail, his arm through hers. The immensity of the night was rushing after them. On those pursuing waves he saw the outstretched arms of his youth, his parents, his grandmother, Floss Delaney, Mrs. Pulsifer, the girls who had flitted across his path, and the little white vision of Laura Lou springing like spray from wave to wave. He pictured a man suddenly falling over the ship's side, and seized and torn to pieces by the pack of his memories—then he felt the current of Halo's blood beating in his, and thought: "For a little while longer we shall outrace them."

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Chapter 3

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The monumental Spanish sky was full of cloud-architecture. Long azure perspectives between colonnades and towers stretched away majestically above an empty earth. The real Spain seemed to be overhead, heavy with history; as if all the pictures, statues, ecclesiastical splendours that Vance and Halo had come to see were stored in the air-palaces along those radiant avenues. The clouds peopled even the earth with their shadow-masses, creating here a spectral lake in the dry landscape, there a flock of cattle, or a hamlet on a hill which paled and vanished as the travellers approached. All that Vance had ever read about mirages and desert semblances rose in his mind as the motor-coach rolled and swayed across the barren land.

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The names of the few villages that they passed meant nothing to him. The famous towns and cities of Spain already sang in his imagination; but there were none on this road, and the clusters of humble houses on bare slopes could not distract his attention from that celestial architecture. At first he had been oppressed by the emptiness of the landscape, its lack of any relation to the labours and joys of men. Stretching away on all sides to the horizon, the tierras despobladas seemed to lie under a mysterious blight. But gradually he ceased to feel their gloom. Under a sky so packed with prodigies it began to seem natural that people should turn their minds and their interests away from the earth. On the steamer he had read a little about the Spanish mystics, in one of the books that Halo had brought; and now he thought: "No wonder everything on earth seemed irrelevant, with all those New Jerusalems building and re-building themselves overhead."

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As the sun declined, cloud ramparts and towers grew more massive, nearer the earth, till their lowest degrees rested like marble stairways on the hills. "Those are the ladders that Jacob's angels went up and down," Vance mused; then the gold paled to ashes, and the sky-palaces were absorbed into the dusk. The motor-coach crossed a bridge and drove into a brown city, through narrow streets already full of lights. At a corner Halo asked the conductor to stop, and entrusted their bags to him. "Come," she said; and Vance followed her across a wide court where daylight still lingered faintly under old twisted trees. She pushed open a door in a cliff-like wall, and they entered into what seemed total darkness to eyes still blinking with Spanish sunshine. Vance stood still, waiting for his sight to return. It came little by little, helped by the twinkle of two or three specks of flame, immeasurably far off, like ships' lights in mid-ocean; till gradually he discerned through the obscurity forms of columns and arches linked with one another in long radiating perspectives. "The place is as big as that sky out there," he murmured.

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He and Halo moved forward. First one colonnade, low-vaulted and endless, drew them on; then another. They were caught in a dim network of architectural forms, perpetually repeated abstractions of the relation between arch and shaft. The similarity of what surrounded them was so confusing that they could not be sure if they had passed from one colonnade to another, or if the whole system were revolving with them around some planetary centre still invisible. Vance felt as if he had dropped over the brim of things into the mysterious world where straight lines loop themselves into curves. He thought: "It's like the feel of poetry, just as it's beginning to be born in you"—that fugitive moment before words restrict the vision. But he gave up the struggle for definitions.

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The obscure central bulk about which those perpetual aisles revolved gradually took shape as sculptured walls rising high overhead. In the walls were arched openings; lights reflected in polished marble glimmered through the foliation of wrought-iron gates. Vance was as excited and exhausted as if he had raced for miles over the uneven flagging. Suddenly he felt the desire to lift his arms and push back the overwhelming spectacle till he had the strength to receive it. He caught Halo's arm. "Come away," he said hoarsely. Through the dimness he saw her look of surprise and disappointment. She was used to these things, could bear them. He couldn't—and he didn't know how to tell her. He slipped his arm through hers, pulling her after him.

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"But wait, dearest, do wait. This is the choir, the high-altar, the Christian cathedral built inside … It's so beautiful at this hour… Don't you want … ?"

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He repeated irritably: "Come away. I'm tired," knowing all the while how he was disappointing her. He felt her arm nervously pressed against his.

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"Of course, dear. But what could have tired you? The hot sun, perhaps … Oh, where's the door?" She took a few uncertain steps. "There's only one left open. The sacristan saw us come in, and is waiting outside. All the doors are locked at sunset; but he's watching for us at the one we came in by. The thing is to find it."

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They began to walk down one of the aisles. Farther and farther away in the heart of the shadows they left the great choir and altar; yet they seemed to get no nearer to the door. Halo stood still again. "No—this way," she said, with the abruptness of doubt. "We're going in the wrong direction." Vance remembered a passage in the Second Faust which had always haunted him: the scene where Faust descends to the Mothers. "He must have wound round and round like this," he thought. They had turned and were walking down another low-vaulted vista toward a glow-worm light at its end. This led them to a door bolted and barred on the inner side, and evidently long unopened. "It's not that." They turned again and walked in the deepening darkness down another colonnade. Vance thought of the Cretan labyrinth, of Odysseus evoking the mighty dead, of all the subterranean mysteries on whose outer crust man loves and fights and dies. The blood was beating in his ears. He began to wish that they might never find the right door, but go on turning about forever at the dark heart of things. They walked and walked. After a while Halo asked: "Are you really tired?" like Eurydice timidly guiding Orpheus back to daylight.

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"No; I'm not tired any longer."

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"We'll soon be out," she cheered him; and he thought: "How funny that she doesn't know what I'm feeling!" He longed to sit down at the foot of one of the glimmering shafts and let the immensity and the mystery sweep over him like the sea. "If only she doesn't tell me any more about it," he thought, dreading architectural and historical explanations. But she slipped her hand in his, and the touch melted into his mood.

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At last they found the right door, and a key ground in response to Halo's knock. Vance felt like a disembodied spirit coming back to earth. "I'd like to go and haunt somebody," he murmured. It was night outside, but a transparent southern night, not like the thick darkness in the cathedral. The court with the old twisted orange-trees was dim; but in the streets beyond there were lights and shrill human noises, the smell of frying food and the scent of jasmine. When they got back to the hotel and were shown to their room, Vance said abruptly: "You go down to dinner alone. I don't want anything to eat. I'd rather stay here … "

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"You don't feel ill?" she asked; but he reassured her. "I'm only overfed with the day … " She tidied her hair and dress, and went down. It was exquisite to be with a woman who didn't persist and nag. He flung himself on the bed, his nerves tranquillized, and watched the stars come out through a tree under the window. Those branches recalled others, crooked and half-bare, outside of the window of the suburban bungalow where he had nursed his wife in her last illness. They were apple-branches; and he remembered how one day—a day of moral misery but acute spiritual excitement—he had seen the subject of his new book hanging on that tree like fruit. "Magic"—the story he had meant to write as soon as he was free. And he had been free for nearly a year, and had not added a line to it. But now everything would be different. With Halo at his side, and the world opening about him like the multiple vistas of that strange cathedral, his imagination would have room to range in. He shut his eyes and fell asleep.

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The opening of the door made him start up, and he tumbled off the bed as Halo entered. "It took forever to get anything to eat. Did you wonder what had become of me?"

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"No. I must have been asleep. But I'm as hungry as a cannibal. Can't we go out somewhere and get supper?" He felt happy, renewed, and as famished as a boy who has been sent to bed dinnerless.

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The streets hummed with nocturnal chatter. Gusts of scent blew over secret garden-walls; and in the narrower thoroughfares of the old town they caught, through open arch-ways, glimpses of white courts with hanging lanterns, and plants about fountains, and gossiping people grouped in willow armchairs. Halo's Spanish was fluent enough to make her at ease in the scene, and she found a little restaurant smelling of olive-oil and garlic, where diners still lingered, and a saffron mound of rice and fish was set before Vance. He revelled in the high-seasoned diet, the thick sunny wine, the familiarity and noise of the friendly place, the contrast between the solitude of the cathedral and the crowded common life at its doors. He longed to wander from street to street, listening to the overlapping gramophones, the snatches of hoarse song, excited talk from door-step to door-step, the wail of muleteers driving their beasts to the stable, the whine of beggars on the steps of churches. It was strange and delicious to be sitting there at ease with this young woman who knew what everybody was saying, could talk to them, laugh with them, ask the way, bandy jokes, and give him the sense of being at home in it all.

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After a while they got up and walked on. "Do you want to see some dancing? I daresay we could find a place," Halo suggested, as they caught a rattle of castanets from a packed café. But Vance wanted to stay in the streets. He liked to wander under the night-blue sky, and to speculate on what was going on behind the white walls of the houses, and the gates that were beginning to be shut on the darkened patios. They strayed down one street after another, through little squares shadowed with trees, to the market quarter around the cathedral, where, at the base of those mute walls, the shrieking of gramophones contended with the smell of fish and garlic. Then they turned the flank of the cathedral, and followed an unfrequented lane descending between convent-like buildings to the river. All was hushed and dim. They went out to the middle of the fortified bridge, and leaning on the parapet looked from the sluggish waters below to the mountain-like mass of the great church.

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Vance gave a chuckle of satiety. "I don't believe I could bear it if there was a moon!"

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Halo had not spoken for a long while. "That's what I used to feel about happiness," she said.

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"That you couldn't bear it?"

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"Yes."

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"Well—and now?"

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"Oh, now … you'll have to teach me … "

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"Me? I never knew what it was, either … not this kind … "

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"Is there any other?"

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He pressed her close. "If there is, I've got no use for it."

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They stood listening to the sound of the lazy river. The darkness drooped over them, low and burning as the curtains of an Olympian couch; and Vance, holding his love, thought how little meaning the scene would have had without her. He had seen it all before, after all—in inklings, in scattered visions; at the movies, at the opera, in the histories and travels he'd read; in "Gil Blas" and Gautier and "The Bible in Spain"; in sham Spanish cafés and cabarets; who was going to tell him anything new about Spain? The newness, the marvel, was in his arms, under his lips—this girl who was his other brain, his soul and his flesh. He longed to tell her so, in words such as no other woman had heard; but the poverty of all words came over him. "See here, let's go home to bed." They linked arms, and went back up the hill to the hotel. It was so late that even a Spanish porter was hard to rouse—but at length they climbed the stairs and stole into their room. Through the window the smell of frying oil and jasmine flowers blew in on them; and Vance wondered if in all his life any other smell would be so mingled for him with the taste of Halo's lips and eyelids.

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Chapter 4

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The next morning Vance announced that he meant to spend at least a month at Cordova. He said "I mean," as naturally as if the decision concerned only himself, and he would not for the world have restricted his companion's liberty. But this was not a surprise to Halo. She knew the irresistible force which drove him in pursuit of the food his imagination required. It was not that he was forgetful of her, but that, now they were together, his heart was satisfied, while the hunger of his mind was perpetual and insatiable.

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In spite of herself she was slightly disconcerted by his taking their plan of travel into his own hands. She, who had worked it out so carefully, considering the season, the probable weather, the number of days to be given to each place, saw that all this meant nothing to him and reflected with a pang that she had outgrown the age of impulse. It was seldom nowadays that she remembered this difference between them. At first she had been continually conscious that he was the younger, and this had kept her from acknowledging to herself that she was in love with him. Even afterward there were times when he had seemed a boy to her; but now that they were lovers she felt in him a man's authority. But in practical matters she was conscious of her greater experience, and half-vexed at his not perceiving it.

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"But, darling, you haven't seen Seville yet—or Murcia or Granada. And we ought to go up to Ronda before the weather turns cold. You've no conception of the wonders … "

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He looked at her with a whimsical smile. "That's why … "

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"Why?"

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"It takes me such a darned long time to deal with wonders. I'm slow, I suppose. I don't care for more than one course at a meal."

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She shrugged a little impatiently. "Oh, don't use your gastronomic preferences as an argument, dearest!"

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"You mean they're too crude?"

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"No; but they contradict your other theory. The theory that artists need only a mouthful of each dish."

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"Oh, damn artists! I just want to please Vance Weston," he rejoined imperturbably, his arm about her shoulder. She laughed, and kissed him; but inwardly she thought: "I must just adapt myself; I must learn to keep step."

