Hugh, half in hope half in distrust, just glanced at his companion’s cameo-like profile, and surprised on it a gleam which stirred an old and until now forgotten memory. They were a boy and a girl just come on their skis to the top of Sparrow Hill in the snow, up above Wild Acres. Joan was insisting on trying a dangerously steep and tricky slide to regain her tam-o’-shanter which had blown over and down. Hugh dragged her back just in time, as he thought, and holding out his arms against her, shot past and down himself. He saw no surer way to convince Joan of the absurdity of her intention than to break his own neck in demonstration. As he went down he carried with him the memory of her profile. To-day’s very gleam was on it then. A gleam of _elated malice_. Going down the slide he took the gleam with him, and then with the snapping of his ankle, for he broke it at the bottom, he forgot it ... until this instant. And now memory’s revival saved him. He smiled to himself. “I’m dull not to know when you’re joking, Joan,—after all these years,” he said. “Of course, we both know that a man doesn’t love beautiful things and give his fortune and his time generously to them if he’s nothing more than a sensualist at heart. Schwankovsky’s devotion to Ariel is disinterested. He’s fascinated by everything that concerns the Clare pictures, that’s all. And who can wonder! They are so wonderful!” “But dear Hugh! If you are so sure that the pictures are wonderful why did you keep ‘Noon’ in the attic all these years?” He answered through his teeth. They might just as well have been fourteen again, and back on their skis up on Sparrow Hill. “You know very well why I put it in the attic. It was you put it there and not I. And you know it. But for some reason it amuses you to make me out stupid. Why? And it isn’t only ‘Noon’ you’ve put in the attic for me, but most of my æsthetic pleasures. You know perfectly well that I can’t hear great music or see a sunset without wanting to take them in my bare hands and rush to lay them in your lap. I can’t adore anything for its own sake. Even God. Beauty disrupts me, gives me anguish precisely in proportion to its loveliness, for the simple cause that I can so seldom share it with you. That’s what’s the matter with me. Or it has been that way until lately. Lately, thank God, I’ve almost been able to care about things for their own sakes again, as I did when I was a boy. Getting ‘Noon’ out again has helped, perhaps. I don’t know.” He was exasperated. Weary. Now let dull misery rise again and entomb him where the sharp-pointed buds of spring could not pierce through. What was all their red-purple-gold to him! Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold ...