Hugh found Glenn beside him when he went to get his car. And suddenly, as they crossed the wide sweep of gravel toward the parked roadster, Hugh came to earth again, for a minute. His heart smote him. His love for Ariel had been gradually, all the spring, making him more sensitive to the world about him and other people. And now he sensed possible suffering. He turned on Glenn and gripped his shoulders in the summer dark. “Glenn, old fellow! Are you in love with Ariel?” he asked. There was only the hint of a hesitation before Glenn said carefully, as if he wanted Hugh to hear every word and remember it forever, “Does one fall in love with a poem? A star? Dawn? Ariel to me is all imagination. She’s in my soul, somehow. But not as woman.... I saw her look at you, Hugh.... At the end of the dance, you know. So I know that you two—that you two—Well! That’s only the shadow of Ariel you’ve got. An accident. Her earth side. The impersonal and beautiful is left for me. I’m not jealous. I’m not—suffering....” “God bless you! Yes. It’s the woman I want, and that I’ve got. The wife. The mother....” They went on to the car. Joan was waiting on the lowest stair under the portico, when they drove it around to the door, and Ariel had not yet broken away from Michael Schwankovsky’s farewells on the top step. The big voice was booming, “And next winter we’ll make a dancer of you! Divine! Better than Isadora ever was!” Ariel laughed. “No, Michael. No, no. I shall never be a dancer. I may dance for you, if you will play again. Because you are not grown up and don’t embarrass me. I don’t mind you any more than I mind Persis and Nicky. You’ll dance with me. But you can’t ever make me into a dancer. Dear Michael!” “We shall see about that. We shall see. When I come back I shall take care of you. I shall teach you to be ambitious. For the sake of art, I must do that, my child. Art cannot let you off, let you go. Not with such genius! I am no artist myself, you see, but I am militant for it wherever there is cause. It is religion with me. So, as I discover your father’s pictures, so I discover you. Not?” Joan drew Hugh into the shadow of a pillar. “Michael’s raving again,” she whispered intimately, her breath at Hugh’s cheek, her perfumed scarf falling against the back of his hand, soft, mothlike. “It’s fatherly raving. _We needn’t worry!_” With the intimately whispered “We needn’t worry,” Joan was trying desperately to identify her interest in Ariel with Hugh’s interest. She was determined to marry Hugh now, not merely resigned to it. And her cue, she thought, was partnership in his responsibility for Ariel. She would pretend genuine concern for the girl, even fondness, if she must. She was ready to do, to be anything—if only in return the scattered seeds of her vanity and pride could be blown back again into their brilliant flower pattern.