Joan was talking to the blond young man, while he visibly gloried in her radiance. “But the radiance is all in herself,” Hugh thought, looking down on the scene, and for once in his life thinking about Joan objectively, as a stranger might. Ever since she had come into the restaurant it had been as if he were at a play, and the four people sitting around the center table down there the players, to criticize impersonally and make what one could of. “Yes, that radiance is all enclosed. It doesn’t light Frye’s way to her, help him forward. It’s not sympathy. Not really. Now Ariel, although she’s silent and no one is looking at her, throws a radiance out from herself, all about her. She stays dim. One hardly thinks of her. But if Frye turned now from Joan to her, he’d find an illumination in the air between them. _Sympathy_.” He speculated about Schwankovsky. Had he tenderness for Ariel’s self, which was so poignantly accessible? Or was it merely self-dramatization in the big creature that had thrown him to his knees at her feet when she came into the drawing-room at Wild Acres that Sunday afternoon? Well, if he had been genuine then—and Hugh thought he was probably much too egocentric for that to be possible—his enthusiasm seemed to have dwindled since, for he had looked only at Joan all this time, listened to her speaking first to Ariel, then to Frye, openly absorbed in her and proud of her. Hugh wondered what he meant to do with Ariel the rest of the afternoon, now that he had usurped her birthday, if this was the extent of his interest in her. “I’ll excuse myself and go down and find out,” he decided. “Perhaps they’ll hand her over to me after lunch. She’ll like seeing the office, I think, and our view of the Battery. She can wait while I finish up the absolutely necessary business, and then we can walk in the Park, or go to an exhibition, or do anything she’d like. Joan and Schwankovsky can’t, after all, enjoy playing around with any one so simple and outside all their interests! My taking her on will be a relief to them, I imagine.” But with the next breath his plan and his hope were shattered. For Schwankovsky suddenly turned to Ariel, until now so unnoticed beside him, and put his great, hairy hand close down on hers, which lay on the white cloth, and they smiled at each other. It was over in an instant but it told Hugh all that he had doubted of understanding and sympathy between those two. Hugh perceived now—turned almost clairvoyant for the instant—that although Schwankovsky might look at Joan and listen to her, world without end, Ariel was all the while in his heart, and that he was as aware of her as—yes, as a mother is aware of the child in her arms while she converses with a caller.... So again Ariel had no need of Hugh.