Her hardest hue to hold—
That was the beginning of a poem of Robert Frost’s. Anne had quoted or read it to Hugh sometime in the winter. He remembered her coming to him where he sat at the piano, tentatively searching for some theme he had heard,—keeping it soft and just for his own ear. He had not wanted to share his music. But Anne had wanted to share her poem. And how had he responded? He had listened, his hands raised waiting above the keys, to that much:
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold—
and beyond that he remembered nothing. Perhaps his indifference and self-absorption had discouraged Anne. In any case, she hadn’t gone on with the poem. But it wasn’t so much his music she had interrupted with her poetry, that far-away afternoon in winter. It was his thoughts. And those thoughts, his whole preoccupation, had been Joan ... Joan ... Joan.... His music was only a path, winding through his preoccupation, a path through, not a path out.
But now, this morning, noticing the swelling purple and red and gold of the budded trees which almost before his eyes were rushing upon spring, the beauty Anne had failed to share so many weeks ago pierced through to him. And it came to him, as a matter of fact, that things in general lately had been piercing through to him with more and more persistence. He saw, felt, tasted, smelled the world this spring as he had not done for many springs. Joan was in his mind more or less, for he was still in love with her. But she no longer tinged his perceptions of everything else as well. Anne, Glenn, his mother, Brenda Loring, his friends at the office, spring coming,—these held vital places of their own in his new, sharpened attention.
And Ariel and Grandam? Grandam had never given way to Joan in his thoughts, any more than she gave way to her in actuality. As for Ariel, she did not so much enter into as hover about the outer edges of Hugh’s consciousness, her feet on azure air as in her father’s paintings. Yes. From her arrival on the same boat with Joan, Ariel had been above and outside but very present to Hugh’s conscious mind.... So he thought now, stirred to such thinking by those pointed, sharp buds of the tree boughs.
Yet after all it wasn’t these buds which had pierced through and touched his soul. As he turned out from the spring woods onto the Post Road, he knew that it wasn’t the buds but something corresponding to them. For all Ariel’s delicate lightness, her tenderness, it was she, her presence at Wild Acres, which had pierced the harsh coating over his sleeping soul.
He jammed on his brakes and the big wheels of his car spurted gravel on Holly’s superbly tended driveway under Holly’s portico. Joan was on the steps.
She, too, knew that spring had come. From head to foot she was all in fresh spring raiment. A lettuce-green hat tilted its shade across glowing eyes. She was drawing on lemon-colored doeskin gloves and laughing. “I thought you were going to drive right through and out again! What were you thinking of so dourly, Hugh?”