His companion laughed merrily. “But of course you didn’t. Did you think I was suspecting you of shadowing Joan Nevin, dear fellow? Wasn’t it I who chose the place?”
Joan had seated herself facing the balcony; but in spite of the concentrated gaze of all the balcony lunchers on herself and her friends she did not look up or appear to be aware that there was a balcony. Hugh realized, as freshly, almost, as if he had never done so before, how distinguished and unusual as well as beautiful Joan was. Her face glowed with a purpose and light no other face in that crowded room possessed. Perhaps it was the effect of the brilliant large eyes set wide under the coppery-winged sweep of her brows. To-day the burnished hair was concealed under a purple hat so à la mode that not a glimmer of it showed at brow or cheek. Few women could wear a hat so daring as that and preserve at the same time a radiant and feminine beauty. And when Joan spoke, leaning across the table toward Ariel, her lips moved with such beauty of precision that one, without need to hear, knew that her enunciation was perfect.
“Heavens! Joan Nevin is a stunning creature,” Brenda ejaculated, all her special gift of taste behind the generous words. “So it’s the great Michael Schwankovsky who invested in the floral piece. Well, if any one in New York can afford it with the stock market what it is, I suppose he can. Big blustering Midas! And it’s Joan he’s blustering around to-day. But that’s quite on the books, isn’t it? The little man, the poor dear, is Charlie Frye. Nobody of any importance, but amiable, and surprisingly often seen in company with the great. The other person—” Brenda assumed her lorgnette, a property she used with discretion and undeniable distinction for one so young,—“The other person—Lady? Child? Flapper? Russian Princess? Can’t make out what she is, and I don’t know who she is. Funny.”
“That’s Ariel Clare. And the party’s in her honor, not Joan’s. Because it’s her birthday,” Hugh informed his companion—diffidently.
Ariel, thin of cheek and shoulders, emerging with Frye’s help at this instant from her coat of a princess, was pale and small in contrast with the radiant Joan. Meager. Thin. Grandam was certainly—Hugh was sure of it—letting her work far too hard. And so this was Charlie Frye!
But what was Brenda Loring saying with so much animation as she waved a presumptuously impatient waiter back from Hugh’s elbow. “Not really! Ariel Clare! The dancer! But how too deliciously interesting to have this early view of her, ahead of the mob. Getting within radius of Joan, though, is as good as being behind the scenes, isn’t it! She’s so frightfully in on everything! But this time you’ve beat Joan. You know the model intimately. She works for you, doesn’t she? Joan’s awfully entertaining on the subject. She declares it’s so typical—your keeping the girl on in that position at Wild Acres now that Schwankovsky himself is her patron, and the exhibition’s going to make her famous. Joan thinks your Philistinism delightful. But of course you’re not so insensible as Joan fondly imagines! I should see through you!”
Joan was talking to the blond young man, while he visibly gloried in her radiance. “But the radiance is all in herself,” Hugh thought, looking down on the scene, and for once in his life thinking about Joan objectively, as a stranger might. Ever since she had come into the restaurant it had been as if he were at a play, and the four people sitting around the center table down there the players, to criticize impersonally and make what one could of. “Yes, that radiance is all enclosed. It doesn’t light Frye’s way to her, help him forward. It’s not sympathy. Not really. Now Ariel, although she’s silent and no one is looking at her, throws a radiance out from herself, all about her. She stays dim. One hardly thinks of her. But if Frye turned now from Joan to her, he’d find an illumination in the air between them. Sympathy.”
He speculated about Schwankovsky. Had he tenderness for Ariel’s self, which was so poignantly accessible? Or was it merely self-dramatization in the big creature that had thrown him to his knees at her feet when she came into the drawing-room at Wild Acres that Sunday afternoon? Well, if he had been genuine then—and Hugh thought he was probably much too egocentric for that to be possible—his enthusiasm seemed to have dwindled since, for he had looked only at Joan all this time, listened to her speaking first to Ariel, then to Frye, openly absorbed in her and proud of her. Hugh wondered what he meant to do with Ariel the rest of the afternoon, now that he had usurped her birthday, if this was the extent of his interest in her. “I’ll excuse myself and go down and find out,” he decided. “Perhaps they’ll hand her over to me after lunch. She’ll like seeing the office, I think, and our view of the Battery. She can wait while I finish up the absolutely necessary business, and then we can walk in the Park, or go to an exhibition, or do anything she’d like. Joan and Schwankovsky can’t, after all, enjoy playing around with any one so simple and outside all their interests! My taking her on will be a relief to them, I imagine.”
But with the next breath his plan and his hope were shattered. For Schwankovsky suddenly turned to Ariel, until now so unnoticed beside him, and put his great, hairy hand close down on hers, which lay on the white cloth, and they smiled at each other. It was over in an instant but it told Hugh all that he had doubted of understanding and sympathy between those two. Hugh perceived now—turned almost clairvoyant for the instant—that although Schwankovsky might look at Joan and listen to her, world without end, Ariel was all the while in his heart, and that he was as aware of her as—yes, as a mother is aware of the child in her arms while she converses with a caller.... So again Ariel had no need of Hugh.
He returned his attention to Miss Loring, and tried to respond to something she had been saying. “I don’t exactly see why Joan should be amused at Ariel’s having a job and sticking at it, until the exhibition, anyway,” he exclaimed. “What’s funny about that, Miss—I mean Brenda?”