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After all, wasn't it what she had wanted to marry him for? The absorbing interest of seeing his gift unfold under her care had been so interwoven with her love that she could not separate them. But she liked to think that she loved him because she believed in his genius, not that (as a simpler woman might) she believed in his genius because she loved him. Yet here she was, on the point of letting her petty habits of routine and order interfere with his inspiration! What did it matter if they spent the rest of the autumn at Cordova—or the rest of the year? "You feel as if you could write here?" she suggested, remembering how once before his art had flowered under her influence; and he smiled back at her: "Just at this minute I feel as if I couldn't write anywhere else." But they agreed that work would be impossible in their one noisy room at the hotel, and Halo set out to find quieter and roomier quarters. In her young days, before her marriage to Tarrant had immersed the family in luxury, Mr. and Mrs. Spear had taught their children that to combine picturesqueness with economy was one of the pleasures of travel. Scornful of the tourist who rated plumbing above local colour, and had to content himself with what could be asked for in English, the Spears, polylingual and ingratiating, gloried in the art of securing "amusing" lodgings at famine prices. The gifts developed in those nomad years came to Halo's aid, and before night she had driven a masterly bargain with the owner of the very quarters she wanted. The rooms were bare but clean, and so high above the town that they commanded the jumble of roofs and towers descending to the bridge, and a glimpse of the brown hills beyond. Vance was enchanted, and the unpacking and settling down turned the lovers into happy children. Though Vance lacked Halo's skill in driving nails and mending broken furniture he shared her love of order, and his good will and stronger muscles lightened her task. Before long his room was ready, and at a carefully consolidated table on which Halo had laid a fresh sheet of blotting paper and a stack of "author's pads" of a blue that was supposed to be good for the eyes, he sat down to his novel.

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"Nobody ever fixed me up like this before," he said with a contented laugh. She remembered the comfortless house in which she had found him after Laura Lou's death, and wondered what happiness could equal that of a woman permitted to serve the genius while she adored the man.

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"Do you think it's going to be as good a place for work as the Willows?" She coloured at her allusion to the old house on the Hudson, where she had spent so many hours with Vance while he was writing "Instead"—the novel the critics had acclaimed, and his publishers had resented his not consenting to repeat. All through one fervid summer the two had met there, unknown to Vance's wife and to Halo's husband. At that time she had imagined that she and Vance were only friends; yet, though she had ceased to meet him when his sudden outburst of passion broke down the feint, she could not recall their stolen hours without compunction. But there was none in Vance's eyes.

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"I'm going to work a thousand per cent better here, because at the Willows I was always in a fever for you, and you kept getting in between me and my book."

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"What a nuisance I must have been!" she murmured hypocritically; and added, half laughing, half in earnest: "And now—I suppose you already take me for granted?"

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Their eyes met, and she saw in his the inward look which sometimes made him appear so much older than his age. "Oh, my soul—mayn't I?" he said; and: "Vance," she cried out, "what I want is just to be like the air you breathe … "

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He lit a cigarette, and leaned back, comfortably surveying the blue pages. "That's only the beginning of all the things you're going to be," he declared. He held out the bundle of cigarettes, and she bent to light one from his, and stole to the door, pausing to say: "Now I'm going to leave you to your work."

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She went to her own room to finish her unpacking; then she sat down in the window, and let the waves of bliss flow over her. More than once since she had left New York she had tried to look into the future and picture her probable destiny; but while her life held this burning core of passion she could fix her thoughts on nothing else. She had been too starved and cold before; now she could only steep herself in the glow.

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No one would understand, she knew; least of all her own family. Mr. and Mrs. Spear had always regarded themselves as free spirits, and were certainly burdened with fewer social prejudices than most of their friends and relations. Mrs. Spear had specialized in receiving "odd" people at a time when New York was still shy of them. She had welcomed at her house foreign celebrities travelling with ladies unprovided with a marriage certificate, and had been equally hospitable to certain compatriots who had broken their marriage tie when such breaks were a cause of scandal. But though she sympathized with "self-expression", and the mystical duty to "live one's life", and had championed the first adventurers in the new morality, she had never expected any one belonging to her to join that band of heroes. She was a Lorburn of Paul's Landing, and people of pre-Revolutionary stock, however emancipated their sympathies, conformed to tradition in their conduct. Mrs. Spear had herself conformed. Her marriage had been a defiance, since she had married out of her own set, or her own class, as her family would have put it; but it was a defiance sanctioned by church and law, and she had never dreamed of her daughter's taking liberties with those institutions. Grieved as she was at Halo's leaving her husband, Mrs. Spear had accepted it as inevitable, and had bowed, after another struggle, to the further inevitability of her daughter's re-marriage; but she had been genuinely shocked, and deeply hurt, by Halo's decision to go away with her lover before her divorce. Mrs. Spear had not been violent and denunciatory, like her husband, whose resentment was doubled by the fact that he could not air it in the newspapers. Mrs. Spear knew that the day was past when parents, especially parents who have coquetted with Bohemia, can call down curses on a dishonoured daughter. But she did feel that Halo was dishonouring herself, and that every influence should be used to save her. If the break with Tarrant was unavoidable, why could not her daughter wait until he had taken the necessary steps? "Lewis is always a gentleman. You must admit that. You can count on his assuming all the blame," Mrs. Spear had pleaded, her beautiful eyes full of persuasion and perplexity.

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"But, mother, supposing I'd rather share the blame—why shouldn't I take the necessary steps for that?" Halo rejoined, trying to evade her mother's entreaties. Mrs. Spear merely replied: "Don't talk like your brother, please"—for Lorry Spear was noted for his habit of dealing with serious questions flippantly; and Halo, conscious of the ineffectualness of any argument, could only repeat: "Mother, I must go with him—I must. He needs me"—though she knew that to her mother such a plea was worse than flippancy.

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"If he really needs you, dear, he'll have the strength of character to wait for you for a year. If he hasn't—" Mrs. Spear left the ominous conclusion unspoken.

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"Oh, but, mother darling, it's not that … I suppose you're thinking of other women … " Halo felt herself burning inwardly at the suggestion.

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"It's not an unusual weakness—with artists especially," Mrs. Spear drily interposed.

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"No," Halo conceded; "I suppose we shouldn't have much art without it … But what I mean is so different … He needs me for his work … I can help him, I know I can … "

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"Of course he'll make you think so—oh, it's all so unlike you, darling!" cried poor Mrs. Spear, feeling herself as short of arguments as her daughter.

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"No, it's like me," Halo exclaimed passionately, "only I've never really been myself before. Don't grudge me the chance." She bent over, trying to kiss away her mother's tears; and on this unsatisfactory conclusion they had parted.

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At first Halo's view had differed little from Mrs. Spear's. To wait till she was divorced, and go to Vance Weston as his wife, had seemed the natural, the obvious arrangement. But when Vance came back from Euphoria, ill-looking, unsettled, unable to work, and pleading not to have his happiness postponed, she had given way at once. She herself hardly knew whether passion or pity had prevailed; but she felt, as she had said to her mother, that this was her first chance to be her real self, and that no argument, no appeal to social expediency or to loftier motives, should deprive her of it. Words like dignity and self-respect seemed to belong to an obsolete language. Her dignity, her self-respect! What had become of them when she had endured to live with a husband she despised? Yet she had remained with him for reasons much less potent than those which called her to her lover. Was she really the same woman who, on the steamer a few weeks earlier, had hesitated over her lawyer's warning letter, and asked herself whether she ought not to turn back? Now it was her past that she was ashamed of, not her present; there were lyric moments when her flight with Vance seemed like an expiation.

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These phases of the struggle were over; she regarded them as indifferently as if they had belonged to some other woman's story. It was sweet to her now to know that she had gone to Vance without hesitating. "In such a heaven as ours there's no marrying or giving in marriage," she thought, as she sat there nursing her happiness; and awed by the perfectness of her well-being she hid her face in her hands.

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"What quiet there is in deep happiness," she mused. "How little I ever imagined this lull in the middle of the whirlpool!" But the stars still danced about her, and when she tried to disentangle her mind from their golden whirl she felt a lassitude, a reluctance she could not explain. "All that matters is that he's sitting there next door, tranquil, happy, at work again—and that it's my doing," she thought. She longed to open his door and steal in, as she used to at the Willows, when he would break off every now and then to read aloud what he had written. But she remembered what he had said of her "getting in between him and his book," and she went back to her seat, reflecting that their moments together were no longer numbered, and that her present task was to defend his privacy, not to invade it.

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The room was very still. The afternoon light, slowly veering, left in shadow first one group of roofs and towers, then another; the cloud-masses faded into twilight. At length Halo got up. Their lodging was without electric light, and she was sure Vance would not know how to light the oil-lamp she had put on his table. She was glad of the excuse for joining him …

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"Vance," she said, opening the door. No one answered, and she saw that the room was empty. The door which led to the landing was ajar—he had evidently gone out. Probably he had felt tired after his hours of writing, and had wandered away without thinking of telling her. She lit the lamp and looked about her. Cigarette ends strewed the floor, and the blue writing pad on the desk, immaculate, untouched, looked up at her ironically. He had not written a line …

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She stood struggling with a sense of disappointment. He had seemed so sure that he wanted to go on with his work—that this was the very place where it would come to him without an effort! Well, what of that? Did she still imagine that an artist, a creator, could always know in advance exactly in what conditions and at what hour the sacred impulse would come?

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She went back for her hat and coat, and descended the dark narrow stairs. Slowly she sauntered through the streets that led to the cathedral, peering with shortsighted eyes to right and left in the hope of meeting him. Lamps had begun to twinkle in the houses. Before long the sacristan would pass on his rounds and close the cathedral doors. Halo thought: "He's surely in there; I must find him before the place is locked up." She pushed back the leather curtain and went in.

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At first the darkness confused her. Each figure straying among the shadows seemed to have Vance's outline; but as she drew nearer she found herself mistaken. From aisle to aisle, from Christian altar to Moorish mihrab, she explored the baffling distances; but Vance was not there. She returned to the outer world, and began to walk back through the modern quarter; and suddenly, in front of a glittering café, she found him installed at a table. He greeted her with a smile, and said: "What will you have? I had to take a vermouth because it was all I knew how to ask for."

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"I've been hunting all over for you—" she began; then broke off, annoyed by the maternal note in her voice. "I thought you might want a Spanish drink, and an interpreter to order it," she added laughing.

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"No. I got on all right. I've been all up and down the place; then I sat down here to watch the crowd." He waited while she ordered a cup of coffee, and went on: "I couldn't write a line after all."

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"What you need is to take a good holiday first, and not bother about your book."

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His remote and happy smile enveloped her. "I'm not bothering about anything on God's earth." He was looking at her curiously. "Do you know, you've got just the shape of the head of one of those statues of the Virgin they carry in the processions—you remember: the one they showed us yesterday in that chapel? A little face, long, and narrowing down softly to the chin—like a fruit or a violin; the way yours does … God, I wish I could draw! I believe I might have … " He leaned across and twisted his fingers through hers. "What's the use of sight-seeing, anyhow, when I've got you to look at?"

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The blood rose to Halo's face. She felt a sudden shyness when he looked at her with those eyes full of secret visions. How long would it be before he had gone her round, and needed new food for his dream? She thought: "Shall I have to content myself with being a peg to hang a book on?" and found an anxious joy in the idea.

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When she had finished her coffee Vance pushed back the table. "Come—let's go down to the bridge and listen to the river in the dark … I don't believe I'll ever write a line again; not in this place anyway," he declared serenely.

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Chapter 5

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Halo wondered at her own folly in imagining that Vance, with a whole new world pressing on his imagination, would be able to take up the thread of his work with the composure of a seasoned writer. Life with him was teaching her more about the creative processes. She saw that Vance himself had not yet taken his own measure, or calculated the pressure of new sensations and emotions on his inventive faculty. His impulse was either to try to incorporate every fresh suggestion, visual or imaginative, into the fabric of his work, or to build a new story with it; but when the impressions were too abundant and powerful they benumbed him.

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For the moment he appeared to have lost even the desire to store up his sensations. What he wanted was to study Spanish history and art, to learn the language, to let the fiery panorama roll past his idle imagination. If he had known how to paint, he told Halo, that might have been an outlet. It was a pity, he thought, he hadn't gone in for painting instead of writing—painting, or perhaps sculpture. Some palpable flesh-and-blood rendering of life, rather than the gray disintegration of words. He recalled the hours he had spent in New York, on the broken-hinged divan in the studio of the young woman sculptor, Rebecca Stram, watching her mauling her clay… "I tell you what it is: words are the last refuge of the impotent. Writing is inexcusable in anybody who isn't blind or paralyzed. It's an infirmity, a palsy—that's what it is. The fellows who 'grab' life, as Goethe called it, are the conquerors who turn it into form and colour … Damn words; they're just the pots and pans of life, the pails and scrubbing-brushes. I wish I didn't have to think in words … I sometimes feel as if I had them in my veins instead of blood. Sometimes I even wish I didn't have you to talk to, so that I could get away from words forever … Why don't you tell me just to hold my tongue, and live?"

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This was one mood; but in others he declared that in yielding to it he had blasphemed against the Holy Ghost. "The tongue of fire descends on a man in one form or another, no knowing which; all a fellow can do is to catch the flame and nurse it, whatever it happens to produce … The other day I was haranguing you about the difference between plastic expression and interpreting things in words. Utter rubbish, of course. Why the deuce didn't you tell me so? The difference is in the mind, not in the material or the tool. If words are a man's tools he's got to paint or model with them … or compose symphonies with them … that's all. Look here, Halo—any idea what I've done with vol. three of Prescott? No—? I had it with me yesterday when we went out to Medina Zahara, didn't I? And my Spanish grammar too! Lord, did I go and leave them both out there, do you suppose?"

