“You’re rather crossing bridges, aren’t you?” she asked, but not without sympathy. “The exhibition has yet to prove itself a failure, no matter what Joan has said. How can she be so sure? She hasn’t anything to do with it, has she? It’s some one else entirely. One of the young Frye’s. I knew his father and his uncle, by the way.” “Did you? But Joan says that he, this boy, doesn’t amount to anything. That Ariel can’t count on him. He’s a lightweight.” “Oh? Well, Joan herself is in a position to do something, isn’t she? Why doesn’t _she_ take the exhibition in hand? Make it a success? Or is she diffident about putting her influence to the actual test?” The last few words were spoken not without malice, but Mrs. Weyman passed that over. “Joan wouldn’t touch it, of course. The only work of this man Clare’s she ever saw was a picture Hugh brought home, years ago. It wasn’t any good. Freakish as well as amateurish, if I remember what she said then. She laughed at it, anyway, and Hugh gave up being a collector on the spot and hid the thing away in the attic. Every spring cleaning since, I’ve been in two minds whether to send it off to the dump or give it to some rummage sale or other. I haven’t liked to do either without speaking to Hugh, and it happens he’s never around at the time. So there it stands against the chimney,—an æsthetic treat to the spiders, no doubt. And that’s that for Ariel’s father as an artist, I’m afraid.” Grandam wasn’t deeply impressed. “Perhaps it’s one of his poorer things,” she suggested. “Or he may have improved during the years. Or Joan might have been wrong. So far, I don’t see that it’s at all final.” “Oh, my dear! I do wish you had been down last night! Ariel solemnly informed us that the hour her father died he was still proclaiming Hugh’s sample of her father’s work his masterpiece. The other paintings are wonderful, of course, but not quite so wonderful. Even so, they are to bring in several hundreds of dollars a canvas, and Ariel confidently expects to have a fortune from them. It isn’t the child’s fault, of course. It’s the father’s. He must have been an extraordinarily conceited and stupid person.” Grandam at this outburst of strong feeling withdrew her gaze—reluctantly, it seemed—from the sun-spangled, snowy world beyond her windows, and gave her more concentrated attention to her daughter-in-law. “How does Hugh himself feel about the situation?” she asked.