“Yes. As much as you....”
“As much? But not like me, I know. You’ve never been lost. You haven’t been what Prescott said I was—eaten into by love as though love was a cancer and a destruction. He said that the people who let it take them like that were disgusting slaves, and not worth anybody’s loving. He was right. My love was cancerous, not beautiful. You know, yourself. You saw it without understanding it and you say it horrified you. Then no wonder Prescott was put off by it. But it’s not like that with you. I can sense things as well as you can, you see! You’ve stayed yourself, kept the integrity of your personality. And your pride. I know it. You’re pure, clear like a diamond. And by ‘pure’ I mean your will is untouched. Unsmirched. Diamond-hard and diamond-clean. Aren’t I right?”
Ariel responded nothing. And after a while Anne went on, urging her confidence: “Do you suppose Joan and Prescott have something alike in them? They’re both so finished, complete in themselves! That’s the sort of person real people love, isn’t it! How can you expect to be loved if you’re not living your own life but all the time trying to break through into another person’s life instead? That’s what I’ve been trying to do with Prescott. He said so. If I’d any authentic life of my own, then he mightn’t have got scared at my loving him too much. I wouldn’t have such terrifying potentialities for being a limpet.... And isn’t that the trouble between Joan and Hugh! I bet it is! She’s complete, finished without him. Authentic! And Hugh—Poor dear! He’s always trying to break through into that authentic, completed circle. If he’d only make a circle of his own and then loop it on to hers, there might be a chance for a happy relation between them. But what he’s concentrating on is not the harmony in his own psyche, but to storm the harmony in hers. He isn’t fit for love—and I’m not going to pity Hugh now any more than I pity myself, please God. Neither of us is fit to be loved, or we would be.”
But then she noticed Ariel’s face, and was silenced as if by a thunder-clap, although Ariel’s face was as quiet as a stone and shut like a stone. Still, Anne was awed or frightened—she didn’t know which—into sudden silence.
After a while Ariel begged, as if Anne hadn’t so carefully shut up, as if she had gone right on with this subject of Hugh and Joan for the last completely silent half mile or so, “Don’t say such things about Hugh. They aren’t so at all. But, oh, Anne! Let us never try to break through and lose ourselves in any one—unless God. That’s the way to be free. Let’s run.—Let’s never be slaves—”
Hand in hand the two girls went plunging along the road until they staggered to a stop, winded. Then, laughing, breathlessly, they kissed each other on the mouth, kissed through the snow, their faces soaked and cold with the snow-flower blobs.
Chapter XIX
Hugh, who had failed in an effort to discover Ariel’s whereabouts on her first “Saturday off” and make a real holiday for her in New York as he had intended, spoke for the following Saturday by the middle of the week. But he was too late. It was already promised to Joan. This surprised him and made him uneasy. He had lost his hope for Joan’s sympathy with Ariel days ago, and now he was past desiring it. For Ariel and Joan, he had come to see, were essentially antithetical. Ariel had been wiser than he in knowing it from the beginning. So it gave him no particular pleasure to learn that Joan was taking Ariel to a Boston Symphony concert, and afterwards to dine at Michael Schwankovsky’s.
Even in Grandam’s apartment it was not easy to see much of Ariel. For when he went up there, evenings, she tactfully left him alone with his grandmother. Monday night when he had protested, “But I’ve come to see you too,” she had surprisingly explained that she wanted to write a letter to Anne and would come back if she finished it. But she had not come back. And why was she writing to Anne? So far as Hugh knew, Anne had paid literally no attention to Ariel at all when Hugh had wanted her to, during the holidays.
Of Joan these days it appeared that he could see as much as he liked, but in most unsatisfactory ways. He found himself hovering on the edges of her hospitality to watch her dance and gossip with her kaleidoscopically shifting groups of intimates. From an entire evening spent in thus shadowing her he might be the richer for only one or two alluring but enigmatical glances, or if he was supremely lucky, a few minutes of one-sided intercourse, when Joan drew him out about his business and his own progress, and he waked too late to realize that he had not entered into her world of interests nor been encouraged to do so.