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Halo sighed, and thought that as for the Prescott it didn't really matter. She had brought with her all the latest and most erudite works on Christians and Moors in the peninsula; but after a glance at Dozy, and a little half-hearted plodding in Hume, he had disappointed her by rejecting all her authors for Prescott and Washington Irving. "But, Vance, dear, they were so undocumented. Prescott was wonderful for his day, of course; but so much that we know now was not available then. And as for Washington Irving … " Vance laughed, and turned over on his face in the grass where he and Halo were sitting, on the sunburnt downs above Cordova. "Well, they just roll over me like waves," he said, leaning his chin on his locked hands and gazing down at the ancient city. He lay there in silence, his brows wrinkled against the glare, with now and then a faint tremor of the nostrils, like the twitching of a sensitive animal's. Once he stretched out a hand, stroking the short grass and plucking at a clump of dwarf herbs that he crushed against his face. "Smells like sun and incense—as if it was the breath of the old place." He held out the tuft to Halo. It was hot and aromatic, full of the flame of a parched earth and the vibration of bees. "It's like my happiness," she thought. She lay there in an idle ecstasy. Overhead a great bird of prey circled against the blue; and Halo remembered how she had once thought of happiness as something bright-winged, untameable, with radiant alien eyes. Now the wings were folded and the strange guest lay asleep in her heart. She was no more afraid of it than a young mother is of her child; only perpetually conscious of it, watching it with wakeful eyes, as the mother watches while her child sleeps. And she thought: "If I could get quite used to it perhaps it would get used to me too, and never stir. If only I could learn to stop watching it."

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Vance raised himself on his elbow. "See here," he broke out, "what I really want is to write poetry. From the very first I've always felt inside of myself that for me it was that or nothing. All the rest is just pot-boiling. Using words to tell stories with is like paving the kitchen-floor with diamonds. God! Words are too beautiful to be walked over in that way, with muddy feet, like the hall oil-cloth. Supposing Keats had used his words to write best-sellers with? Don't it strike you like turning a Knights of Pythias picnic loose down there in the cathedral? Words ought to be received at the door of the mind with lighted torches and incense and things—like one of the big church ceremonies you described to me. See here, Halo—when did you say they danced before the altar of the cathedral at Seville? I wish I could get that into poetry… "

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The bright confusion of his mind sometimes charmed and sometimes frightened her. She was so much afraid of laying clumsy hands on his capricious impulses that she felt herself sinking into the character of the blindly admiring wife. Yet that had not been her dream, or his. She remembered how her frank criticism had guided and stimulated him while he was writing "Instead", and she did not quite know why she had become so uncertain and shy in talking with him of his literary plans, so fearful of discouraging or misdirecting him. Sometimes she asked herself if it would not have been better if they had stayed in America, in some out-of-the-way place where this tremendous vision of a new world would not have thrust itself between him and his work. Yet she felt it must be a weak talent that could not bear the shock of wonder and the hardening processes of experience. Presently the mass of new impressions would be sorted out and dominated by his indefatigable mind, and become a part of its material—and meanwhile, what mattered but that he and she were together, with these waves of beauty breaking over them? All she had to do was to hold her breath and wait. She slipped her hand in his. "Do you remember when you read me your first poetry, that morning up on Thundertop?"

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A few days later Vance came in from one of his dreaming rambles about Cordova, and said, with illuminated eyes: "I've met a man who says we're fools not to go straight off to Granada."

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Halo could not repress a feint movement of impatience. It was a little exasperating to have this information imparted as a novelty. Vance seemed to have no recollection of her having told him repeatedly that they ought to get to Granada before the rainy weather began.

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"A man? What sort of a man?"

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"He said his name was Alders," said Vance, as if that settled everything.

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Halo made a hasty mental calculation of the probable cost of cancelling the lease of their lodgings, which they had had to take for the rest of the season. The landlady would certainly be nasty; but Halo had fought such battles before, and instantly began sharpening her mental weapons. "Well, all right. Do you want me to get ready?"

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"He says we ought to," Vance repeated serenely.

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For the next two or three days he vanished frequently to rejoin his new friend. Halo gathered that Alders was a wandering American who wrote—at least he was planning a book on Saint Theresa. "For the present he's just letting Spain soak into him," Vance explained. He did not offer to produce Alders for Halo's inspection, and she did not suggest that he should. She was beginning to realize that in throwing in her lot with Vance's she had entered into an unknown country—as unknown to her as Spain was to him, and with far fewer landmarks to guide her. When Lewis Tarrant made a new acquaintance, and imparted the fact to his wife, his words at once situated the person in question, socially and intellectually. But Vance could not situate anybody. He could only say that he liked a fellow, or didn't like him. He seemed to think that in some mysterious way the impressions he could not sum up in words would be telepathically communicated to Halo; but this was impossible, for they had no common ground of reference. Halo tried to bridge the gulf by declaring cheerfully: "Well, I'm sure I'll like him if you do," but Vance answered, with a sort of school-boy vagueness: "Oh, I dunno that I like him as much as all that," making no allusion to Halo's possible opinion of Alders. He seemed to regard Alders as exclusively his own, as a child might a new toy.

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A few more days passed; then Vance suddenly announced that he thought it would be fun to go over to Granada in the touring car that was starting the next morning. Could Halo be ready, did she think? After another mental readjustment she said, yes, of course, if he'd be home in the afternoon in time to pack his things; to which he cheerfully agreed.

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At the tourist agency Vance surprised her by engaging three seats. Alders, he said, was going to Granada too, and had asked to have his ticket taken for him. An exclamation of annoyance was on Halo's tongue; but she repressed it, and bought the ticket.

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The next morning, when they arrived at the square from which the car started, Vance said: "Here's Alders," and a nondescript young man in a shabby gray suit came forward. He greeted Halo with an awkward bow, and started to climb to Vance's side; but at the last moment he bent over to say something to the conductor, as the result of which he was transferred to a seat several rows behind them, and a girl with large horn spectacles and a portable gramophone was pushed into his place. Vance laughed. "You scared him—he's as shy as a hawk." He seemed content to know that his new friend was making the journey with them, and bound for the same destination.

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At Granada they went for a night to an hotel in the town, and the next morning Vance proposed that they should look for rooms in one of the English pensions on the Alhambra hill. Alders, who knew the place well, had given him several addresses; and though Halo was beginning to resent Alders's occult participation in their affairs, she agreed to the suggestion. But half way up the hill Vance deserted her, captivated by the carolling of fountains under the elms, and the shadowy invitation of the great Moorish archway. "See here, Halo—this beats everything. Do you mind if I wait for you here while you look for rooms? I shouldn't be any good anyway," he said persuasively; and Halo, admitting the fact, went on alone.

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On the hillside below the hotels she wandered about, consulting Alders's list, till a dusty stony lane ended unexpectedly at a gate inscribed: "English Pension. View. Afternoon Tea"; and in a tumble-down house among oranges and pomegranates she was shown two rooms high up on a roof-terrace. The rooms were comfortless, and not too clean; but the terrace overhung the fairest landscape on earth. Halo concluded her bargain and hurried back rejoicing to the Alhambra. She was impatient to lead Vance up to this magical proscenium, and hear his cry at first sight of the snow peaks and green plain. She found him curled up in a coign of the wall above the city. He seemed to have forgotten the errand on which she had left him, and protested at being obliged to leave his warm corner. "What's the use of finding such a place if you come and root me out of it?" "I've found something even better—come and see!" she exulted; and reluctantly he let her lead him out of the Alhambra and up the hill. But when she introduced him to the terrace he cried out: "Say, are we really going to live here? Why the devil did you let me waste all that time at Cordova? Alders told me—"

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Halo laughed ironically. "I told you long before Alders. Only you're so used to the sound of my voice that I don't believe you hear it any longer."

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He was looking at her with beauty-drunk eyes. "Maybe I don't," he agreed contentedly, turning back to lean over the parapet. Halo could not help being a little vexed that they should owe the discovery of this vantage-ground to Alders. She might easily have found it herself—but it was in pursuance of his indications that she had turned down that uninviting lane. She wished she were able to feel more grateful.

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Alders came up to see if they were satisfied. He himself lodged, mysteriously, somewhere below in the town; but he was always on the Alhambra hill. That first day they asked him to tea, in one of the little tearooms near the Alhambra, and afterward he walked up with them to the Generalife. His shyness in Halo's presence persisted—or at any rate, his reserve. For she was never, then or afterward, sure if he were shy or merely indifferent, any more than she could decide if he were young or old. She could barely remember, when he was out of sight, what he looked like. There was something shadowy and indefinite about his whole person. His dullish sandy hair merged into the colour of his skin, his thin lips were of the same tint as his small unkempt moustache. She had seen straw-coloured and sand-coloured people, but never any whom protective mimicry had provided with so complete a neutrality. His manner was neutral too, if anything could be called a manner which seemed rather a resigned endurance of human intercourse. Judging from Mr. Alders's attitude one would have supposed that his one aim was to avoid his fellow beings; but Halo presently discovered that this shrinking exterior concealed a ravenous sociability.

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She recognized in him the roving American with a thin glaze of culture over an unlettered origin, and a taste for developing in conversation theories picked up in random reading, or evolved from an imperfect understanding of art and history. He told them that among his friends (he implied that they were few but illustrious) he was known as "The Scholar Gypsy"—adding that the name (taken, he smilingly explained, from a poem by Matthew Arnold) had been conferred on him because of his nomadic habits; perhaps also, he concluded, of his scholarly tastes. He made these boasts with such disarming modesty that Halo could not resent them, though she failed to understand the impression they produced on Vance. But gradually she discovered that under his literary veneer Alders possessed a miscellaneous accumulation of facts and anecdotes about places and people. His mind was like the inside of one of the humble curiosity-shops on the way up to the Alhambra, where nothing was worth more than a few pesetas; but these odds and ends of cosmopolitan experience amused Vance, and excited his imagination, though Halo noticed that he was less impressed by them than by Alders's views on Croce or Spengler, or the origin of religious mysticism in Western Europe. Vance's ravenous desire to learn more and more—to learn, all at once, everything that could be known on every subject—was stimulated by his new friend's allusions and references, and Halo saw that he ascribed her own lukewarm share in their talks to feminine inferiority. "Of course general ideas always bore women to death," he said in a tone of apology, as they climbed to their pension after a long afternoon with Alders at the Alcobazar. "But you see I was pretty well starved for talk out at Euphoria—and in New York too. God! When I think of the raw lumps of ignorance those fellows used to feed me, at the Cocoanut Tree and at Rebecca Stram's … I tell you what, Halo, going round with a man like Alders, who's got art and philosophy at his fingers' ends—"

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She was on the point of interrupting: "Yes, but only there—" but she saw Vance's glowing face, and understood that he was getting from his new friend something which a scholar like George Frenside might not have been able to give him. There was excitement in the very confusion of Alders's references, and reassurance in their audacity. Vance seemed to feel that he too might become a scholar after a few more talks with Alders, and that the wisdom of the ages might emerge from a breathless perusal of Samuel Butler and Havelock Ellis.

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It was hard on Halo to have it thought that such flights were beyond her; but she told herself again that at this stage her business was to hold her breath and watch. Though she resented Alders's incursion into their lives she was relieved that Vance did not expect her to share in his confabulations with his new friend; and she came to see how natural it was that to a youth who had lacked all artistic and intellectual training the other's shallow culture should seem so deep. The clever young writers he had known in New York had read only each other and "Ulysses"; here was a man full of the curious lore of the past, who could at any rate put the Cocoanut Tree clan in their true perspective.

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This hunger and thirst of Vance's was all the more touching to Halo because she knew that his eagerness to learn everything at once was due not to superficiality but to the sense of time lost and of precious secrets kept from him. "If only I'd had Alders's advantages!" he burst out one evening, in passionate retrospection; and she could not help answering: "It was funny, though, his thinking you'd never heard of Matthew Arnold."

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"Well, I don't believe those Cocoanut Tree fellows have; or if they have, they've thrown him overboard without reading him. They haven't got time to embalm dead bodies, they say—leave that to the morticians. And there they sit and talk endlessly all day long about nothing! Look here, Halo—I sometimes think I was meant to be a student and not a writer; a 'grammarian', like the fellow in the Browning poem. Alders was telling me last night how many years the Jesuit novitiate lasts—he thought at one time of being a Jesuit. Well, I tell you what, it gave me a big idea of those old fellows who weren't afraid of being left behind … weren't always trying to catch up … catch up with what? Why; just with other fellows who were trying to catch up. Did you ever think of the beauty of not giving a damn if you were left behind?"

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Yes; in those ways Alders was good for him. His talk was a blurred window; but through it the boy caught glimpses of the summits. Halo could have given him a clearer sight of them; but she recognized that the distance was yet too great between her traditional culture and Vance's untutored curiosities. This dawdling Autolycus, with his bag of bright-coloured scraps, might serve as a guide where she was useless.

