Contrary to Anne’s and Glenn’s expectations, though, Joan pretended neither indifference nor ignorance concerning Prescott that night. Her first words to Glenn were words of sympathy, and she took pains to let him guess that her hostess manners this night were covering a grieved and very troubled, even a contrite, heart. Glenn actually found himself being sorry for her. After all, she had never encouraged Prescott to think that he counted especially with her. Remembering this, and Prescott’s open hopelessness as he stated it, Glenn was boy enough and susceptible enough to be softened by Joan’s beauty and the pathos in her eyes, as she stood holding his hand that brief minute of their whispered interchange of troubled words in her wide hall at Holly. “It isn’t your fault,” he heard himself muttering sincerely. “You couldn’t believe he meant what he said, any more than I could. If you only knew, Joan, you’re not so much to blame as I am.” Hugh was near enough to hear. And Joan turned to him, drawing him into it. She said with something which had the similitude of harsh grief, “Youth itself is to be blamed for this terrible thing. Do you remember, Hugh, weeks, months ago, my telling you that young men in love were frightening? The middle-aged were safe? They do not kill themselves for romance. It is your generation, Glenn. Yours—and Anne’s.” Anne had caught this, and for a minute she thought that Joan had raised her voice for that very purpose. Had Prescott, then, told Joan that Anne too had wanted a way out of life, and almost found it, because of youth and love? But Ariel alone knew that. And Anne’s sordid secret was as safe with Ariel as it would be with the Wild Acres woods, or with the sky, had she made her confidences to either. Anne was certain. She turned away from Joan’s group, hard, austere. Glenn might be won to Joan by her beauty and charm, in spite of her terrible part in the tragedy of his friend. Hugh might marry Joan. But Anne knew at that moment that she herself would never again, after this night, be able to bear the sight or the sound of her. “She’s horrible,” she thought. “A glutton of love. A walking sore of vanity. It isn’t jealousy that makes me see her this way. Even to be loved by Prescott I would not be anything like Joan Nevin. I’d rather Prescott never gave me a thought again through eternity than have any touch of that stinking vanity, scarring my voice and face as it scars Joan’s to-night. I’m the only one who _sees_. She’s horrid, rotten.” And she went over to stand with Michael Schwankovsky and Charlie Frye and Ariel before the painting of Gregory Clare’s which Joan had bought for herself and which now hung between the long windows in the drawing-room, where the party was to wait for the announcement of dinner.