“I’m glad Ariel’s having a little fun,” she murmured after a while. “Aren’t you, really, Hugh? You’re glad?”
“Yes. Of course. That’s what I want for her....” But in the dimness of her pillows Grandam smiled—a malicious, elfin smile, like the far-away music with which she was for the minute in harmony. A grating in Hugh’s voice, the droop of his ordinarily so squared shoulders, was not unpleasant to her. For Grandam, Saint Paul was contradicted to-night. In the midst of death she was in life.
However, Ariel’s brief hour of comradeship and fun with Anne and Glenn was soon over. The next morning they went back to their colleges until final examinations should release them. A day or two after that Michael Schwankovsky sailed for Bermuda, hoping to buy the Clare studio from Doctor Hazzard, who owned it. To Schwankovsky the studio and the beach where the artist had lived and done all his painting had become sacred. He wanted it as a retreat for himself, for the present, and ultimately to endow and present to St. George’s as an altar to Gregory Clare’s memory. But Doctor Hazzard was not to be hurried in a decision to sell, and Schwankovsky stayed on in Bermuda, waiting. Joan, since Ariel had decided against accepting her offer of Switzerland and contact with the rare souls who would soon be gathering there, paid no more attention to her.
Now at last was Hugh’s best opportunity to relieve the strain of Ariel’s rather arduous days and nights with his friendly interest and companionship. But for a variety of reasons he did not use what might have been the golden days. Instead he spent longer hours at the business of making money. He cultivated Brenda Loring’s willingness to lunch, dine and dance with him in town, and he was meeting and liking many of her friends. They were mostly people with whom Joan and Schwankovsky would not have bothered, and of whom certainly they had never heard—young artists and writers and editors, an architect, a professor from Columbia and so on. Most of the men were struggling but gifted, and the women without exception were earning their way and making places for themselves in the artistic or intellectual life of New York. Hugh felt at home with these new friends and they were candid in their liking for his company. After having for so many years been tolerated on the fringes of Joan’s more sophisticated and glittering world of what his mother called the “absolutely arrived,” this new experience of appreciative friendliness was pleasant. And Brenda’s gay friendship and open admiration were more than pleasant. They were consoling.
So, of Ariel he saw almost nothing. For when he went up to sit with his grandmother, or play or read to her, as he did as often as he was at home in the afternoons or evenings, Ariel ran out for air, or into her own room, in order to leave them together. But Hugh always thought, “She is going to answer Glenn’s letter that I saw on the hall table this morning.”
Joan seldom called him up now, and she was hardly ever at home, at Holly. For the few weeks before leaving for Switzerland she was accepting invitations to house parties; so Hugh saw little of her.
Then, one day toward the middle of June, he received an invitation to a week-end house party himself, at Fernly, Mrs. Ronald Hunt-Smith’s place on Long Island. As he barely knew the lady, having met her only once, at Holly, and then only for a minute at one of Joan’s larger teas, he rightly attributed his invitation to Joan’s persuasions. Rather to his own surprise, he decided against going.
The invitation was in reality, he knew, an indirect promise from Joan that they should have some long hours together at Fernly, for surely she would never have bothered to secure so unlikely an invitation for him unless she meant to manage to give him a good deal of her time there, as a farewell before her departure for the summer. But even this assurance did not seem inducement enough to Hugh, in the new directions his life had taken this spring, to make him willing to face a household of uncongenial strangers.
Before he had sent his regrets, however, he learned from Brenda that she too was included in this house party. “I suppose you’re asked for Joan,” she said, frankly annoyed at the idea. “And I sha’n’t see anything of you. I don’t believe I’ll go. Oh, yes, but I must, of course. Business! Mrs. Ronald Hunt-Smith may have a drawing-room or a boudoir that needs doing over. And there’ll be a dozen or so women of her own sort there, I suppose, with drawing-rooms just as terrible which I can fix. No. I can’t afford to turn it down, you see. But, Hugh, will you be a little decent to me, please? I shall be lost among the bigwigs. They are bigwigs, you know. Not just money, but diplomacy and high finance. All that. You’ll remember that we’re pals—promise?”
“Oh, but I hadn’t meant to go. I was going to ask you to come out to Wild Acres for the week-end instead. Mother is writing you to-night. But you prefer magnificence and bigwigs?”