The last few words were spoken not without malice, but Mrs. Weyman passed that over. “Joan wouldn’t touch it, of course. The only work of this man Clare’s she ever saw was a picture Hugh brought home, years ago. It wasn’t any good. Freakish as well as amateurish, if I remember what she said then. She laughed at it, anyway, and Hugh gave up being a collector on the spot and hid the thing away in the attic. Every spring cleaning since, I’ve been in two minds whether to send it off to the dump or give it to some rummage sale or other. I haven’t liked to do either without speaking to Hugh, and it happens he’s never around at the time. So there it stands against the chimney,—an æsthetic treat to the spiders, no doubt. And that’s that for Ariel’s father as an artist, I’m afraid.”
Grandam wasn’t deeply impressed. “Perhaps it’s one of his poorer things,” she suggested. “Or he may have improved during the years. Or Joan might have been wrong. So far, I don’t see that it’s at all final.”
“Oh, my dear! I do wish you had been down last night! Ariel solemnly informed us that the hour her father died he was still proclaiming Hugh’s sample of her father’s work his masterpiece. The other paintings are wonderful, of course, but not quite so wonderful. Even so, they are to bring in several hundreds of dollars a canvas, and Ariel confidently expects to have a fortune from them. It isn’t the child’s fault, of course. It’s the father’s. He must have been an extraordinarily conceited and stupid person.”
Grandam at this outburst of strong feeling withdrew her gaze—reluctantly, it seemed—from the sun-spangled, snowy world beyond her windows, and gave her more concentrated attention to her daughter-in-law. “How does Hugh himself feel about the situation?” she asked.
“Hugh’s in no position to judge,” Hortense responded impatiently. “It’s Joan’s opinion I trust. She’s just home from six weeks at St. George’s, and among all her artist friends staying there she never even heard the name of Gregory Clare once. That in itself is enough, isn’t it? Joan says that impossible would-be artists and writers and people like that often do think themselves geniuses, no matter what the world tells them to the contrary; but it’s seldom their families are tainted with the same megalomania. And this Ariel’s not just tainted. She’s poisoned. Why, she’s not sane on the subject.”
“Is all of that Joan? She hasn’t spared Hugh’s friend or the friend’s daughter, has she!”
Mrs. Weyman regained her poise. “Oh, of course you don’t like Joan. I keep forgetting that. You even hope she won’t marry Hugh. After all these years of his devotion, and their truly wonderful friendship! But even feeling as you do, it isn’t like you to be so prejudiced. Joan does know about painting and painters. She’d see this Ariel Clare business and the problems involved more clearly than anybody else we happen to know. Besides, she’s ready to help Hugh with it, if only he’ll be a little tactful. I can see that. She has interested herself in working girls and their problems for years. She would, with a little encouragement from us, get Ariel into a good working girls’ home or club, I know, and find a way for her to earn money at the same time that she was learning a trade. But there has to be all this time wasted waiting for the exhibition, and Hugh’s absurd heroics about Gregory Clare’s having been his great friend, and having entrusted Ariel to him. It’s too tiresome. And not exactly fair to the family—this family—do you think?”
“It’s Joan who constitutes a problem, to my mind. My dear Hortense, really, why do you want Hugh to marry a stupid woman like that?”
Mrs. Weyman did not wince. She even replied in a humoring voice, because her mother-in-law, wonderful as she was in some ways, was peculiar enough in others, every one knew. “Joan stupid!” she laughed. “She’s absolutely brilliant!”
“Brilliant, yes, and stupid, yes. But why do you want Hugh to marry a brilliant-stupid woman, then, like Mrs. Nevin? Hugh’s not brilliant, and neither is he stupid. So both ways he’d be embarrassed with her. He’s much too simple and ordinary for Joan. He’d be miserable.”