“Pff. Since it’s out, it’s out. No matter. Only it was going to be something of a satisfaction, springing an exhibition like that on New York. But now you and Joan know! Probably he’s told everybody. Well, I don’t suppose it really matters—”
He blustered off without another word or look, leaving Hugh stranded. Didn’t Schwankovsky know that Ariel was at Wild Acres with the Weymans? That Hugh was her host? Apparently not.
Miss Loring, seeing Hugh so suddenly and unequivocally disengaged, forsook her own group by the buffet and started to insinuate her way through the room toward him.
“Got to catch a train,” he thought, to put himself in countenance with himself. If Miss Loring got to him before the elevator arrived, summoned by his urgent finger, he would say it aloud. He looked at his watch. True enough! If he was to catch the hour’s train from the Grand Central, he must get himself on the inside of a taxi in something less than a minute. The elevator beat Miss Loring, and Hugh was grateful.
In the taxi he began sorting it out. Schwankovsky had seen Gregory Clare’s pictures all right, and he had taken the exhibition in charge. But Joan had had nothing to do with it, and in fact knew nothing about it. And Schwankovsky himself hadn’t a hint of Hugh’s connection with the artist or with his daughter. Probably he wasn’t even aware that Joan herself knew Ariel. Surprising, perhaps, but not unaccountable. Charlie Frye mightn’t even have mentioned that she had left Bermuda.—And Hugh decided that his having bolted away from that party didn’t matter. He couldn’t think that Miss Loring would be unconsolable, and no one else would even notice. Certainly Joan wouldn’t. Asking him to come had been the merest impulse—a fragile impulse at that—just a slight flutter of well-meaningness toward poor old Hugh.
He looked drawn as he paid off his taxi driver at the Grand Central and mingled his stride with the throngs pouring toward their various locals on the lower level.
His mother was reading in bed when he got home. She called out to him. Propped among snowy pillows, swathed in a rosy negligee under a rosy bedside light, she was reading a book of “Cases,”—collected and edited by Joan’s Doctor Steiner. For unpleasantness of subject they competed tolerably with the popular murder mysteries of the day, and for the ingenuity of their unraveling and denouements they competed not at all, but superbly surmounted.
“Ariel in bed?” Hugh inquired. Mrs. Weyman closed the book, but kept a finger in it. “I should hope so,” she exclaimed, just this side of sharpness, while her welcoming smile changed into an irritated frown. “Really! Hugh! Don’t you expect quite a lot of me these days? Three times this week I’ve dined with that girl alone here. We’ve nothing to say to each other. If Grandam came down, it would help. But no, Ariel seems to have become my eternal vis-à-vis. Joan’s away. Mrs. Drake and the Eddingtons and ’most everybody else, for the matter of that, are still in Florida. Even without Ariel it would be dreary enough—But with her! And you come rushing in—’Is Ariel in bed?’ I can’t stand it.”
“I’m sorry, Mother. But Joan’s back. You’ll see her to-morrow, probably. That will help. And the exhibition’s on the way,—less than two months to wait. After that Ariel might go abroad, or something, with some nice older woman. Meanwhile—”
“Exactly, Hugh! Meanwhile? It’s appalling! What to do with her! And how’s she to go abroad, or do anything—without any money?”