“You put me too much in the wrong, Joan. I won’t take it.” Hugh, too, could lose his temper. “What I really feel, and _know_, is that you nor I nor Crowell Fuller nor Schwankovsky nor anybody on God’s earth, in the last analysis, will have a damned finger in the ultimate fate of Clare’s work. Justice goes its own ways, with art as with souls. And don’t let any one tell you it isn’t so! If Clare’s paintings are really important (God! how I hate that word, used as you patronizing intelligentsia are using it these days!), the importance will win through for itself, without your worrying about it. That’s what I believe, anyway. Always _have_.” Joan’s jaw dropped perceptibly. But her eyes kept their angry glitter. “That is a decision, my friend, which I believe even the greatest philosophers haven’t dared to make. Personally, I have never supposed that there is a god of art who deals out ultimate justice, willy-nilly. It looks pretty much a matter of chance—and of friends, and advertising. I’d say—” But Hugh interrupted her, still hot. “Well, I wouldn’t. There’s a life, a soul of its own in a picture like—‘The Shell,’ for instance. It’s a life that will, come spring, burst through into humanity’s appreciation, the way buds burst through bark, come their spring, to light and air. For the imagination is strong, like love.... It is a power.... Yes. I’m willing to leave my friend’s works to their own destinies. So long as imagination is organic in them, as it is in Clare’s pictures, then they’re potent in their own right as is a bolt of electricity. Even if some poor fool hides ’em away in his attic, or even if fire burns ’em or water drowns ’em,—justice still works with ’em and for ’em.... For Beauty is—_must be_—as immortal as goodness.... Though we don’t see how, or understand. “It’s the same with people.... With people’s personalities I mean. Their ‘importance,’ since you like the word so well. If they have any importance—_beauty of spirit_, _Soundness_, are my terms for it—it bursts a way for itself, like buds in the spring. Environment and accident haven’t got power over it. Not a bit. It can’t be kept in, held back, any more than birth itself can be held back, once it gets going.... And Ariel’s got that thing in her personality,—that _soundness_, _beauty_, _importance_. Beauty’s organic in her character....”