“Hugh’s in no position to judge,” Hortense responded impatiently. “It’s Joan’s opinion I trust. She’s just home from six weeks at St. George’s, and among all her artist friends staying there she never even heard the name of Gregory Clare once. That in itself is enough, isn’t it? Joan says that impossible would-be artists and writers and people like that often do think themselves geniuses, no matter what the world tells them to the contrary; but it’s seldom their families are tainted with the same megalomania. And this Ariel’s not just tainted. She’s poisoned. Why, she’s not _sane_ on the subject.” “Is all of that Joan? She hasn’t spared Hugh’s friend or the friend’s daughter, has she!” Mrs. Weyman regained her poise. “Oh, of course you don’t like Joan. I keep forgetting that. You even hope she won’t marry Hugh. After all these years of his devotion, and their truly wonderful friendship! But even feeling as you do, it isn’t like you to be so prejudiced. Joan does know about painting and painters. She’d see this Ariel Clare business and the problems involved more clearly than anybody else we happen to know. Besides, she’s ready to help Hugh with it, if only he’ll be a little tactful. I can see that. She has interested herself in working girls and their problems for years. She would, with a little encouragement from us, get Ariel into a good working girls’ home or club, I know, and find a way for her to earn money at the same time that she was learning a trade. But there has to be all this time wasted waiting for the exhibition, and Hugh’s absurd heroics about Gregory Clare’s having been his great friend, and having entrusted Ariel to him. It’s too tiresome. And not exactly fair to the family—this family—do you think?” “It’s Joan who constitutes a problem, to my mind. My dear Hortense, really, why do you want Hugh to marry a stupid woman like that?” Mrs. Weyman did not wince. She even replied in a humoring voice, because her mother-in-law, wonderful as she was in some ways, was peculiar enough in others, every one knew. “Joan stupid!” she laughed. “She’s absolutely brilliant!” “Brilliant, yes, and stupid, yes. But why do you want Hugh to marry a brilliant-stupid woman, then, like Mrs. Nevin? Hugh’s not brilliant, and neither is he stupid. So both ways he’d be embarrassed with her. He’s much too simple and ordinary for Joan. He’d be miserable.”