She pulled off her lemon-colored gloves and reached a warm vital hand, laying each separate finger exactly on Hugh’s fingers, which were guiding the wheel now through Fifth Avenue traffic. She measured their hands thus. And hers were only a little smaller than his. For Joan’s hands, though beautiful, with their smooth palms and backs, and the long conical fingers, glistening-tipped, were large and strong. The hand on Hugh’s shut away the hot, spring sunlight. And it seemed almost, then, as though his whole body as by infection from the shadowed hand was darkened slowly. Flames might any instant roar through that dark. But his expression was unmoved except for straightened lips. His eyes remained keen for every loophole in the difficult traffic. Even his hand, under that shut-down vital one on it, vibrated only with the nuances of steering.
Joan was absorbed like a child in the way her enameled finger nails reflected the spring sunlight. And then she became aware of how beautifully shaped and groomed were Hugh’s own almond-shaped nails. By shifting the tips of her fingers ever so slightly she could see the moons at the base of his nails, so clear, high and definite.
“You have nice hands, Hugh,” she murmured. “Terribly nice.” And when he did not respond by look or word she added with sudden generosity, “I’ll ’fess up, dear. I did make an idiotic and totally moronish mistake about ‘Noon’ five years ago when you brought it to me from Bermuda. But don’t tell on me, please; I am ashamed. And it doesn’t matter to you what any one thinks of your taste. You don’t pretend to anything, you dear, so they can’t show you up, do you see!”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter,” Hugh muttered. He meant, of course, “What does anything matter compared with your hand on mine, and this darkness and its flame corroding my body, my mind!”
Presently Joan said, “You can put me down at the next corner, Hugh. I want to walk twenty blocks or so for exercise before plunging into my silly spring shopping.”
She did not stir her hand from his until the car was parked against the curb.
But spring was insistent. Nothing could keep the pointed, delicate buds from piercing their way through the harsh bark to azure light and air and sun, and their flowering expression. One afternoon, a few days after his drive to town with Joan, Hugh returned to Wild Acres rather early with the idea of persuading Ariel and his grandmother to take a drive with him, it was such perfect weather. No one answered his knock at the attic apartment door; so he opened it and went in.
Grandam was not there on the bed nor in the long chair: only Ariel, and she was kneeling by one of the wide-open windows, her back to the room, looking out into the tree-tops that in the past few days had foamed into a sea of green gold. The sunlight slanted down this sea, at the moment of Hugh’s arrival and Ariel’s watching, in a way that turned it into an unearthly lightness of gold,—a winged, breathing wind of green gold. And Ariel knelt upright at the edge of the wind-shaken loveliness like a wand, stilled, not bent, by the high stir of beauty.
Hugh stopped short. He had come to Grandam’s low table and saw it spread with brown paper, and on the paper a heap of wild flowers. Hepaticas, anemones, white and yellow violets, green leaves too, and clumps of rich brown wood loam,—all in a fragrant tangle. At the edge of the pile Ariel’s green hat was tossed down, with its green feather.
“Hello! Did you collect all these?” Hugh asked.