“Yes,” Ariel cried. “Put out your wrist, Grandam! I’ll light on it. I’ll stay till the wind blows me off!” Then they smiled at each other and during the instant of the smile their friendship mellowed as though the instant had been an entire life-time.
“But we’re forgetting about ‘Noon,’” Grandam reminded Ariel. “I’ll go with you now to look for it.”
“Look for it? But don’t you know where it is? I thought you said you knew.”
“It’s in the attic across the hall. It mayn’t be just in plain sight, though. But we’ll find it and bring it in here and hang it above the mantel.”
“In the attic! But why?” Ariel could not take it in for a minute. But strangely, her body was quicker than her brain to react. Her heart had started an angry pounding and her fingers were curling into her palms, hard, the nails biting into the flesh. Ariel wondered at her fingers and at her heart.
She had followed Grandam across the floor toward the hall door. But Grandam halted by the piano and leaned a hand on it, suddenly supporting herself. “Wait, Ariel,” she said. “I’ll try to explain it to you a little. Hugh put ‘Noon’ in the attic because he didn’t want it around where he could see it. But it isn’t the insult to the painting and to your father that it seems. I’m sure it isn’t. It is something different altogether. For the attic, in this case, isn’t the attic at all....”
But Ariel was not to be betrayed into thinking that the attic was the haunted, magical home of the invisible great-great-great-great-grandmother which she had almost imagined it on looking in there this afternoon. Her nails were biting into her palms, and her mouth was dry. What did Grandam mean, saying the attic was not an attic?
Grandam was looking down at the anemones. She had stopped looking at Ariel.
“The attic isn’t an attic—because it is Hugh’s subconscious mind. That’s what modern psychology, anyway, calls the place where we chuck away the memories that hurt us. And no more than the attic out there is an attic, is ‘Noon’ a painting. It was a painting when Hugh bought it, and thought it so beautiful. But Hugh was in love. And when one is a lover, every æsthetic joy actually hurts until it can be passed on to the beloved. To share it would be even more relieving, of course. But in this case there was no hope of Hugh’s sharing anything very much with Mrs. Nevin. Her husband was still living and Joan had chosen him in preference to Hugh, anyway. No. Whatever he could possess of beauty he must give her outright, not even think of sharing with her.”
Grandam touched the glassy petal of an anemone, so lightly that its delicate nerves did not feel a tremor.