Ariel responded nothing. And after a while Anne went on, urging her confidence: “Do you suppose Joan and Prescott have something alike in them? They’re both so finished, complete in themselves! That’s the sort of person real people love, isn’t it! How can you expect to be loved if you’re not living your own life but all the time trying to break through into another person’s life instead? That’s what I’ve been trying to do with Prescott. He said so. If I’d any authentic life of my own, then he mightn’t have got scared at my loving him too much. I wouldn’t have such terrifying potentialities for being a limpet.... And isn’t that the trouble between Joan and Hugh! I bet it is! She’s complete, finished without him. Authentic! And Hugh—Poor dear! He’s always trying to break through into that authentic, completed circle. If he’d only make a circle of his own and then loop it on to hers, there might be a chance for a happy relation between them. But what he’s concentrating on is not the harmony in his own psyche, but to storm the harmony in hers. He isn’t fit for love—and I’m not going to pity Hugh now any more than I pity myself, please God. Neither of us is fit to be loved, or we would be.” But then she noticed Ariel’s face, and was silenced as if by a thunder-clap, although Ariel’s face was as quiet as a stone and shut like a stone. Still, Anne was awed or frightened—she didn’t know which—into sudden silence. After a while Ariel begged, as if Anne hadn’t so carefully shut up, as if she had gone right on with this subject of Hugh and Joan for the last completely silent half mile or so, “Don’t say such things about Hugh. They aren’t so at all. But, oh, Anne! Let us never try to break through and lose ourselves in any one—unless God. That’s the way to be free. Let’s run.—Let’s never be slaves—” Hand in hand the two girls went plunging along the road until they staggered to a stop, winded. Then, laughing, breathlessly, they kissed each other on the mouth, kissed through the snow, their faces soaked and cold with the snow-flower blobs. Chapter XIX Hugh, who had failed in an effort to discover Ariel’s whereabouts on her first “Saturday off” and make a real holiday for her in New York as he had intended, spoke for the following Saturday by the middle of the week. But he was too late. It was already promised to Joan. This surprised him and made him uneasy. He had lost his hope for Joan’s sympathy with Ariel days ago, and now he was past desiring it. For Ariel and Joan, he had come to see, were essentially antithetical. Ariel had been wiser than he in knowing it from the beginning. So it gave him no particular pleasure to learn that Joan was taking Ariel to a Boston Symphony concert, and afterwards to dine at Michael Schwankovsky’s.