“What? About Ariel Clare? Really, I don’t remember. Why, it’s so obvious I may even have thought of it myself,” Brenda retorted, laughing. “Is it true, Hugh,” she went on, still teasingly, “that you yourself have had one of these Clare pictures for years, the best one at that, the gem of them all, according to Schwankovsky, in your attic? And did Schwankovsky and Joan and Ariel go on a still hunt for its recovery? And is it now hanging in your grandmother’s bedroom, because there’s no other place you want it at Wild Acres? Or are they only making a good story?” “It’s quite true,” Hugh replied seriously. “Except that Ariel got the picture out herself when she came to us, without help. By the time Schwankovsky had looked her up at Wild Acres, it was hung over my grandmother’s mantel. But it belongs to Ariel now, because I’ve given it to her.” Brenda stopped laughing. She looked at Hugh with new seriousness and exclaimed, “Do you know, I’m really, in my heart of hearts, quite different from Joan and from most of the women she plays with. I’m willing to have all the cultivation myself, and not expect my men friends to play up to all that.... Art, you know. Taste. It doesn’t matter so much as one thinks! And I don’t believe that we so-called artistic people have all the imagination, either. Men like you, business men, your imagination is the real thing. You create something out of nothing. Fortunes out of ideas. Skyscrapers out of thin air. Who am I to laugh when you show bad taste in judging a painting or prefer jazz to Debussy? One can’t have things both ways. And your way looks to me to be the biggest, truly. “Schwankovsky, for instance, is an entertaining person, and he certainly has cultivated his taste to an extraordinary and sure degree, and he’s done a whole lot for art in our benighted country. But he inherited his millions. His imagination never had to go into the making of _them_. Only in the spending. He uses his imagination in the spending, you in the making. Nobody would have time to do both. “I’d be willing to bet quite a lot, Hugh, that you in this particular case are the one who’s right. Not about the picture. Schwankovsky’s more likely to be right about that. But about the girl. Your genius must be in sizing up people. All business men, successful ones, have to be able to size up people. That’s obvious. And if you see that Ariel Clare is just a simple, wholesome girl who happened to have an artist for a father, but herself is a type to make a good nurse or maid, something practical and useful, then I think you’re right in sticking to it and being disgusted at the idea of Joan and her friend Schwankovsky thinking they can make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.... I’d accept your judgment on a person much quicker than anybody’s down there.” She waved her cigarette in its long holder in the direction of the Schwankovsky party.