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Luckily there were days when Alders was off on his own mysterious affairs, and Halo had her lover to herself. Then life burned with beauty, and every hour was full of magic. Vance's successive declarations that he meant to write poetry, to take up painting, to immure himself in a scholar's cell, no longer frightened her. It was enchanting to watch the tumult of his mind, sun-flecked, storm-shadowed, subsiding in moonlit calm or leaping sky-ward in sun and gale. This journey was a time of preparation from which his imagination would come forth richer and more vigorous. Occasionally she wished his idleness were not so total, for she was afraid the lost habit of work might be hard to recover; but when she hinted this, he rejoined that she didn't understand the way the creative mind was made. "There's Alders, now—I suppose you might think he was loafing… Well, he's amassing. A very different thing. He told me he might very likely lie fallow another year before he wrote the first line of his book about the influence of Byzantine art on El Greco."

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"On what? I thought he was collecting material for a life of St. Theresa."

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Vance frowned impatiently. "Yes; he was. But he's put that aside, because he felt he ought to go into sixteenth century art in Spain before he tackles mysticism. He says you can approach spiritual phenomena only from the outside; the way they manifest themselves in art and architecture and the whole social structure… If you don't get that into your system first … "

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Halo made no answer, and Vance continued, still in a slightly irritated tone: "I don't suppose you want me to be like those fellows that are sent to Europe for a year on a college scholarship, and are expected by the Faculty to come back with a masterpiece? I've heard you on the subject of those masterpieces. And a novel isn't a thesis anyhow—it's a live thing that's got to be carried inside of you before it can be born. I suppose I'm a trial to you sometimes," he concluded.

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"Only when you imagine that I don't understand." But he protested that he never did; and side by side on their high-hung terrace they watched the full moon push up above the Sierra.

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Chapter 6

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Their rooms were not easy to warm, and the October winds began to rattle the windows; but Halo and Vance were loth to leave, and they always managed to find a warm corner in the courts of the Alhambra, or sheltered by the ilexes of the Generalife, where Vance could "lizard" in the sun, and turn over his dreams like bright-coloured shells and pebbles. He had begun again to discuss his literary plans with Halo; but he only toyed with them as distant possibilities. He still seemed to regard his genius as a beautiful capricious animal, to be fed and exercised when it chose, and by him alone; and she forbore to remind him of the days when her nearness had seemed necessary to inspire his work, and her advice to shape it. She told herself that in becoming his mistress she had chosen another field of influence, that to be loved by him, to feel his passionate need of her, was a rapture above the joys of comradeship; but in her heart she had dreamed of uniting the two. She was learning now that the ways of nature were slower and more devious than her sentimental logic had foreseen; and she tried to lose herself in the rich reality of her love.

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Now and then they spoke of leaving Granada; but the talk did not reach any practical conclusion. Their plans offered to Vance as many alluring alternatives as his literary future, and what he liked best was to lie stretched out on the warm red wall of the Alhambra and dream of being elsewhere.

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Alders, by his own account, had many friends in Granada—he talked especially of an old Marquesa who lived in a palace behind the cathedral, with a statue of a captive Moor over the door. The old Marquesa, Alders said, was an authentic descendant of Bobadilla's, a wonderful woman in whose veins flowed the purest blood of Castilian and Moorish chivalry. One met at her house the oddest and most interesting specimens of the old Andalusian aristocracy. Regular palæoliths, they were; it would be a wonderful chance for Weston to document himself in such a prehistoric milieu, especially as he was thinking of laying the scene of his next novel in Spain … "Oh, are you?" Halo interrupted, glancing eagerly at Vance, who said, well, he'd had an idea lately that something amusing might be done with a young American in the wine business, sent to study the trade at a Spanish port in the eighteen thirties, say…

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Alders declared that the possibilities of such a subject were immense, and he proposed that he and Vance should go to the Marquesa's that very evening; the lady, it appeared, still kept up the picturesque custom of the nightly tertulia, an informal reception at which people came and went as they pleased till daylight. Alders explained this to Halo in his shy halting way, and though she doubted the antiquity of the Marquesa's lineage, and even its authenticity, she assumed that Alders naïvely believed in them, and wondered how, without offending him, she could decline to be of the party. But he continued, more and more hesitatingly: "You don't mind, do you, Mrs. Weston, if I carry off Weston this once? It's all in the interest of his work … an exceptional opportunity… " Halo disliked being asked by a man like Alders if she "minded" anything that Vance chose to do; and her laugh perhaps betrayed her irritation. "I'm sure it will amuse you—you'd better go," she said to Vance, as if it were he who had made the suggestion. There were times when she could not help treating Alders as if she had not noticed that he was there.

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The next morning she gathered from Vance that the Marquesa was in fact a rather splendid figure, in a vast mouldy palace with "huge things hanging on the walls—you know—," and a lot of people coming and going, men and women, eating ices and talking a great deal. His vague description gave Halo the impression that he had been among people of the world, and she was annoyed, in spite of herself, that Vance should have figured as the hanger-on of Alders.

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"I'm glad you've had a glimpse of Spanish society; but it's rather odd that your friend didn't think of asking me to go with you." The words really reflected her dislike of Alders rather than any resentment at not being included in the party; but when they were spoken she felt how petty they sounded. "Of course," she added quickly, "I didn't want to go—that sort of thing bores me to tears; I merely meant that if Alders had known a little more about the ordinary social rules he would have felt he ought at least … " She stopped, silenced by the colour that rose to Vance's forehead.

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"Vance—" she exclaimed, in sudden anger, "do you mean it was because … Does Alders know that we're not married?"

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Vance looked at her in surprise. "Why, of course he knows. I told him the very first thing how splendid you'd been … coming to me straight off, like that … he thought it was great of you… "

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"Oh, don't please! I mean, I don't need Alders's approval—." She could hardly tell why she was so indignant; had she been asked point-blank if she were Vance Weston's wife she would certainly have denied it, and have said that she called herself so only for the convenience of travel. But this concerned only herself and Vance, and the discovery that he had been talking her over with a stranger picked up at a café was intolerable to her. Alders, of course, had cross-questioned Vance to satisfy his insatiable craving for gossip; but how could Vance have fallen into such a trap?

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"Why, you don't mind, do you? I thought you'd have despised me for pretending," Vance began; but without heeding him she interrupted: "That was the reason, then! He proposed to you to go with him alone because he knew you were travelling with your mistress, and he couldn't have asked his Marquesa to receive me? Was that it?"

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Vance reddened again. "He said how funny and fossilized that kind of people were … but I never thought you'd care; you always seem to hate seeing new people."

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"Of course I don't care; and of course I hate seeing people I don't know anything about… "

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"Well, then that's all right," said Vance.

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"I don't know what you call all right. Most men would resent such a slight—"

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"What slight?"

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She saw that his perplexity was genuine, but that made it none the less irritating. There were moments when Vance's moral simplicity was more trying than the conventionalities she had fled from.

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"Can't you see—?" she began; and then broke off. "I sometimes think you keep all your psychology for your books!" she exclaimed impatiently.

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"You mean there are times when you think I don't understand you?"

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"You certainly don't at this moment. I won't speak of the good taste of discussing our private affairs with a stranger—but that you shouldn't see that any slight to a woman in my situation… "

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"What about your situation?" he interrupted. "I thought you chose it—freely."

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"When I did, I imagined you would know how to spare me its disadvantages!"

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He stood silent, looking down at the rough tiles of their bedroom floor. Halo was trembling with the echo of her own words. The consciousness that their meaning was not the same to him made her feel angry and helpless. An impenetrable wall seemed to have risen between them.

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"You mean that you hate our not being married?" he brought out, as if the idea were new to him.

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"Certainly I do, when you put me in a position that makes it hateful."

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"Like that old woman last night not wanting to receive you? It never occurred to me you'd want her to."

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"Or that you ought not to have gone yourself, if she didn't want me?" His eyes were again full of surprise. Halo laughed nervously.

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"I don't understand," he went on. "I thought you didn't care a straw about that sort of thing."

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"I shouldn't if I felt you knew how to protect me."

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She saw from his expression that her meaning was still unintelligible to him, and that he was struggling to piece her words together.

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"What is there to protect you from?"

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"Vance—if you can't understand!" She paused, her heart in a tumult. "How does your mother feel about the way we're living together?" she broke out abruptly.

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A shade of embarrassment stole over his face. "How on earth do I know?"

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"Of course you know! She hates it—and me, probably. I daresay she wouldn't receive me if I went to Euphoria with you. And my mother hates it quite as much. My going away with you like this made her terribly unhappy. And yet you say you don't understand—!"

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"Oh, see here, Halo—if that's what you mean! Of course I know how my mother feels about marriage in general. It's all nonsense about her not receiving you; but I daresay she's unhappy about our being together in this way. The marriage ceremony is a kind of fetish to her. And I suppose your mother feels the same. But I never thought you would. I thought that for you our being together like this—so close and yet so free—was more than any marriage. I never dreamed you didn't look at it as I do. I thought you'd always felt differently from the people around you about the big things of life."

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Halo was silent. She was bewildered by his incomprehension, yet moved by his evident sincerity. "You're terribly logical—and I suppose life isn't," she said at length, forcing a smile.

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Vance stood before her, his gaze again bent on the floor. She saw that he felt the distance between them, and was wondering how to bridge it over. "I guess you worry about a lot of things that I haven't yet learned to take into account. What do you think we ought to do?" he asked abruptly.

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The blood seemed to stop in her veins. She looked at him helplessly. "To do—to do?"

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"I suppose," he interrupted, "the real trouble is that you don't like Alders."

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This flash of insight startled her. She was beginning to see that though the conventional rules of life still perplexed him, and perhaps always would, he was disconcertingly close to its realities.

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"If you don't want me to go around with Alders, I won't, of course. He said the other day he thought maybe you didn't want me to."

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The mention of Alders renewed her irritation.

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"How can you think I want to interfere with you in any way? What I can't understand is your lowering yourself to talk me over with a stranger."

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There was another silence, and she began to tremble inwardly. To discuss things with him was like arguing with some one who did not use the same speech.

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"I guess I'm the stranger here, Halo. I can't understand your supposing that I'd speak of you to anybody in a way that could lower either you or me. I don't yet know what's made you angry."

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"Angry? I'm not angry! I can't bear to have you speak of me as if I were a silly woman with a grievance."

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"I suppose everything I say is bound to sound to you like that, as long as I don't understand what the grievance is."

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"When a man says he doesn't understand a woman it's because he won't take the trouble."

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"Or feels it's useless."

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"Is that what you feel?"

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"Well—maybe I will, soon."

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"No. Don't be afraid! I shan't be here then—"

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She heard the echo of her own words, and broke off dismayed. A longing overcame her to be taken into his arms and soothed like a foolish child. Of course that would come in a moment. She felt her whole body drawing her to him; but though she waited he did not move or speak. He seemed remote, out of hearing, behind the barrier that divided them. She thought: "He's been through scenes like this with Laura Lou, and he's sick of them… He thought that with me everything was going to be different… "

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At length Vance said slowly: "You must do whatever you want." She did not speak, and he added: "I guess I'll go out for a walk." His voice sounded cold, almost indifferent. How could she have imagined he was waiting to snatch her to his breast? He was simply counting the minutes till their senseless discussion was over, and he could make his escape. His inflexible honesty was deadly—she felt herself powerless against it, and could think of nothing to say. He took up his hat and went out, carrying her happiness with him.

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Chapter 7

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Halo sat alone among the ruins. It was one of the moments when life seems to turn and mock one's magnanimity. When she had torn up her lawyer's letter, and cast in her lot with Vance's, she fancied she was tearing up all the petty restrictions of her past. In her new existence the meaner prejudices would no longer reach her. All the qualities in her which could serve the man she loved—her greater experience, her knowledge of the world, her familiarity with Vance's character, her faith in his genius—seemed to justify her decision. It was to be her privilege to give him what he had always lacked: intellectual companionship and spiritual sympathy. And now, for a whim, for nothing, she had risked her hard-won happiness and dropped to the level of any nagging woman—all because he had unwittingly offended the very prejudices from which she imagined he had delivered her!

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The worst of it was that she was no untaught girl among the first pitfalls of passion. Psyche turning her lamp on the secret face of love was a novice; Halo Tarrant knew the ways of men, yet at the first occasion she had repeated Psyche's blunder. She had found out now how little importance Vance attached to the idea of marriage—and she had shown him the social value it had for her. Everything that she had meant to leave undefined and fluid in their relation her own act had forced him to define and crystallize, and thereby she had turned the lamp on her own face. Yet she could not help feeling as she had felt. Her relations with the men she had grown up among had been regulated by a code of which Vance did not know the first word, and she now saw how such tacit observances may be inwoven with the closest human intimacies.

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"Laura Lou couldn't understand a word of what he wrote or thought; but in my place she would have known at once that in discussing her situation with a stranger he was only proving his admiration for her." And she recalled a whimsical axiom of George Frenside's: "No passion can survive a woman's seeing her lover hold his fork in the wrong way."

