“Schwankovsky, for instance, is an entertaining person, and he certainly has cultivated his taste to an extraordinary and sure degree, and he’s done a whole lot for art in our benighted country. But he inherited his millions. His imagination never had to go into the making of them. Only in the spending. He uses his imagination in the spending, you in the making. Nobody would have time to do both.
“I’d be willing to bet quite a lot, Hugh, that you in this particular case are the one who’s right. Not about the picture. Schwankovsky’s more likely to be right about that. But about the girl. Your genius must be in sizing up people. All business men, successful ones, have to be able to size up people. That’s obvious. And if you see that Ariel Clare is just a simple, wholesome girl who happened to have an artist for a father, but herself is a type to make a good nurse or maid, something practical and useful, then I think you’re right in sticking to it and being disgusted at the idea of Joan and her friend Schwankovsky thinking they can make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.... I’d accept your judgment on a person much quicker than anybody’s down there.”
She waved her cigarette in its long holder in the direction of the Schwankovsky party.
“Have you ever in your life tasted such onion soup?” she murmured after a minute of rather stunned silence on Hugh’s part. “How old is she, by the way? To become a dancer one should start very young.”
“Ariel, you mean? Yes, the soup is very good. She’s twenty to-day. It’s her birthday.”
As Hugh said this, Ariel caught sight of him for the first time, and smiled up at the balcony. He bowed to her, and his own smile was rather constrained. But he felt that a finger of sunshine had suddenly traversed his heart. He said again, not realizing that he was repeating himself, “To-day is her birthday. She is twenty.”
Chapter XX
Joan telephoned Hugh the next morning early and asked him to pick her up at Holly if he was driving to town that day. This was not an unusual request, but for all its usualness Hugh never failed to be delightedly surprised to the point of suddenly being able to eat no more breakfast. To-day, however, its effect on him was unusual. He was delighted, it is true, and decided instantly that he was driving, of course, although he had intended going in by train and leaving the car for his mother. The sudden change in plan necessitated hiring a car and driver from a Tarrytown garage by telephone, writing a note of explanation to his mother, who was still asleep, and arriving an hour or so late at his office. This meant nothing to him, or ordinarily would have meant nothing, compared with the felicity of having Joan’s company on the long drive. But to-day, on returning from the telephone, he finished his whole breakfast and told himself that if he drove fast perhaps he needn’t be much more than an hour late in town. He’d try, anyway.
It had been a long winter. But to-day not so much as a wispy trace of it was left in the Wild Acres woods. As he drove down the avenue he marveled how the last patches of snow had melted from the hollows over night. The woods glistened with red and purple and gold leaf-buds. To-morrow, or the next day—or the day after that, at the latest,—it would be a golden-green blaze through here.
Nature’s first green is gold,