Produced by Stephen Hutcheson and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net _Ariel Dances_ _by Ethel Cook Eliot_ _Boston Little, Brown, and Company 1931_ _Copyright, 1931_, BY ETHEL COOK ELIOT _All rights reserved_ Published February, 1931 Reprinted February, 1931 (three times) PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA FOR MY MOTHER _Ariel Dances_ Chapter I Ariel, quiet but alert, lay in her steamer chair, one of the most inconspicuous of the several hundred passengers the _Bermuda_ was bringing to New York. No one would be likely to look at her twice or give her a second thought, as she crouched away from the March wind, insufficiently protected from the cold by her nondescript tweed coat, and carelessly, casually bare-headed. All about her on the deck were people of outstanding, vivid types. The thing that had impressed Ariel about these fellow passengers during the two days of the voyage was their apparent self-sufficiency,—a gay, bright assurance of their own significance, and the reasonableness, even the inevitableness, of their being what and where they were. The very children appeared to take it quite as a matter of course that they should come skimming over the Atlantic in a mammoth boat-hotel while they played their games, read their books and ate their meals,—just like that. Ariel took nothing as a matter of course, and she never had from the minute of earliest memory. Her proclivity to wonder and to delight was as organic as her proclivity to breathe. But now it was neither delight nor wonder but an aching suspense that quivered at the back of her mind. She thought, “If Father were here! If it weren’t alone, this adventure! New York Harbor at last! _I_—Ariel! But it isn’t real. There’s no substance. It _was_ to have happened and been wonderful, but this is paler than our imagining of it. The shadow of our imagining. Oh, it’s I who have died and not Father. Where he is, whatever he is doing, it’s still real with him. With Father it would be always real,—alive.”