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The absurdity of it shook her out of her depression. Yes, a real passion could; she meant to prove it! She would show Vance that she understood his heart as well as his brain. She would propose to him to have Alders to dine that very evening, she would even suggest Vance's going off on a trip with his new friend if he wanted to. She would prove to him that her only happiness was in knowing that he was happy. Already she marvelled that anything else had seemed of the least moment…

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The hours went by, and she sat alone in the dreary pension room. Rain-clouds hung low on the Sierra; summer seemed to have passed with the passing of her unclouded hours. She recalled Vance's impulsiveness, his moody fits. What if he had taken the train and gone off, heaven knew where, away from her tears and her reproaches? He would come back, of course; in her heart she was sure of him; but meanwhile what irreparable thoughts might he not be thinking?

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She went down alone to lunch; then she rambled out aimlessly, hoping to run across him in some corner of the Alhambra hill. But a bleak wind blew over the ramparts, shaking the leaves from the elms, and she returned, chilled and discouraged, without having found him. She thought to herself: "I ought to have gone with him when he went out. I ought not to have let him carry away that distorted image of me… I ought to have done something, said something, that would have blotted it out before his eyes had grown used to it… And I stood there, and couldn't think of anything!"

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She recalled her differences with Lewis Tarrant, the low-pitched quiet conflicts from which she always emerged more worn than after a noisy quarrel. No doubt Vance was feeling at this moment as she used to feel after those arid arguments. He would never say of her again that she was like the air he breathed! She sat down and rested her tired head on her arms.

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She was still sitting there when the door opened and he came in. At the turn of the door-handle she knew he was there, and sprang up. "Vance—!" She stood looking at him, filling her eyes with his face as if he had come back from the dead.

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He gave a shy laugh, and one hand fumbled in his pocket. "You liked this the other day—." He pulled out a little packet. "Here." He pushed it into her hand. She was touched by the boyishness of the gesture; but instantly she thought: "He used to make up his quarrels with Laura Lou by bringing her presents … " and his impulse seemed to lose its spontaneity.

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"But, Vance, I didn't want a present—." Seeing his look of disappointment she regretted the words. "Oh, but this is lovely," she hurried on, slipping through her fingers an old peasant necklace of garnets and enamelled gold. She remembered having admired it one day in an antiquary's shop. "I didn't even know you knew I'd seen it," she said, her voice shaken by the returning rush of happiness.

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"I didn't. Alders told me; he notices those things more than I do," said Vance with simplicity.

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Halo's heart dropped. She looked at the necklace with disenchanted eyes. Then she thought: "If he tells me the truth it's because he still loves me, and doesn't feel that he has to pretend"; and she slipped the trinket about her neck. Vance looked at her earnestly. "You really like it?"

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"I love it—but you've been very extravagant, haven't you?"

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He laughed and shook his head. "Call it a wedding present."

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Halo echoed the laugh. "A wedding present? Oh, please not, darling; because I want to wear it at once!"

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"Well, you won't have to wait long, will you? Can't we get married pretty soon now?" Vance looked at her shyly, as though making the offer to a young girl he secretly worshipped, but was afraid of frightening by a too impulsive word.

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Halo saw that he was trying to reassure her, to convince her of his love; he had trembled for their future as she had. For a moment she found no words; then they came, quick and passionate. "No, no! Don't let's talk of that now. It won't be soon, at any rate; my divorce, I mean; probably not for a long time—I don't care if I never get it. Nothing can be as perfect as this. If there's any way of being happier, I don't want to know it—it would frighten me! In heaven there's no marrying or giving in marriage. Let's stay in heaven as long as we can." She went up to him and found the safety of his arms.

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Their second honeymoon had the factitious fervour which marks such reconstructions. Halo had grown afraid to take her happiness for granted, and afraid lest Vance should detect her fears. The simplest words they exchanged seemed to connote a background of artifice. There were times when the effort to be careless and buoyant made her feel old and wary; others when the perfection of the present filled her with a new dread of the future. There was hardly an hour when she could yield without afterthought to the natural joy she had known during her first weeks with her lover.

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She had hesitated for a long time before answering the letter her lawyer had sent to the steamer; now she wrote briefly, thanking him for his advice, but saying that the affair must take its course. For her part she would not attempt to interfere. She was travelling abroad with Vance Weston, as her husband could easily assure himself, and he was at liberty to divorce her if he preferred a scandal, and was unwilling to let her have her liberty without it. To her mother, from whom she had received several letters full of distressful entreaties, she wrote in the same strain. "Dearest, dearest, do try to understand me, and be patient with me if you can't. I love Vance, I believe in his genius, I went to him because he was lonely and unhappy and needed me, and I mean to stay with him as long as he wants me. If Lewis won't let me have my divorce on the terms we had agreed on he can easily get all the evidence he needs and take proceedings against me. But if he would rather forego his freedom than give me mine, even on those conditions, his decision can make no difference to me, for I shall be proud to live with Vance as his mistress. Nothing that Lewis does can really hurt me, and it seems a pity he should sacrifice his own happiness when he is so powerless to interfere with mine."

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The words, as she re-read them, sounded rather theatrical, and she would have preferred to avoid such a declaration of independence; but it had the advantage of defining her situation, and cutting off her retreat. She would have liked to show the two letters to Vance, but she refrained lest he should think she was trying to remind him of what she had given up for him. Such a reminder might seem like a claim, and in her heart she was afraid to make it; yet an instant later she thought: "Whatever happens, I must keep him now," and seeing in a flash the desert distances of life without him she forgot her magnanimous resolve to respect his freedom.

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To Vance, it was obvious, the whole episode had been less important. He had never even asked her how she knew she would not be able to obtain her freedom immediately; the question of divorce and marriage seemed to have dropped out of his mind. "He takes what I say so literally," she reflected, "that I daresay he thinks I really don't care about it"; yet the possibility that he might think so was a surprise to her. But no doubt he had had many lovers' quarrels with Laura Lou, perhaps with other women of her type, and was used to pacifying them with a kiss and a present. Probably he regarded such incidents as inevitable interruptions to his work, and had learned to dismiss them from his mind as soon as they were over… Ah, if only he were working now! If she could have seen any returning impulse of activity, any trace of that impatience to express himself which had been his torment and rapture when she had first known him, how eagerly she would have banished her anxieties, how jealously she would have defended his privacy! The hours he spent away from her were not spent in solitary toil, but in dreaming and dawdling, or in long discursive sessions with Alders at restaurants and cafés. She made a fresh effort to conceal her dislike of Alders, and he sometimes came up to the pension to dine, and went with them afterward to the tawdry dances in the gypsy quarter, or to concerts of local music in the cafés. But Alders was never wholly at his ease with her, and was therefore less entertaining to Vance than when the two were alone. "He gets all wooden when you're around. I guess he's woman-shy. I can see he doesn't amuse you," Vance commented unconcernedly. Halo understood the reason; she saw that Alders knew she had taken his measure, and that he ascribed her lack of cordiality to his not being exactly in her class. To Alders, the victim of unsatisfied social cravings, she was the fashionable woman in whose company he was not at ease; whereas Vance, for whom social distinctions did not exist, felt no constraint in her presence because to him she was as different from every one else as a nymph or an angel. And after two or three evenings of heat and noise and bad tobacco in the sham underworld of gypsies and guitarists she let Vance rejoin his friend without her.

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There was no physical jealousy in the irritation which his absences caused her. As a woman she was still sure of her hold; as a comrade and guide she felt herself superseded. When he began to work again he might still need her as audience and critic; but meanwhile his restless mind was always straying from her. He had begun to learn Spanish, and this was the only task he had persisted in. His insatiable intellectual curiosity made him chafe at the obstacle of a strange language; and tramping the streets with Alders was a quicker method of learning than reciting conjugations to a snuffy professor. Meanwhile, with the beginning of the autumn rains, their rooms had become too cold and damp, and they began to look about for others. But one morning Vance abruptly announced that he wanted to go for a couple of months to some sea-port in the south—say Malaga or Cadiz—where he could settle down to his new book in the proper environment.

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"Your new book?" Halo echoed, eagerly.

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Yes, he said; he was beginning to want to get to work again. And he ought to know something about life in a Spanish trading port if he was to situate his story there, oughtn't he—the story of the young American sent over from Boston or Salem in the eighteen thirties, to learn the wine business in Spain: the subject Alders had first suggested. He'd been thinking it over a good deal lately, and gradually it had taken hold of him. He liked the idea of a heroine who could be called Pilar—she was to look like that little Virgin with the pear-shaped face that they'd seen at Cordova. Well—hadn't Halo anything to say to the idea? he broke off, as she continued to listen in silence.

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"I thought you meant to go on with 'Magic'," she said at length.

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"Well, so I did—but now I don't. I don't suppose it's any use trying to make you see… "

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"I think I see. It's perfectly natural that new scenes should suggest new subjects."

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He looked at her with a smile of relief. "I'm glad you feel that—"

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"Only you said you'd never do another story like 'Instead'—a 'costume piece', I mean. I thought you were determined not to go back to that, but always to do contemporary subjects."

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"Oh, these 'neverses' and 'alwayses'! Who was the gent who talked about some word or other not being in the lexicon of youth? I'm sure the lexicon of art has no hard-and-fast words in it like always and never. I do what I'm moved to do; any artist, even the greatest of 'em, will tell you it's all he can do. It's the eternal limitation… See here, Halo, I didn't mean to bother you again with this kind of talk. Nobody but a writer can understand—but you must trust me to know what I'm after; what I'm driven after, as it were."

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She recognized the Alders vocabulary, and said with a slight shrug: "What I do understand is that it will do you good to get to work again."

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Instantly his eyes darkened. "Ah, that's it! You're disappointed in me—you think I've just been losing my time all these months?"

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"We shall be able to judge of that better when you begin to write again," she answered, smiling.

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"All right, then. What do you say to Cadiz? The climate's better there, isn't it? Or I might call her Concepcion, perhaps—that's even funnier, if she's to be married to a Puritan from Salem. Don't you think so?"

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Halo hesitated. She had meant, when they left Granada, to propose that they should go to Florence or Rome for the winter. She felt that Vance needed the stimulus of a cultivated society; she would have suggested Paris if their situation had not made it embarrassing for her to settle down in a city where, at every turn, she was sure to run across friends and acquaintances. Until the matter of the divorce was settled in one way or another she preferred to avoid such encounters. But now she decided that she must let him have his way, lest he should feel that, at the very moment when his writing mood returned, she had needlessly interfered with it. "By all means, let's try Cadiz," she agreed.

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"But you don't believe in my idea for the new novel?"

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"I believe in your trying it out, at any rate."

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"You're a great girl, Halo," he said joyously. "I love the way you look when you hate a thing, and think you can persuade people that you like it."

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It was on the tip of her tongue to answer: "I suppose you mean the way I look at Alders—" but she refrained, and merely said with a laugh: "It's the first principle of every woman's job." Inwardly, she was wondering what had made Vance suddenly decide to go to Cadiz. She felt sure that Alders had suggested the change, and that he had his own reasons for wishing to exchange Granada for the south. But the next day Vance asked her if she would mind if Alders came up to say goodbye. She minded so little that she had to bear in mind Vance's remark on her inability to conceal her feelings. "Goodbye? Oh, Alders is off too, is he? Yes, of course I'll see him." But she still felt that, unless Alders had found some one else to prey on conversationally, this leave-taking was probably only a feint.

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Alders appeared punctually, and overcame his shyness sufficiently to thank her for her kindness, and mumble something about its being a privilege he would never forget. She was on the point of asking him if he would not be turning up later at Cadiz; but she refrained lest he should act on the suggestion, and merely remarked that she supposed he thought the time for leaving Spain had come.

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"No, not leaving Spain; I don't expect to do that for some time. Only leaving Granada." With increased timidity he explained that he was joining a big shooting party in Estremadura—rather a romantic sort of affair, as they were to stay in a fortified castle among the mountains, a place belonging to the old Marquesa. Her sons had organized the party in honour of a young cousin from Palermo who had come to Spain for the first time, to visit the Marquesa; and as he didn't know a word of Spanish, and as Alders spoke Italian, the latter had been invited to join the expedition—"in the character of interpreter," Alders added, with a fresh access of modesty which manifestly invited contradiction.

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"The poor young man—what a blessing for him to find somebody he can talk to!" Halo said cordially; and Vance added: "And somebody who knows the country inside out, like Alders."

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"Oh, he's very much on the spot; he'll make his own discoveries. But it will be amusing to do what I can. As a collector of human antiquities, these great heraldic names always appeal to me." Alders addressed himself to Halo: "I once planned out a book on the relation between heraldry and religious symbolism. Take the Babylonian Fish God, for instance, who figures in the Zodiac, and then in the Roman catacombs as the sacred emblem of the Christ … and finally as the armes parlantes of some great mediæval family. I am sure you will recall which, Mrs. Weston? The idea is not without interest… But you've so many friends in European society," Alders broke off. "Very likely you know the Marquesa's cousin. It's a great name in Calabria … there's a cousinship with the Spanish Bourbons." He waited long enough to enjoy the taste of his own words, and to let Halo enquire the name. "The Duke of Spartivento," he replied devoutly.

