She urged sharply, “But you’ll come back. You’ll only be gone ten minutes or so. I want a long, quiet talk with you to-night, Hugh. Our last, perhaps, for months!” She was very white. But Hugh did not take his eyes from the top of Ariel’s head, which was all he could see, for her face was bent quite down and she was still looking at the aquamarine. He replied, and it sounded absent-minded and was certainly casual, “Let’s have that talk to-morrow morning, Joan. Your boat doesn’t sail till midnight. I’m counting on quite a wonderful walk and talk with you in the woods to-morrow.”
“Oh! Yes?” Joan knew now, but did not admit to herself, that she had lost. How could she acknowledge that she had anything to fear from this pale girl, who stared at her silly ring when she could look up and see Hugh Weyman’s very heart in his eyes bent on her? Had Hugh ever looked at herself like that? She could not believe he had. If he had, then she had been a fool—a fool! She felt her ego shrivel. It was like a spent dandelion flower, dried into fluffy seed, blowing to the four winds.
When Ariel, after long ages, to Joan’s aching sensibilities, lifted her gaze from the aquamarine, withdrew herself from those distant, eerie, Bermudian depths, Joan made no more of her even then; for the eyes she lifted were crystal,—blind with tears. What in heaven’s name was the girl crying about? Crying!
Hugh found Glenn beside him when he went to get his car. And suddenly, as they crossed the wide sweep of gravel toward the parked roadster, Hugh came to earth again, for a minute. His heart smote him. His love for Ariel had been gradually, all the spring, making him more sensitive to the world about him and other people. And now he sensed possible suffering. He turned on Glenn and gripped his shoulders in the summer dark. “Glenn, old fellow! Are you in love with Ariel?” he asked.
There was only the hint of a hesitation before Glenn said carefully, as if he wanted Hugh to hear every word and remember it forever, “Does one fall in love with a poem? A star? Dawn? Ariel to me is all imagination. She’s in my soul, somehow. But not as woman.... I saw her look at you, Hugh.... At the end of the dance, you know. So I know that you two—that you two—Well! That’s only the shadow of Ariel you’ve got. An accident. Her earth side. The impersonal and beautiful is left for me. I’m not jealous. I’m not—suffering....”
“God bless you! Yes. It’s the woman I want, and that I’ve got. The wife. The mother....”
They went on to the car. Joan was waiting on the lowest stair under the portico, when they drove it around to the door, and Ariel had not yet broken away from Michael Schwankovsky’s farewells on the top step. The big voice was booming, “And next winter we’ll make a dancer of you! Divine! Better than Isadora ever was!”
Ariel laughed. “No, Michael. No, no. I shall never be a dancer. I may dance for you, if you will play again. Because you are not grown up and don’t embarrass me. I don’t mind you any more than I mind Persis and Nicky. You’ll dance with me. But you can’t ever make me into a dancer. Dear Michael!”
“We shall see about that. We shall see. When I come back I shall take care of you. I shall teach you to be ambitious. For the sake of art, I must do that, my child. Art cannot let you off, let you go. Not with such genius! I am no artist myself, you see, but I am militant for it wherever there is cause. It is religion with me. So, as I discover your father’s pictures, so I discover you. Not?”
Joan drew Hugh into the shadow of a pillar. “Michael’s raving again,” she whispered intimately, her breath at Hugh’s cheek, her perfumed scarf falling against the back of his hand, soft, mothlike. “It’s fatherly raving. We needn’t worry!”