“Nothing, if it were a respectable job, of course. But the idea was, you see, her being a maid. An odd coat, that, for a maid to be wearing!”
“Oh, but she isn’t a servant. She’s my grandmother’s companion-nurse, and doing it very well too! You misunderstood Joan.”
“Perhaps.” Brenda had turned around in her chair, and continuing to pretend that the impatient waiter did not exist, looked down at Ariel with clever, narrowed eyes. Then she laughed, a keen little ripple of pure pleasure, and continuing to squint through her lorgnette at the unconscious Ariel, cried softly, “But I do begin to see—something in her, anyway. The dancer. A cerise veil, a straight, very short purple tunic. Sheer. Neck, arms, legs, bare. That clean line of shoulder blade and thigh.... The face doesn’t matter, you know, in dancing. It’s the body.”
“The dancer! What do you mean?” Hugh was suddenly as much revolted by Brenda’s narrowed, discerning eyes taking Ariel in from her head to her feet as he had been revolted a minute ago by Schwankovsky’s hand swallowing Ariel’s on the white tablecloth.
Brenda dropped her lorgnette and looked across at Hugh, surprised by his tone. “Of course. The dancer. Why not? Joan’s crowd are saying it now. But soon all the world will be shouting it,—if Schwankovsky is right, and the Clare pictures are all that he thinks them. Isn’t this Ariel in every one of them, dancing? Isadora Duncan stuff? May Morning stuff? Well, there’s all the publicity she needs, if she wants to go on the stage, whether she has any actual talent or not. They say she’s untrained. But a few weeks of hard work would fix that. Æsthetic dancing doesn’t require the technique that ballet requires, you know, or even the vaudeville dancing stunts. All that is necessary is a reasonably pretty body, some gracefulness, and a lot of feeling. Given these, and a cerise veil, that girl down there can go as far as she likes—providing her father’s paintings make a big enough stir. Haven’t you even thought of that, Hugh? After all, the girl’s in your house, no matter in what capacity. You might get just a little interested, I should think!”
Hugh peremptorily beckoned the waiter, by now almost hopeless, and took up the matter of their lunch with him. After the business was settled to Brenda’s complete satisfaction, and even more to the waiter’s, whose respect for Hugh showed to almost a shocking degree in his face as he received his orders, Hugh asked, “Did Joan put this nonsense into your head, or Schwankovsky? Anyway, it is utterest nonsense.” He could not disguise from himself, and even less from Miss Loring, that he was angry and uncomfortable.
“What? About Ariel Clare? Really, I don’t remember. Why, it’s so obvious I may even have thought of it myself,” Brenda retorted, laughing.
“Is it true, Hugh,” she went on, still teasingly, “that you yourself have had one of these Clare pictures for years, the best one at that, the gem of them all, according to Schwankovsky, in your attic? And did Schwankovsky and Joan and Ariel go on a still hunt for its recovery? And is it now hanging in your grandmother’s bedroom, because there’s no other place you want it at Wild Acres? Or are they only making a good story?”
“It’s quite true,” Hugh replied seriously. “Except that Ariel got the picture out herself when she came to us, without help. By the time Schwankovsky had looked her up at Wild Acres, it was hung over my grandmother’s mantel. But it belongs to Ariel now, because I’ve given it to her.”
Brenda stopped laughing. She looked at Hugh with new seriousness and exclaimed, “Do you know, I’m really, in my heart of hearts, quite different from Joan and from most of the women she plays with. I’m willing to have all the cultivation myself, and not expect my men friends to play up to all that.... Art, you know. Taste. It doesn’t matter so much as one thinks! And I don’t believe that we so-called artistic people have all the imagination, either. Men like you, business men, your imagination is the real thing. You create something out of nothing. Fortunes out of ideas. Skyscrapers out of thin air. Who am I to laugh when you show bad taste in judging a painting or prefer jazz to Debussy? One can’t have things both ways. And your way looks to me to be the biggest, truly.