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After Alders had taken his leave, Vance sat indolently swinging his legs in the window-seat, while Halo returned to the task of sorting their books and gathering up the odds and ends which had accumulated in their little sitting-room. They had engaged places in the motor-coach for Cadiz, and both were full of the happy excitement of departure.

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"What was that he called his new friend?" Vance mused. "It sounded like a thunderclap."

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"Spartivento."

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"Well, that's some name. What does it mean? Windjammer, I suppose?"

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"More like wind-divider, I should say. It's the name of a big promontory off the coast of Southern Italy or Sicily. Calabria, probably, as the family come from there."

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"Why, are there real people called that? I had an idea Alders had made it all up. He gets word-drunk, sometimes."

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"Oh, no. Not this time. It's really one of the titles of an old Italian family. I've often heard of them."

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Vance lapsed into a marvelling silence until Halo, looking up from her work, abruptly accused him of having spirited away Ford's "Gatherings in Spain". But he merely declared that he knew where the book was, and stood staring at her with visionary eyes. "What a name! What a name! It sounds like that poem of Christopher Smart's, with every line beginning 'Glorious'. I should hate to have to live up to it, though, wouldn't you?"

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Halo, absorbed in her task, replied absently that very likely the owner didn't; and Vance continued to murmur: "Spartivento—Spartivento: the wind-divider. Dividing the winds. Why, that's what genius ought to do, isn't it?"

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"Genius," Halo replied gaily, "ought first of all to find me 'Gatherings in Spain'."

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Part 2

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Chapter 1

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On a day of the following September Vance Weston was walking down the Boulevard Montparnasse.

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He seemed to himself a totally different being from the young ignoramus who had left New York with Halo Tarrant a year previously. To begin with, he was the author of a second successful novel. "The Puritan in Spain", dashed off in a rush of inspiration during the previous autumn and winter, had come out in the spring, and attained immediate popularity. It was a vivid tale, sultry and savage as the Spanish landscape—so one reviewer said. Another compared it with "Carmen", to Mérimée's disadvantage; and a third declared that it combined the psychological insight of Tchekov with the sombre fatalism of Emily Brontë.

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Vance did not wholly share these views. The thing had come too easily; he knew it had not been fetched up out of the depths. When he was among friends and admirers, with the warm breeze of adulation blowing through him, he remembered that greater geniuses had suffered from the same dissatisfaction, and his disbelief in his book grew more intermittent. But when he was alone he recalled the passionate groping conviction with which he had written "Instead", and the beginning of the unfinished novel, "Magic", and the feeling returned that those two books had been made out of his inmost substance, while the new one sprang from its surface. "The Puritan in Spain" was better written and more adroitly composed than its predecessors; there were scenes—little Pilar's death, or young Ralston's return to Salem—that Vance could not re-read without a certain pleasure. These scenes had assuredly been written with the same conviction as those in the earlier books; yet now he felt only their superior craft. One half of him was proud of the book, and believed all that his readers said in praise of it; but the other half winced at their praise. "What's the use of doing anything really big? If ever I do, nobody'll read it… Well, and what if they don't? Who am I writing for, anyhow? Only the Mothers!" he thought savagely.

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He swung along down the Boulevard Montparnasse and the Boulevard Raspail to the Seine. The sight of moving waters always arrested him, and he leaned on the parapet and watched the breeze crisp the river. The sun-flecks on the water mimicked the yellowing leaves of the trees along the banks, and streets and river were dappled with the same gold. Vance felt young and happy, and full of power. "Wait till I get my teeth into the next—" he thought, his joyous eyes on the river, the boats, the bridges, the gray palaces seen through fading trees. He would have liked to spend the rest of his life in that setting of foliage and buildings; yet he was beginning to feel that he would never get to work while he remained in Paris. "The Puritan in Spain" had been written in three months at Cadiz, in solitude and monotony—for the life there, alone with Halo, had been desperately monotonous. They knew no one; his friend Alders had vanished, and Vance had made no new acquaintances. He had imagined that once he was at work Halo's presence would be the only stimulus he needed; and no doubt it was, since the book had been written. But he had not felt her imagination flaming through him as it had when they used to meet at the Willows. The dampening effect of habit seemed to have extinguished that flame. She listened intelligently, but she no longer collaborated; and now that the book was done he knew she did not care for it. Perhaps that was the real source of his dissatisfaction; he told himself irritably that he was still too subject to her judgments.

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During their first months together he and she had lived in a deep spiritual isolation; at times they seemed too close to each other, seemed to be pressing on each other, pinning down each other's souls. With the first intrusion from the outside, with the appearance of his queer friend Alders, from being too near they had suddenly become too far apart, at times almost out of sight; and since Alders had left them, and they had gone to Cadiz, there had been something strained and self-conscious in their relation, delicious though certain moments were.

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His book finished, Vance was in a fever to get away, not only from Cadiz but from Spain; and Halo, after suggesting that they should end the winter in Italy, agreed that Paris might be best. She seemed to understand that after their months of solitude he needed the stimulus of a great city, the contact with conflicting views and ideas. He did not have to tell her—one never had to explain things to her. At first she had hesitated when he mentioned Paris, and he remembered her outbreak of resentment at not being invited to the old Marquesa's, and was reminded that she was sensitive about meeting strangers to whom her situation had to be explained; but when he asked her if she would rather go to some quiet place where they needn't bother with people she said she didn't see why they should have to do with people who bothered them. Now that the book was done, she added, he ought to go about again, and see something of the literary world; and so they decided on Paris.

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Halo, almost at once, found a little flat with a studio, in a shabby friendly house near the Luxembourg; and her brother Lorry Spear, who had been living for some years in Paris, helped the pair to settle down, and introduced them to his friends. Vance had last seen Lorry Spear on the day when the latter had borrowed ten dollars of him. Lorry had never returned the ten dollars, and had figured mysteriously in a far more painful episode. Some valuable books had disappeared from the library of the Willows, which then belonged to old Mr. Tom Lorburn, Mrs. Spear's cousin, and Mr. Lorburn had suspected Vance of stealing and selling them. They had eventually been found at a second-hand bookseller's, and brought back (it was whispered) by Lewis Tarrant; and no more was said, or suggested, as to Vance's connection with the incident. But Vance knew, and so did Halo, that Lorry Spear had been the last person in the library of the Willows before the books vanished, and that he had been there alone.

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This had left an unpleasant taste in Vance's mouth; but he had travelled too far from the raw boy of those days to be much affected by what concerned him; and like everything which did not strike to the quick, the affair had faded from his mind. Moreover he knew that Halo was fond of her brother, though aware of his weaknesses, and that she was glad to be near him again.

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Life in Paris had roused in Vance a thousand new curiosities and activities. So far he had chiefly frequented the young men and women who met at the literary cafés of Montparnasse, and at the studios of the painters and decorators of the same group. In this world Lorry Spear was an important figure. He had made a successful start as a theatrical designer (also, it was rumoured, with Tarrant's aid) and his big studio in the painters' quarter off the Boulevard Raspail was the centre of an advanced group of artists and writers. A young woman with violently red hair and sharp cheek-bones presided over it when she could spare the time from a mysterious bookshop in the Latin Quarter, which she and a girl friend managed. The red-haired young lady, whose real name was Violet Southernwood, had been re-christened Jane Meggs when she threw in her lot with Lorry, who declared himself unable to endure the sound of so nauseatingly pretty a name. "A flower and a tree—southernwood's a shrub, isn't it? Well, anyway, I don't want anybody around here who smells of nature to that extent. And I should have had to call myself Mossy Stone, which would—what? Oh, well, Jane don't mind a joke, do you, my own?"

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Miss Meggs said what nauseated her was having to associate with anybody who got his jokes out of Wordsworth; but Lorry replied that Wordsworth was the author of some of the most virulently hideous lines in English poetry, and would soon be recognized as the Laureate of the new school of the Ugly-for-the-Ugly—"which is all ye need to know," he ended, while Miss Meggs groaned: "Lord—and he's read Keats too!"

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Such pleasantries were too reminiscent of the Cocoanut Tree, and Rebecca Stram's studio, where Vance had picked up his first smattering of the new culture, and he preferred Alders's second-rate learning to this wholesale rejection of the past. But the group contained other elements. Among the young men, would-be writers and painters, who laughed at Lorry's oracles, and idled away the hours capping each other's paradoxes, there were a few, French or English, who had joined the circle out of curiosity, and the exuberance of youth, but had already taken its measure. With two or three of them Vance and Halo had at once made friends, and founded a little circle of their own. These young men all professed the philosophic nihilism which was the creed of their group; but they were scholarly, analytical, intellectually curious and the cheap fireworks of Lorry's followers no longer satisfied them. What interested Vance, however, was less the nature of their views than the temper of their minds. He felt in all of them the fine edge of a trained intelligence—the quality he had always groped for without knowing what to call it or how to acquire it. Now, wherever he went, he seemed to meet it; as though it were as much a part of Paris as the stately architecture, the beauty of streets and river, and the sense of that other accumulated beauty stored behind museum walls. All through this great visual symphony he felt the fine vibrations of intelligence, the activity of high-strung minds. The young men who sat the night through talking with him were but obscure participants in this vast orchestration; but its rumour was always behind their talk. At first the life satisfied all Vance's needs. To look and listen and question was as stimulating as creation. Then, as always happened, he began to feel the need of setting his mind to work on the new material he had amassed, away from the excitement of discussion. This rhythmic recurrence of moods seemed to be a law of his nature, but he did not know how to formulate it to himself, still less to make it clear to Halo. It seemed hopeless to try to explain his sudden impulses of flight from everything that was delighting his imagination and expanding his mind. As he leaned on the parapet in the September sunshine he was thinking of this, not irritably or even impatiently, but with a sort of philosophic detachment. Communion with Halo had once been the completion of his dreams; now, when his thoughts took flight, she was the obstacle that arrested them. When he thought of her he felt almost as hopeless of explaining himself as he had with Laura Lou. She, who was alive and vibrating at so many points, failed to feel the rhythm of his inner life. Everything on the surface of his intelligence she instantly caught up and flashed back; he could laugh and talk with her by the hour in the freedom of perfect understanding. But of the forces stored in him during his solitary wanderings, and his talks with this group of young men, she guessed nothing, perceived nothing; and to this he had made up his mind without any feeling of loneliness or resentment. He was beginning to discover that he no longer needed a companion in these explorations of the depths; what he most wanted then was to be alone.

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Now and then he and Halo went off for a weekend, to see some of the wonderful places she had told him about. The first time Vance was alight with fervour and curiosity. They had chosen Senlis, and loitered all day around its ramparts, in its ancient streets, and on the wall overlooking the mossy golden flanks of the cathedral tower. Then they went down into the square before the west front of the cathedral, and stood gazing at the death of the Virgin over the west portal, and at the saints and prophets poised among the delicate grasses and lichens of the cornice. Vance was in the state of receptiveness into which great impressions steal like angels. If he had been alone, and had not had to tell Halo how beautiful he thought it, his well-being would have been complete.

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The experiment was so successful that Halo was eager to repeat it; and soon afterward they went to Chartres. She had decided that they must spend the night there, so that Vance should see the cathedral in all its aspects, at dusk, at sunrise, under the stars, and when noonday jewelled its windows; she gave him the impression that they were going on a kind of spiritual honeymoon. It was unlucky that the day before he had been seized by the desire to plan a new book, and was in that state of inward brooding when the visible world becomes a blank; but Chartres was Chartres, the treasury of visions and emotions, the fountain of poetry and dreams… He only wished he hadn't read and heard so much about it…

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And then, when at last he was face to face with the cathedral, he couldn't see it. He stood there, a little lump of humanity, confronting a great lump of masonry; that was as far as he could get. All the overwhelmingness left him standing in front of it, open-eyed and utterly insensible. Halo led him from one façade to the other, and at each halt he felt her watching him in tender expectancy. At last they went in, and walked slowly about that vast luminous world—and still he felt nothing, saw nothing. A band of trippers dragged by, deaf and vacant-eyed, a guide buzzing about them with dates and statistics. Halo gave them a contemptuous glance; but Vance thought: "They feel the way I do." Halo was elaborately tactful; she waited; she kept silent; she left him to his emotions; but no emotions came. He almost wished she would scream out: "Well, aren't you going to say something?"—and he thought despairingly: "When will it be over?"

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They went to a little tea-shop and had tea (thank God!), and came back and saw twilight fall on towers and buttresses, and dusk deepen to night under the sculpture of the porches. They dined, and came back to see the blueish-gray mass shimmering gigantic under the stars. Then they wandered through the streets and stopped at a café for a glass of vermouth. Vance felt that he would soon have to say something, and he would have given the world to slip away before Halo spoke. "Well, dearest—?"

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He emptied his glass, and stared sullenly into it. "Well, I just don't see it."

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"Don't see it?"

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"Not a glimmer; not of what you expect me to… It's not my size, I suppose."

