“No. I haven’t talent—of any sort. That is the trouble. (One instinctively told this lady the trouble, because, no matter what that casual, low voice of hers actually said, the violet eyes said, ‘Here is sympathetic understanding of the most poignant, rarest kind. Snatch it. It has winged your way. Snatch it on the wing.’) But, if one didn’t have to have a high-school education first, I’d like to get hospital training as a nurse. That is what I’d like to do, of the things by which one earns money.” “And of the things by which one does not—earn money?” Well! Ariel was plunging now through ether on a very swift flight, beside Grandam’s flight. Careless flight. So she answered with truth as winged-casual as Grandam’s own, “A mother. I’d like to have children. (But she saw them as the age of Nicky and Persis, dancing with her out of winter into spring.) Or be a lover. Or be a sailor.” “If you have genius for any one of those three occupations you have something that will keep you alive all your life. Children. Passion. Adventure. And you have fairy-tale eyes. Has any one ever told you that?” The flight was very swift, very sure. At its height it must burst into a fountain of song. “Father has. And he didn’t mind their being narrow and green. Oh, Grandam! Why didn’t you come down sooner?” So she might have cried, “Oh, I have been lonely! And you have taken that away, absolutely.” No one had heard what they had been saying or noticed anything except that Grandam had not listened to that amusing anecdote of Enderly’s so bedecked with famous names. And they were preparing to rise now. Luncheon was over. “The sun’s out for the first time in days,” Mrs. Weyman exclaimed. “Wouldn’t you like Glenn to take you out in Hugh’s car for a while, Grandam? Anne will run up and bring down your things. Later we’re all going to a tea-dance over at Holly. Joan’s being very nice to us! But now I know Glenn would be glad—” The sun was shining,—windy, gold afternoon sunlight. They all went out under the portico together to watch Grandam and Glenn off, in Hugh’s roadster. Anne’s arm was linked carelessly in Ariel’s. As they turned back into the hall Enderly cried—now that Grandam was out of hearing, he was the brash young novelist again—“But she’s magnificent, that woman. Sarah Bernhardt couldn’t have managed it any better! (He meant old age, of course.) Some one should have prepared me for her beauty, though. Once she must have been almost too beautiful.” “Her hair’s always been like that, pure silver ever since I remember,” Anne told him. And Mrs. Weyman enlarged upon it. “Ever since Anne’s grandfather died, a few days after Anne’s father was born, it’s been gray. Grandam was young then, hardly twenty. It happened as it happens in romances but never supposedly in real life. Her hair went white in a night.”