Hugh’s whole face was burning, and his words came out staccato, fierce with conviction. Joan, almost miraculously, she felt, had the insight to realize that at least part of this amazing passion of conviction was impersonal. She saw that Hugh was really talking about such things as imagination, love, personality, abstractly,—out of deep-seated convictions which had grown in him with his own growth, and which she had never suspected in him. Why, he was a man with a religion, and she had never guessed! But she preferred to pretend to think him moved by personal emotions merely, and asked bitingly, “Then what is your plan for Ariel when your grandmother dies? Have you changed your mind about her so utterly as it appears, and you’ll let her be a second Isadora? Express this wonderful personality, this beauty of spirit of hers, in some world-shaking way?” Hugh dropped back to natural. He was ashamed of so having betrayed his soul’s convictions to Joan’s skepticisms. “I shall have nothing to say about it; why should I? But of course that wasn’t what I meant at all, or anything like it. Ariel’s far too ordinary—” Joan’s mind reeled. “Oh, but surely not. After all you’ve said! Ordinary?” “Well, ‘ordinary’s’ the wrong word, of course. But you know very well what I mean, Joan. She’s not artistic. She has nothing in her of the genius, or the artist. Or rather, her genius is her personality. I thought I said it all before. She’s of the spirit.... _Love_—_Life_.... It would be rotten to turn it into dancing. All that _life_.” “‘Life’ doesn’t seem at all descriptive of that child to me, Hugh. She’s about the quietest—” “I’m not talking about liveliness. Well, look at the sun, here on the back of my hand. Still, isn’t it? Quiet? But it’s life! Ariel’s quiet is like that.” Joan was silent, quiet herself for a minute. But not the kind of quiet Hugh had just explained to her. She asked, finally, “Are you sorry, then, that her father has advertised Ariel, as he has, in his pictures? Do you think it is cheapening? And would you think that being a famous dancer would cheapen her? Is that what you’re afraid of?” He hesitated. “I’m afraid I used to feel that way,” he acknowledged. “The first time it was suggested that Ariel might get all this publicity she has been getting, I did think it a shame. I wanted to protect her from it. But I’ve outgrown that angle of it. I know now that that’s a false, inherited attitude. Not sound. You yourself, Joan, let Enderly and those other literary fellows vote you the most beautiful mother in the East for the Ideal Perfume Company, Inc., the other day, and your picture’s even in the subway entrances now, and in the advertising sections of every magazine, that’s worth the name, I’ve picked up this month. I’ve had to get over the prejudice, you see. And I’ve succeeded, I think. No, it isn’t that at all now that convinces me that Ariel shouldn’t go in for dancing. I—”