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"Not your size?" Halo echoed, in the tone of one who has fitted Chartres into her cosmogony without an effort.

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Vance felt the inadequacy of words. "I don't see it, I tell you. I don't care for it. There's too much of it; yet there isn't anything in it—not for me."

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Halo stood up and slipped her arm in his. "You're simply overwhelmed by it—as you were that first evening at Cordova. I was like that when I came here the first time; but tomorrow … "

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"Oh, no; I don't want to wait till tomorrow. I want to go home now. Can't we—isn't there a night train? There's sure to be one… "

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He would have liked to tell her that his mind was full of his new book, passionately grappling with its subject. If he had, she would have been full of sympathy and understanding; but he did not want sympathy and understanding. He felt sulky and baffled, and wanted to remain so. The masculine longing to be left alone was upper most; he wanted to hate Chartres without having to give any reason.

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"It's not my size," he repeated obstinately.

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He saw the immensity of her disappointment. "I know—I'm a Yahoo. But let's go home," he pleaded. They caught a train, and got back to Paris, tired and heavy-eyed, at daylight; and for some time Halo proposed no more week-ends.

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But one afternoon, a month later, he went off with two of the young men he had met at Lorry Spear's—a young English painter named Arthur Tolby, and Savignac, a French literary critic. They were not in pursuit of sights; both his companions knew the environs of Paris well enough to take them for granted. But they knew of an inn, fifty miles away, where the food was good enough to satisfy the Frenchman, and there was a chance of trout-fishing for Vance and Tolby. They started in Tolby's rattling motor, hours later than the time appointed, and toward sunset came to a town of which Vance was too lazy to ask the name. As they reached it, a sudden thunderstorm rolled up and burst above them. The sky was black, the roads became riverbeds. They decided to wait till the worst of the deluge was over, and Tolby took his car to a garage for a little tinkering. The young men dropped Vance under the porch of a church, and he went in to get shelter. His thoughts were all tangled up in his new novel—a big unwieldy subject full of difficulty and fascination. When he entered the church in this unknown town his eyes were closed to the outer world; he simply wanted to take refuge from the weather. The church was empty, immense, and dark as night. There was a cluster of candles before a distant shrine, but the nave and aisles were unlit, and the thunder-cloud hung its pall before the windows. Vance sat down, and was listening absently to the roar of the storm when a flash illuminated the walls of glass, and celestial fields of azure and rose suddenly embowered him. In another instant all was dark, as if obliterated by the thunder following the flash; then the incandescence began again—a flowering of magical sky-gardens in which every heavenly hue blossomed against a blue as dazzling as sunlight; and after each flowering came extinction.

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Vance sat among these bursts of glory and passages of darkness as if alternate cantos of the Paradiso and the Inferno were whirling through him. At length his friends came, they scrambled into the motor, and he left the vision behind. To his companions he said no word of it; he did not even ask the name of the town. They reached their destination late, and sat half the night in the inn garden, watching the moon on a placid river, and talking about the new experiments in painting and literature, about Eddington and Whitehead, Pure Poetry and Thomism, and the best trout-flies for the stream they were to fish…

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These memories flowed through Vance's mind as he sat on the parapet looking across the Seine. His months in Paris had been rich in experience; if his receptivity sometimes failed him when Halo had most counted on it, he had secreted treasures unsuspected by her, such as the sights and sounds of the river, or that fragment of heaven torn from the storm in the unknown church. Surcharged and happy, he got up and strolled on.

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Chapter 2

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Halo Tarrant, when she and Vance decided to come to Paris, had looked forward to the adventure with dread. Free love, she found, was not the simple experiment she had imagined. The coast of Bohemia might be pleasant to land on for a picnic, yet the interior of the country prove disappointing. She had fancied that in the tolerant air of her brother's studio she would shake off this feeling. She knew it was not based on moral scruples (morally speaking the business was still a labyrinth to her) but on a sort of inherited dislike of being unclassified, and out of the social picture. The social picture, as understood in the Lorburn tradition, had never existed for Lorry; or so he had led his sister to suppose. It had probably never occurred to him to marry Miss Jane Meggs, or to Miss Meggs to expect or wish that he should. Almost all the young men of the group stood in the same unfettered relation to one or more young women; and the few married couples among them tried to excuse their inferior state by the show of a larger liberty.

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Among such people, Halo told herself, she would certainly lose the last of her old prejudices. After the cramping hypocrisy of her life with Lewis Tarrant it would be refreshing to be among people who laughed at the idea that there could be any valid tie between young men and women except that of a passing attraction. But from the first she had felt herself an outsider in this world which was to set her free. She liked some of the people she met at her brother's, she was amused and interested by nearly all of them, and she tried to cultivate a friendly tolerance toward the few she found least sympathetic. But she had dropped out of her own picture without yet fitting into this one. Just as she imagined herself to be growing happy and at home among those harum-scarum people with their hysterical good-nature and their verbal enormities, she became suddenly aware that her real self was still ruled by other ideas, and that her new companions all knew it. Beauty, order and reasonableness grew more and more dear to her in the noisy anarchy of Lorry's circle, and the audacities she risked, instead of making her new friends feel that she was one of them, only caused them a vague embarrassment. She had wanted Bohemianism on her own terms, as a momentary contrast to convention; and finding its laws no less irksome that the others, she bore them less philosophically because she did not believe in them.

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The delay about her divorce did not trouble her greatly. In that easy-going world such matters seemed irrelevant, and she smiled to think how bitterly she had resented Vance's going without her to the party at Granada. Since then she had put away childish things, and whether she and Vance married, or remained as they were, seemed of no consequence compared to the one vital point: would he weary of her, or would she be able to hold him? Sometimes she thought that if they could be married before he grew tired, their marriage might consolidate the bond. But in Lorry's world it would have occurred to no one that marriage was in itself more permanent than a casual love-affair; the new generation argued that it was easier to separate if you were married, since divorce formalities were easier than a sentimental break.

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Nevertheless she clung to the thought of marriage; and soon after their arrival in Paris she wrote to ask her lawyer the reason of the delay, and to repeat that, if Tarrant would not let her divorce him, she hoped he would take proceedings against her at once. The answer was not what she had expected. The lawyer wrote that Tarrant no longer wished for a divorce. He not only refused to take proceedings, but declined on any terms to set Halo free. No reasons were given; but the lawyer was satisfied that, for the present, any appeal against this decision would only harden Tarrant's resolve. He advised Halo to wait, in the hope that her husband's mood might change; and her knowledge of Tarrant made her accept the advice.

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From Frenside and her mother she learned soon afterward that Tarrant's projected marriage with Mrs. Pulsifer was off, and she suspected that this wound to his vanity had been the cause of his sudden opposition.

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This new obstacle was a blow to her; but she did not speak of it to Vance. She had resolved not to make any allusion to their marriage unless he raised the question; and since their talk at Granada, when he had asked her about the delay in her divorce, he seemed to have dismissed the matter from his mind. Probably it made no difference to him if they were married or not; perhaps, even, it was a relief to feel that the tie between them depended only on their pleasure. Whatever happened, she could not tell Vance about that letter…

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There were moments when such questions weighed little in the balance of her daily joys; but these joys became more necessary because of what they had to replace. She had to love Vance more passionately, and to believe in his genius more fervently and continuously, because she had staked so much on her love and her faith. Vance as a lover still filled her life with radiance, and her tenderness grew with the sense of his eager longing to make her happy; but it was in the region of thought and imagination that she had dreamed of a lasting hold over him, and it was in this region that she found herself least wanted.

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She did not begrudge the hours he spent with his new friends. Men with quick discerning minds, like Arthur Tolby and young Savignac, interested her as much as they did Vance, and she was proud of their appreciation of her lover. They would never have encouraged him, as Alders had, to repeat himself by writing an other novel like "Instead"—a "costume piece" which drew its chief effects from a tricky use of local colour. Savignac had told her privately what he thought of the book; it was ever so pretty—ever so clever—but what business had a man of Weston's quality to be doing novels like ladies' fancy-work, or an expensive perfume? He ought to be tackling new difficulties, not warming up old successes. Yes; Halo knew it all; she did not need to have it pointed out, and there was a sting in the fact that this clever young man thought that her affections blinded her, or that her literary standards were less exacting than his. She had always known that Alder's cheap enthusiasms were misleading Vance; but her hints had been wasted. And now, after an evening with his new friends, he could come back and say, quite unconsciously: "Of course I know 'The Puritan' is just pretty wall-paper—something pasted over the rough stuff of reality. Tolby called it that yesterday. Not an ounce of flesh-and-blood in it, not a breath of real air. Don't I know? Why didn't you have the nerve to tell me so? A fellow gets balled up in his subject, and doesn't see which way he's going. You might have told me that I was just re-writing 'Instead' in a new setting."

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A year ago she could hardly have refrained from saying: "But, darling, I did tell you, and you wouldn't listen!" She was too wise for that now, and she merely replied: "I'm so glad you've had these talks with Savignac and Tolby. A fresh eye is always such a help—"

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"Oh, I oughtn't to need any eye but my own," Vance grumbled jealously: and she went away smiling to put on her newest hat for an out-of-door dinner in the Bois. "The next book—the next book," she thought, "will show them all what he really is." There were times when she caught herself praying for that next book as lonely wives pray for a child…

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All this passed through her mind as she sat one afternoon in her brother's studio, encumbered with half-finished stage-settings and models of famous theatres, and waited for him to come in. She envied Lorry the place he had made for himself in the busy experimental world of the arts. From an idle and troublesome youth he had turned into a hard-working man, absorbed in his task, confident of his powers, and preoccupied only by the eternal problem of getting money enough to execute his costly schemes. The last of these, she knew, was a great musical spectacle, to be expressed entirely in terms of modern industrialism, with racing motors, aeroplanes and sub-marines as the protagonists, prodigies of electric lighting, and stage effects of unprecedented complication. For the present there was little hope of carrying out this apocalyptic plan, and only the providential appearance of a rich American with a craving to be æsthetically up-to-date could make the dream come true. Lorry, deserting his impecunious friends of Montparnasse, had taken to haunting fashionable hotels and millionaire nightclubs; but hitherto his possible patrons had shied away from his scheme, and as Halo sat waiting she noticed that the stage-settings and models for "Factories," which filled the working-table in the middle of the room, were already gray with dust.

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Waiting for Lorry was always an uncertain affair, but Halo seldom had any engagements, and her unoccupied hours weighed on her less heavily away from home. If any one had told her, a year ago, that a young woman living with her lover in Paris could be lonely, and find the time long, she would have smiled at the idea as Vance did at her hints about his work; but now she had given up trying to conceal the truth from herself. Before long, perhaps, Vance would want to begin to write again, and then she would be happy; but meanwhile even love and Paris were not enough.

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At last the door opened, and she heard Lorry's step. Luckily he was alone, and they would be able to have a talk before the afternoon crowd turned up. He came in whistling a negro spiritual, said: "Hullo, child—you there?" and walked with an absent eye toward the model of the last scene of "Factories". He stood before it for a long time, passing from spirituals to the latest Revue catch, and screwing up his eyes in meditation. As his sister watched him she thought how changed he was since he had found the job he was meant for. He would always be unreliable about money, careless as to other people's feelings, sweetly frivolous, gaily unfeeling; but where his work was concerned he was a rock. He had found the right ballast for his flighty nature, and would no doubt have said that the rest didn't matter. Halo looked at him with envy.

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"Lorry," she said, "can't you find me a job?"

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He swung around and scrutinized her with those handsome ironic eyes which were a shade too near together for security.

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"A job? Why, I thought you had one! I thought you'd chucked everything else for it."

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She was on the point of answering, with a touch of bitterness: "I thought so too—" but she checked herself.

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"Don't be a goose! What I want is some sort of occupation while Vance is working. I've never learnt to be lazy, and I feel at a loose end, with all the rest of you absorbed in your village industries. Why can't I have one too? Won't Jane take me on as an apprentice in her book-shop?"

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Lorry Spear pulled his hands out of his pockets and ceased his whistling. "It's you who are the goose, my dear," he said. "When are you going to get married?"

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She looked at him in surprise. It was the last question she had expected; but she rejoined with a laugh: "Is that your idea of an occupation?"

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"For you, yes. A good deal more in your line than selling censored books in Jane's back shop."

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Halo coloured a little. "I didn't know you were so particular about either literature or morals."

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Lorry's face took on an expression of irritated severity. "Hang it, I'm particular about everything—from my own point of view. I like things to be in the pattern. Old Jane's in my pattern—so are her books. Naturally a man feels differently about his sister."

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Halo was silent, and he continued, in his light sharp voice: "I should have thought that as a mere matter of taste a woman like you wouldn't want to be mixed up with the rabble that come here. It's all right for a fugue—I'm all for a night off now and then; but I don't suppose you're going to settle down among them, as one of them, are you? Has it never occurred to you that it leaves a bad taste in a man's mouth to have to introduce his sister to the kind of women who come here? 'His sister? Who is she? Oh, just one of us'. You can't hear them snicker; but I can. If I haven't spoken till now it's because I expected, any day, to hear that you and Weston were to be married."

