Ariel was his, in a manner, after all. Her father had given her to him in a way that made his concern imperative. And this was all simply crazy. Schwankovsky was just an insufferable buffoon. And Anne and Glenn were idiots— But Ariel was standing, straight and unabashed in her violet-blue, wood-smoke dress that was made from Grandam’s scarf, the folds of the skirt falling about her bare legs, her high-arched, slim feet very white against the gray velvet rug that covered the floor in there. Hugh halted inside the window. Schwankovsky was saying with almost an hypnotic look and voice, “Forget all about us, my Ariel. Even the music. Remember your beach, and the smooth floor of sand down between the rocks. Remember the loggia and the path through the cedars. Remember the violets and the roses.” He was playing “The Water Lily” as he talked, but stopped and changed abruptly into something that might be César Franck’s, but nothing of his that Hugh knew. Hugh had not realized before that Schwankovsky could play,—and play like this! The big man was looking beyond Ariel, as if he himself saw the clouds, the beach, felt the rhythms of earth, sky and water, that were pouring through his music. Hugh could not go forward. He dared not break into the Forces of Beauty which even he, Philistine that he was, could feel gathering in that room. Ariel started walking away from the piano, slowly. She was coming directly toward Hugh, but it was obvious that she did not see him, or the others there, against the wall of the room. She was walking forward into the world which Schwankovsky had given her back suddenly, when she was unhappiest and needed it most. And Mrs. Weyman and Charlie Frye, Anne, Glenn, Hugh, and even Joan—out on the dark terrace—were being drawn with the slow pacing of those bare feet over the gray rug into a simple state of harmony with—the cosmic rhythms? Ariel drew them with her, Ariel and Schwankovsky’s music together,—drew them forward, forward, out—out—out beyond the confines of the room, even farther than the boundaries of their individual desires and passions, into a state of identification with the intentions of the universe. They were, all of them, pressing forward along with Ariel’s poised, spiritualized body, her bare, sure feet, and the music,—straight into the heart of Beauty.... When she began to dance, she did not dance _to_ the music. She danced _in_ it. In the music, moving in it as if she were the fire at the heart of its purity, she danced to Life. First it was elemental life, the rhythms of earth, sky, water. Her face stayed immobile. She was as impersonal as the music. Only her body spoke. Much of the time her head was dropped, so that the immobile features were shadowed in her hair, as in the pictures where her father had painted her dancing. This was at the beginning of the dance....