“Aren’t you a little unreliable, Hugh? You appeared to agree with me that the whole thing was nonsense. Then, right on top of that, you congratulated Ariel! Are you or are you not going up to Grandam now and straighten her out as to what she can and can’t do.”
“I’d rather say not. I think we can trust Grandam to go lightly with Ariel, though it is rather whimsical of her! Not so inappropriate though, once you get used to the idea. There’s something goddess-like about Grandam. So she can do with lovely service. And it’s better, worlds better, than Macy’s and the American Girls’ Club, all thanks to Joan just the same for her interest—in us.”
“You’re behaving weirdly! But Ariel won’t last with Grandam a week, so in the end it won’t matter. Anyway, now I can invite people to dinner without wondering what’s to be done with the child.”
Sunday. A gray dismal afternoon at Wild Acres. Mrs. Weyman was driving with friends to New York to hear a Philharmonic concert.
Suddenly Hugh, who had passed up the concert, put down the mystery story he had intended to substitute for it and went, three steps at a time, up to the attic apartment. He wanted society—Grandam’s and Ariel’s—and perhaps to sit down at Grandam’s piano and play the mists away from heart and mind. Yesterday, while he was lunching a man at the Waldorf, the orchestra had played something of César Franck’s which Hugh had never heard before. He thought he could remember bits of it, work them out for Grandam this afternoon. Hugh was musical in a temperamental, totally undisciplined way, and for years past he had played only for Grandam or himself. Not even his mother could persuade him. But, somehow, Ariel’s presence wouldn’t matter to him a bit, he knew. Or rather it would matter. The very thought of her listening made his fingers want the keys.
Wood smoke mingled with the smell of the violets which bloomed perpetually in the glass bowl by the daybed. This mixture of smells had lifelong association for Hugh. It meant understanding and an atmosphere of exquisite harmony between two human beings. Grandam was draped in a red shawl—the red of wild poppies in June fields—and lying in the long chair under the western windows. Ariel was kneeling on the floor by her side, and they were reading from a book resting on the arm of the chair, “The Oxford Book of English Verse.”
Ariel got up when Hugh came in. She looked strange to him, for a minute, because of a new frock she was wearing. It was the color of wood smoke, or dim violets. It was, Hugh thought, the mingled smell of violets and wood smoke run into color and form. It fell in soft pleats from a silver piping at the base of her throat, was gathered in at her waist by a silver cord, and from there, still thickly pleated, hung in dense thick chiffon folds down almost to her ankles. With it she was wearing the low-heeled silver slippers that went with her green evening frock, and silver stockings.
So Grandam had already dressed her serving-maid in these first days of her service. Hugh recognized the material instantly as having come from one of Grandam’s most notable scarfs, a great square of loveliness with which he had been familiar from boyhood.
“You’ve come to play, Hugh! Well, I wanted music. Ariel ought to run out and get the air. I’ve been working her rather hard.”
But Ariel cried, “Not a bit of it! It’s wonderful up here, Hugh!”