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Halo sat looking at her brother with growing astonishment. He was aflame with one of the brief fits of self-righteousness which used to seize him when he tried to borrow money, or to justify some kind of doubtful transaction; but she wondered why he had chosen her as a pretext.

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"Oh, no; of course not," he pursued indignantly. "My feelings are the last thing you ever think of—how a man likes it when he knows the fellows he sees are saying behind his back: 'His sister? Oh, anybody can have her the day her novelist chucks her.' Look here, Halo, I've made myself a situation I'm proud of, and here you come along and behave as if you wanted to do me all the harm you can—as if you'd gone out of your way to offend our family pride and ridicule our traditions! Of course if Weston had any sense of what he owes you—"

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Halo interrupted him with a laugh. "Really, Lorry, I suppose I oughtn't to let you go on. But all those obsolete words sound so funny in this atmosphere that I can't take them seriously; and I don't believe you expect me to. I don't know that it's any of your business to ask why I don't marry Vance—it's not a question I expected to hear under this roof. As a matter of fact, I suppose we shall marry when Lewis makes up his mind to let me have my divorce; but such matters seem so secondary to any one as blissfully happy as I am—"

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Her brother gave an ironic shrug. "You blissfully happy? Bless your heart—just go over and look at yourself in the glass! You're better looking than ever, but your cheek-bones are coming through your skin and your eyes look as if you'd tried to rub out the circles under them with a dirty India rubber. And then you talk to me about being happy!"

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Halo shrank at the challenge, but met it with a laugh. "I thought you liked ravaged beauties—I've been living on lemon juice and raw carrots on purpose. But if you want to see me led to the altar by my seducer you'd better persuade Lewis to let me divorce him, or to get a divorce from me, if he prefers. When he does, I daresay Vance and I will marry."

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Lorry stood before her in an attitude of contemplation; at last he said: "Look here, Halo—I hold no brief for Lewis, though he did me a good turn once. But if a man agrees to let his wife divorce him, I can understand his feeling that she might wait to join her lover till she's got her decree."

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"No doubt the principle is a good one. But in my case only one thing counted. Vance wanted me; I had to go to him."

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Lorry gave an impatient shrug. "That's so Ibsenish. Talk of obsolete words! Your whole vocabulary is made up of them. What was there to prevent your seeing your young friend on the quiet?" He laid a half-friendly, half-rebuking hand on her shoulder. "My poor old girl, when a lady's such a lady, all the night-life and the adultery won't wipe out the damned spot… I'm sorry; but you offend me æsthetically; you really do; and that's the worst sin in my decalogue."

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"What a picture, Lorry! It would be funny if you turned out to be the most conventional member of our family."

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"I'm the most everything of our family, my dear; haven't you found that out? I push things to their logical conclusions, while the rest of you live in a perpetual blur. That, I may add, is why I don't marry and found a family."

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"And why you enjoin me to?"

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"Certainly. It's the safest way, for people who can't see around the next corner. And you're one of them."

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Halo sat staring down at the rough cement of the studio floor. She felt suddenly weary of the effort of bandying chaff with her brother. Weary of that, and of everything else. What he said had taken the strength out of her. It was not the first time that she had been struck by Lorry's penetration. No one could see more clearly into human motives, or drive his argument home more forcibly when it was worth his while. For some reason which escaped her, it was worth his while now; but that did not arrest her attention, for her mind was riveted on the image of herself which his words evoked. She had no need to look in the glass; in his description her secret anxieties were revealed to her, feature by feature. It was true that she would never be at home among these people whose way of living was not the result of passion but of the mere quest for novelty. Contact with the clever mocking young women who, like herself, were living with their lovers, seemed to belittle her relation to Vance. When everything which was sacred to her in that relation would have appeared to them incomprehensible or ridiculous, how could she ever imagine herself one of them? She had always felt a latent repulsion for them: for the capable free-spoken Jane, with her thriving trade in forbidden books and obscene drawings, for her friend and business partner, Kate Brennan, whose conversation echoed and parodied Jane's, and for all the other women of the group, with their artistic and literary jargon, picked up from the brilliant young men whose lives they shared, and their noisy ostentation of emotions they seldom felt, and sins they probably did not always commit. Halo stood up and looked about her, at the stacked-up stage-settings, the dusty electrical and photographic apparatuses, the hideous sub-human faces grimacing from futurist canvases, the huge plaster group of two women evilly contorting themselves against a background of theatrical posters. It had all seemed so free and jolly and clever—and Lorry's words had crumbled the whole show to dust.

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"Well, I'm off," she said. "If Vance comes, tell him not to wait for me."

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Lorry seemed to feel a touch of compunction. "Oh, look here, old girl—" he glanced at his watch a little nervously—"don't go till I've built you up with a cocktail."

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She shook her head with a smile. "I'm beyond cocktails. It's this stuffy weather—I feel so lifeless. I'm going home to lie down."

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She detected a tinge of relief in his eyes as he followed her toward the door. "So long, then, my dear. If Weston turns up I'll send him back to smooth your pillow." He laid his hand on hers. "See here, Halo; why don't you go home—really?" His eyes looked into hers simply and kindly, as they used to when he and she were children. She pressed his hand and went out without answering.

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The studio was at the back of an untidy walled enclosure, encumbered with the materials of an adjoining carpenter's shop. As Halo emerged into the street a glittering motor drove up and stopped. The chauffeur, after a glance of doubt and disapproval, jumped down to open the door, and there descended a heavily built lady dressed with sober opulence. It was clearly unusual for her to set foot to the ground in such a quarter, for she looked as dubious and disapproving as the chauffeur. As she surveyed with lifted nose and eye-glass the unpromising front of the carpenter's shop, the rifts in the pavement, and the general untidiness of the half built-up street, Halo thought: "New York—and Park Avenue!" An instant later she identified the lady. "Mrs. Glaisher! How fat she's grown. They all do, when they own opera boxes and Rollses." She remembered Mrs. Glaisher as one of the chief ornaments of the old expensive New York group which her parents had belonged to and broken away from. Mrs. Glaisher was a necessary evil. Once in the winter one had to hear Tristan or the Rosenkavalier from her opera box, and once to dine off gold plate in her Gothic refectory. But for the rest of the year she was the object of proverbial pleasantry among the clever people who met at Mrs. Spear's. What on earth could she be doing here now? Why, probably looking for Lorry! The thought interested Halo, but did not surprise her; she knew that Mrs. Glaisher was always panting and puffing after what she called "the latest thing". Perhaps she had just discovered Lorry; perhaps—very possibly—it was she on whom he was counting to finance the costly stage-setting of "Factories". The idea was so amusing that Halo forgot her own troubles, and decided that she would guide Mrs. Glaisher to the studio for the pleasure of hearing what she and Lorry had to say to each other. Halo had a high idea of Lorry's verbal arts, and he would need them all to bridge the distance between Mrs. Glaisher's extremest mental effort and the most elementary explanation of "Factories".

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Mrs. Glaisher still wavered, as if seeking guidance. Simultaneously, the two women moved a few steps toward each other; then Mrs. Glaisher, pausing, appeared to absorb Halo's presence into her eye-glasses, to turn it over and reject it. After one deadly glance of recognition she averted her gaze, and walked on as if there were no one in her path, and Halo, from the street, was left to contemplate her broad and disapproving back. She had been cut, distinctly and definitely cut, by Mrs. Glaisher.

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The idea was so new that she burst into a laugh. She caught an expression of surprise on the chauffeur's disdainful face, and then—could it be?—a fleeting but unconcealable grin. Mrs. Glaisher's chauffeur was joining her in her laugh at Mrs. Glaisher.

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"But it's all New York that has cut me!" she chuckled to herself; for she knew that every act and attitude of Mrs. Glaisher's was the outcome of a prolonged and conscientious study of what her particular world approved and disapproved of. The idea of being excluded, ruled out, literally thought out of existence, by all those towering sky-scrapers to whose shelter the statue of Liberty so falsely invites the proscribed and the persecuted, filled Halo with uncontrollable mirth, and she sped homeward cheerfully humming: "I've been cut by Mrs. Glaisher—Mrs. Glaisher—Mrs. Glaisher… "

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Chapter 3

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As she unlocked her door Halo heard animated talk in the studio. The voices were Savignac's and Tolby's; they were speaking with great vivacity, as if the subject under discussion provoked curiosity and amusement. Still humming to herself: "I've been cut by Mrs. Glaisher—Mrs. Glaisher—" Halo thought: "How I shall make Vance laugh over it!" and she tried to catch his voice among the others. But if he were there he was doubtless listening in silence, stretched out on the brown Bokhara of the divan, his arms folded under his head, and watching between half-shut lids his cigarette smoke spiral upward. "Shall I tell him before the others?" she thought, with an impulse of bravado.

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"Well—!" she cried out gaily from the threshold. Only Tolby and Savignac were there; as she turned the door-handle they ceased talking and her "Well!" rang out in the silence. Savignac rose, and Tolby, who was bending over the fire, continued to poke it. "They were talking of me!" she thought, and Lorry's phrase flashed through her mind: "The fellows are saying to themselves: 'His sister? Oh, anybody can have her the day her novelist chucks her'."

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That was what these young men, whom she liked, and who were sitting over her fire waiting for her to come in, were probably saying. If not, why should they stop talking so suddenly, and lift such embarrassed faces? It had been very comic to be cut by Mrs. Glaisher; it seemed to put things in their right perspective, and rid Halo of her last scruples. But the idea that her lover's friends had fallen silent on her entrance because they had been caught discussing her situation did not strike her as comic, and she felt a sudden childish ache to be back in the accustomed frame-work of her life.

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She came in and shook hands with the young men. "What have you done with Vance?" she asked lightly.

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Tolby gave a laugh. "Why, we were talking about him—if that's what you mean."

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"Oh—about Vance?" In her relief she could not help stressing the name. "Is that why you both look so guilty?"

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Tolby laughed again, and Savignac rejoined: "Yes, it is. But for my part I'm going to confess. I don't like his book—at least not as much as I want to."

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"Oh, I know you don't. And Tolby doesn't either. But he had the courage to tell me so." Inwardly Halo was thinking: "What an idiot I am! As if these young fellows cared whether Vance and I are married or not! They know we love each other, and for them that's all that counts. These are the kind of people I want to live among." She sat down by the fire, and said: "One of you might find the cocktail shaker. I'm too lazy."

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Tolby made the necessary effort, and while they sipped, and lit their cigarettes, Halo continued gaily: "But, you know, Vance doesn't really care for the Spanish novel himself. Has he shown you 'Magic', the one he began two years ago?"

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"No," Tolby rejoined. "He said it was no use showing it because it was definitely discarded; but last night at Savignac's he read us an outline of this big new thing he's planning. Derek Fane, of the 'Amplifier', was there, and Weston wanted his opinion. That's the book we were talking about."

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"Oh—" Halo murmured. There was a big new book, then; and Vance hadn't yet seen fit to speak to her about it, much less to read her the outline with which the young English critic had been favoured. Why did he no longer talk to her about his work? The idea that it must be her fault made her spirits droop again; but she thought: "I mustn't let them see that I haven't heard of it." She leaned back and puffed at her cigarette. "Well—how does it strike you?"

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Tolby gave a shrug. "Not my job—I'm no critic."

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Halo laughed. "Savignac can't get out of it on that pretext."

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"No," Savignac admitted. "But I can say that I'm a critic only within certain limits."

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"Is this out of your limits?"

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"It's out of my scale. Too big—"

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"For human nature's daily food," Tolby interpolated. "That's my trouble. I think the proper measure of mankind is man."

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"Well—?"

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"Well—did you ever read Maeterlinck on the Bee—or, rather, I should say, on THE BEE? Rather before your day, but—you have? Well, then you'll understand. When I began to read that book I had imagined the bee was a small animal—insect, in fact; something to be spoken of in a whisper, written of in airy monosyllables—an idea justified by the dimensions of the hives in which, I'm assured by competent authorities, a whole swarm can be comfortably lodged, and carry on their complicated civic and domestic affairs… Well, as I read Maeterlinck, the bee grew and grew—like Alice after eating the cake. With each adjective—and they rained like hailstones—that bee grew bigger. Maeterlinck, in his admiration for the creature's mental capacity, had endowed it with a giant's physical proportions. The least epithet he applied to it would have fitted a Roman emperor—or an elephant. That's what the creature became: a winged elephant. That bee was afflicted with giantism, as they say in French. You didn't know that giantism was a glandular disease? Certainly! And Maeterlinck didn't give his thyroid piqûres in time—he let the creature swell and swell till it turned into an earth-shaking megatherium among whose legs rogue elephants could have romped… " Tolby laughed, refilled his pipe, and stretched his contented ankles to the fire. "That's what I told Weston, in my untutored language."

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Halo echoed his laugh; then she said tentatively: "But I don't quite see how I'm to apply your analogy." She was trying to conceal from them that Vance had never breathed a word to her of the new book.

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