“Oh! I misunderstood you. I thought you needed sympathy!” She turned to Charlie Frye and asked, shutting the rest of the table into the abysses of outer darkness by the intimate fall of her voice, “Did you know this Doctor Hazzard when you were in Bermuda?”
Schwankovsky retained Ariel’s hand and stared like a seer into the cold green clarity of the semi-precious stone. Glenn felt shuddery and resentful. Why ever did Ariel let the great creature go on petting her in that absurd way? He might be the great Michael Schwankovsky, famous for his wealth, his art collections and his books, but Glenn refused to be hypnotized by such considerations into overlooking his boorishness. It was hideous of him to have spoken to Ariel about her grief like that—before everybody! Both insane and inane. He was an old sentimentalist too. And all this pawing—!
But Ariel seemed to like it. And, in fact, she did. Michael Schwankovsky’s warm, strong, great hand holding her wrist with such gentle firmness was regulating those leaden heartbeats back to normality. Kindness and _soundness_ were transmitted through those strong, firm fingers to her consciousness. From her very first meeting with Michael Schwankovsky she had felt at home with him. And by now, quite simply, she had come to love him very much. Glenn could understand nothing of this. He sat between Ariel and his brother, trying not to care that Schwankovsky was keeping Ariel physically prisoner by that wrist, trying not to hear what seemed to him the mawkish tenderness in the booming voice that shattered, to his senses, against Ariel’s delicate reserves so unforgivably.
And Hugh was thinking, “This is going to be an awful evening!” It stretched away before him, a desert of aridity, where Ariel would be kept close at Schwankovsky’s side, his mother and Joan would discuss psychoanalysis and the comparative merits of its different schools endlessly, and Anne, Glenn and this Frye fellow would keep the radio going over all. If it fell out that way, he could not go on with it. His nerves were taut.
And then those taut nerves hummed like telephone wires in a storm as he caught the look of tortured disgust on Glenn’s features as the boy’s eyes turned from Ariel’s prisoned wrist. “What right has Glenn to care like that!” Hugh cried to himself. “He’s too young to know really how to love her!”