Hudson River Bracketed by Edith Wharton

Vance walked away with a conquering step. Frenside had set his blood circulating. "I believe you've got the stuff in you"--when a man like Frenside said it, all the depths cried out in answer. "Loot--Loot--Loot--a big American novel; that's what I've got to do," Vance sang, almost shouted to himself, as he trudged homeward in the dusk.

He had spoken the plain truth when he told Frenside that nothing mattered but his work. When that possessed him it swept away all material miseries, poverty, debt, the uncertainty of the future, the dull dissatisfactions of the present. He felt that he could go without food, money, happiness--even happiness--as long as the might within drove him along the creative way. "That's a man to talk to," he thought, tingling with the glow of Frenside's rude sincerity. He was dead right, too, about a thing like Instead being a sideshow, about the necessity of coming to grips with reality, with the life about him. Vance brushed aside the vision of his East Indian novel--the result of a casual glance at a captivating book called The French in India--and said to himself: "He's right, again, when he says I ought to go into society, see more people, study--what's the word he used?--manners. I read too much, and don't brush up against enough people. If I'm going to write Loot I've got to get my store clothes out of pawn." He laughed at the idea. .