She swung on him angrily. At last he had given her a cause for anger which she could openly acknowledge. And Hugh, obtuse, did not dream that the fury now directed at his head was not caused by his last remarks at all, but by what had gone before.
Her voice was splintered with anger, all the lovely intonations splintered and lost. “I thought Gregory Clare was your friend. After all, you were the first purchaser he ever had. And now you can so stupidly say that it doesn’t matter what place he’s to hold among American painters! Nothing matters, I take it, except the money that his dear little daughter’s pulled from the sale. I tell you that Gregory Clare, dead, is worth a million of Ariel Clares living. A million—million! But now that she won’t have to drudge for a living, it’s no matter to you what becomes of Clare’s wonderful art. You are content. Complacent. Very exhilarating!”
She laughed with what sounded like bitterest scorn.
“You put me too much in the wrong, Joan. I won’t take it.” Hugh, too, could lose his temper. “What I really feel, and know, is that you nor I nor Crowell Fuller nor Schwankovsky nor anybody on God’s earth, in the last analysis, will have a damned finger in the ultimate fate of Clare’s work. Justice goes its own ways, with art as with souls. And don’t let any one tell you it isn’t so! If Clare’s paintings are really important (God! how I hate that word, used as you patronizing intelligentsia are using it these days!), the importance will win through for itself, without your worrying about it. That’s what I believe, anyway. Always have.”
Joan’s jaw dropped perceptibly. But her eyes kept their angry glitter. “That is a decision, my friend, which I believe even the greatest philosophers haven’t dared to make. Personally, I have never supposed that there is a god of art who deals out ultimate justice, willy-nilly. It looks pretty much a matter of chance—and of friends, and advertising. I’d say—”
But Hugh interrupted her, still hot. “Well, I wouldn’t. There’s a life, a soul of its own in a picture like—‘The Shell,’ for instance. It’s a life that will, come spring, burst through into humanity’s appreciation, the way buds burst through bark, come their spring, to light and air. For the imagination is strong, like love.... It is a power.... Yes. I’m willing to leave my friend’s works to their own destinies. So long as imagination is organic in them, as it is in Clare’s pictures, then they’re potent in their own right as is a bolt of electricity. Even if some poor fool hides ’em away in his attic, or even if fire burns ’em or water drowns ’em,—justice still works with ’em and for ’em.... For Beauty is—must be—as immortal as goodness.... Though we don’t see how, or understand.
“It’s the same with people.... With people’s personalities I mean. Their ‘importance,’ since you like the word so well. If they have any importance—beauty of spirit, Soundness, are my terms for it—it bursts a way for itself, like buds in the spring. Environment and accident haven’t got power over it. Not a bit. It can’t be kept in, held back, any more than birth itself can be held back, once it gets going.... And Ariel’s got that thing in her personality,—that soundness, beauty, importance. Beauty’s organic in her character....”
Hugh’s whole face was burning, and his words came out staccato, fierce with conviction. Joan, almost miraculously, she felt, had the insight to realize that at least part of this amazing passion of conviction was impersonal. She saw that Hugh was really talking about such things as imagination, love, personality, abstractly,—out of deep-seated convictions which had grown in him with his own growth, and which she had never suspected in him. Why, he was a man with a religion, and she had never guessed! But she preferred to pretend to think him moved by personal emotions merely, and asked bitingly, “Then what is your plan for Ariel when your grandmother dies? Have you changed your mind about her so utterly as it appears, and you’ll let her be a second Isadora? Express this wonderful personality, this beauty of spirit of hers, in some world-shaking way?”
Hugh dropped back to natural. He was ashamed of so having betrayed his soul’s convictions to Joan’s skepticisms. “I shall have nothing to say about it; why should I? But of course that wasn’t what I meant at all, or anything like it. Ariel’s far too ordinary—”
Joan’s mind reeled. “Oh, but surely not. After all you’ve said! Ordinary?”