Hugh was smiling at her across the bouquet of carnations which decorated the center of their table. He was exclaiming: “Imagine Mr. Schimpler suggesting a new hat for you from his brother’s shop, with a hat like that to flaunt in his face! It’s a real hat, Ariel, but I suppose you know it. And the feather! There are no words for the feather! It has an insistent personality all its own.”
Ariel lifted her fingers searchingly, up to find the feather. She started to say, “Father found—” and got no farther than opened lips. But she tried her best to smile. He must be the one first to name her father. The next piece of toast that she swallowed, forcing herself, tasted salt.
Wild Acres, the Weymans’ estate, is on the Hudson near Tarrytown—a drive, from Forty-Second Street and the “Carnation” tearoom, of something over an hour and a half. Ariel, snuggled back in her coat for a princess against the cushions of the roadster’s low seat, observed alternately the flying white landscape and Hugh’s intent profile. How he dared push the car along like this over the icy, snowy road she did not know, but since he did dare she had not even a quiver of doubt of their safety, for all her instinct shouted confidence in the judgment of this stranger with the incised lines at the corners of his mouth. He might not be her father’s friend, have long forgotten that, and there had not yet been time for him to become hers, but he was a person—of this she was calmly aware—to trust one’s life to.
They had sailed along for miles before he spoke at all. Then he asked, “Were you ever in an automobile before, Ariel? They aren’t allowed in Bermuda yet, are they?”
“No. Only government trucks. There are a few of those. But in France, of course, Fa—we taxied quite a lot, just for the fun of it. That was our—my first motoring. This is the first time I’ve seen snow, though. But I don’t feel that it is. I’ve imagined it so concretely, I suppose, and then it’s in so many books, of course. If I picked up a handful now, or began walking in it, the sensation wouldn’t be a new sensation,—because of imagination. Do you see?”
“Yes. I know. It was like that when I went West years ago with my father,” Hugh responded, with sympathetic understanding. “The prairie we found there was no more real than the prairie I’d lived on and played over with the gang in Tarrytown the year I was ten, though we’d made that prairie for ourselves out of reading and imagination. The very earth had the same feel beneath my feet that it had had under my moccasined feet when I was ‘Wild Eagle,’ bravest of chiefs. The moccasins were imagined too, although the headdress was real. There’s something of a thrill in catching up with these places in our imagination, isn’t there? By the way, have you got it straight in your mind, Ariel, about us Weymans, how many and who we all are at Wild Acres?”
“I think so. There’s your mother. And your sister and brother. Doctor Hazzard said that your sister and brother would be at home for the Easter vacation now. But, of course, I don’t know them with my imagination the way you knew the prairie and I knew the snow.”
They both laughed. He said, “Well, I can’t give you a whole literary and imaginative background for our household. But you’ve left out the first and most interesting member. Perhaps I didn’t mention her in my letter to Doctor Hazzard. It’s my Grandmother Weyman. She lives above us, literally as well as figuratively, in the attic which she had fixed over into an exclusive apartment for herself when she returned from her last winter in Egypt, several years ago. You may or you may not get to know her really. Perhaps you’ll hardly ever see her. She’s rather disconcertingly invisible and exclusive. I mean, she’s exclusive even toward us, the family. Her contacts are with Silence and the Angels,—that kind of exclusiveness. She’s got it down to a science, how to be alone when she wants to be alone. You may think her—odd. People do.”
Ariel was catching a rich, almost secret note of tenderness in Hugh’s voice. “He adores his grandmother,” she thought. “And he doesn’t think she’s odd. He thinks she’s perfect.”
“Well, after Grandam, there’s my mother, of course. She’s perfectly visible, from all sides. And she’ll help you a lot, Ariel, in the—in the adjustments to a new life you’re in for now, I’m afraid. She’s just the sort of person to do that,—practical, sensible. Then there’s my kid sister Anne. Only she won’t seem kid-sisterish to you. She’s a month or two older than you are, in fact, and you may get to be great friends. Doctor Hazzard wrote that that was something you’d missed so far, contemporaries. She is a sophomore at Smith.