As for herself, Ariel was aware that Grandam was aware of her even when she seemed most absorbed in the others. Several times the violet eyes had swept her, lightly but not blindly. And with dessert, when Mrs. Weyman had succeeded in an attempt she had intermittently been making to draw Enderly out, during the meal, and show Grandam how much of a person this guest of theirs really was, and he was in the middle of an anecdote which had to do with a recent party in a famous New York studio—an anecdote studded and aglitter with famous and near-famous names—Grandam suddenly turned to Ariel, and without any real impoliteness to Enderly, for after all he was sitting beside Mrs. Weyman at the other end of the table, and had her undivided, individual attention, said, “They tell me that your father was a painter. Do you care about that? Do you paint or want to?”
“No. I haven’t talent—of any sort. That is the trouble. (One instinctively told this lady the trouble, because, no matter what that casual, low voice of hers actually said, the violet eyes said, ‘Here is sympathetic understanding of the most poignant, rarest kind. Snatch it. It has winged your way. Snatch it on the wing.’) But, if one didn’t have to have a high-school education first, I’d like to get hospital training as a nurse. That is what I’d like to do, of the things by which one earns money.”
“And of the things by which one does not—earn money?”
Well! Ariel was plunging now through ether on a very swift flight, beside Grandam’s flight. Careless flight. So she answered with truth as winged-casual as Grandam’s own, “A mother. I’d like to have children. (But she saw them as the age of Nicky and Persis, dancing with her out of winter into spring.) Or be a lover. Or be a sailor.”
“If you have genius for any one of those three occupations you have something that will keep you alive all your life. Children. Passion. Adventure. And you have fairy-tale eyes. Has any one ever told you that?”
The flight was very swift, very sure. At its height it must burst into a fountain of song.
“Father has. And he didn’t mind their being narrow and green. Oh, Grandam! Why didn’t you come down sooner?”
So she might have cried, “Oh, I have been lonely! And you have taken that away, absolutely.”
No one had heard what they had been saying or noticed anything except that Grandam had not listened to that amusing anecdote of Enderly’s so bedecked with famous names. And they were preparing to rise now. Luncheon was over.
“The sun’s out for the first time in days,” Mrs. Weyman exclaimed. “Wouldn’t you like Glenn to take you out in Hugh’s car for a while, Grandam? Anne will run up and bring down your things. Later we’re all going to a tea-dance over at Holly. Joan’s being very nice to us! But now I know Glenn would be glad—”