Glenn lowered his voice but muttered on: “Can you imagine how Ariel felt when she found it in the attic? Why, the kid expected, of course, it would be the first thing her eyes would light on at Wild Acres. And instead she had to start a hunt for it! It goes beyond imagination that anybody could do such a thing to it, even after Joan Nevin had sniffed. Couldn’t Hugh stand up to one little sniff? If he had, he’d be in a beautiful position of _I told you so_ now!” “Hugh’s all right,” Anne defended him. “He appreciates Ariel herself, at any rate. And that takes taste. More than I had. I had to be knocked down to wake up to it. But I can’t understand what was the matter with Joan. It seems incredible.” Glenn didn’t notice Anne’s ambiguous allusion to having been knocked down. It was her implied opinion of the genuineness of Joan’s taste which interested him. “You forget,” he pointed out, with a decided sneer in his voice, “that no Michael Schwankovsky had spoken authoritatively on him yet, and Clare wasn’t famous, when Joan had the privilege of first seeing this masterpiece of his. If anything ever showed that old girl up, this business does. She’s a four-flusher, that’s what she is, a kowtower, a sheep, a total washout. If she had any taste, even if she personally detested Clare’s way of painting, she’d have known this was important. Just as I detest D. H. Lawrence’s stuff, but even without the critics to tell me I’d sense he was genuinely a great writer. I hope I would.” Anne, however, resented all this. She loved Joan less than Glenn did and with more reason. But if Joan was mean, of little account, then what of Anne? No. She preferred to think her rival something better than shoddy. So pride was in it, and pain too, when she answered Glenn hotly, “Joan _has_ taste, and knows and cares a lot about the things she pretends to know and care about. Look at her own collection of oils! And how many people hasn’t she made! Brenda Loring, for instance. And now she’s doing everything she can to encourage Charlie Frye, they say. This picture—Well, Hugh probably showed it to her in a bad light and on top of his hundredth and first proposal. She merely took her boredom out on ‘Noon.’ Doesn’t that explain it?” “You always stand up for females, Anne, whether you hate the particular one being criticized or not, I notice. But supposin’ you’re justified this time,—then why doesn’t the pussy own up now, say she never got a good look at the thing, instead of howling all over the place that Hugh never showed it to her at all? Why is Hugh to be the goat! That’s awfully sporting of her, isn’t it! Why! At college any number of fellows have tried to razz me about it already! I suppose I owe that to friend Prescott directly,—to Joan, though indirectly.