“No, of course not. It’s very col—d in the States,” she shivered out, taken unaware.
“Yes. But you keep out the cold, you know, with warm clothes,” he said. “You don’t look at all warmly enough dressed. Is there another coat, a big overcoat, anywhere in your baggage? We’ll get it out.”
“But there isn’t,” Ariel told him. “I didn’t realize how cold it would be the beginning of March. I thought March was almost spring here. I was stupid.” She shivered again,—not with cold this time, but from sheer nervousness at the intent way Hugh was looking down at what she guessed were her blue lips and pinched nose.
“Look here,” he was saying. “We’re driving out to Wild Acres, after a good hot tea, in my open roadster. That means a fur coat for you if we can pick one up along the way to the ‘Carnation.’ That’s the tearoom. You’ll need a fur coat in this climate, anyway, and you might as well get it to-day as to-morrow. I ought to have borrowed Anne’s. My stupidity. They’re expecting me to bring a live, real girl home this evening, you know, not an imported icicle. An icicle from Bermuda would be too surprising!”
But Ariel did not laugh. The tone of his humor surprised and confused her. Sometimes thus she had heard adults banter a child. But she wasn’t a child, and even if she had been, would have been put off by such banter. Children are.
“But it is almost spring,” she protested. “And I don’t think I’d better get a coat now. I’d rather buy a spring coat, you see, a little later. It would be more—practical.”
Hugh, however, proved domineering. “This isn’t your affair, it’s mine, since I neglected to bring something warm for you. Besides, I’d rather, much, buy a pretty fur coat for you this afternoon than a handsome coffin for you day after to-morrow.”
Ariel said nothing farther. That word “coffin” which Hugh had uttered so lightly had shut her throat tight like fingers around it. Three weeks ago she had watched a coffin lowered into the ground.... So she went with Hugh dumbly, numbed by the noise and the crowds of the city as much as by the unaccustomed cold, a walk of several blocks to the place where his roadster stood parked.
“We’ll cut out to Fifth Avenue,” he told her, opening the car door, “cruise down it until we see a fur sale in some window or other, bundle you up in the best-looking one, and be at the ‘Carnation’ in time for four o’clock tea.”
The seat of the roadster was swung so low and the wind-shield stood so high that Ariel felt protected from both wind and hurrying crowds the minute she was in. Hugh did not speak again while he picked his way out through jostling traffic over bumpy pavements to Ariel’s first sight and experience of Fifth Avenue. She sensed that Hugh’s silence had nothing to do with the difficulties of driving. Glancing up at his profile, she felt that he had forgotten her, and that his skillful maneuvering of the car was automatic. He was deep in thoughts of his own, in his own inner life.