Hugh spoke soothingly, “It’s been in the store-room until recently. Ariel rescued it for us out of the attic. I’d put it there. So Joan hasn’t seen it—not hung in my grandmother’s room.”
He was giving Joan her way out, if she cared to take it. She could say now truly enough that she had never seen “Noon” hung, and in a good light.
But Joan did not take advantage of the way out Hugh had so carefully prepared for her vanity. And Schwankovsky grew stormier. “In the attic! You put this picture in the attic? _You_ did? And you boast of it? Then, when Ariel finds it there, you very, very kindly let her hang it up in Grannie’s room? Wonderful! This is too wonderful! More and more wonderful, and still more so!”
Joan kept a silence which masked itself as amusement. As for Hugh, he nodded, but did not pretend to be entertained by the vaudeville sketch in bad manners which was being imposed upon them.
Let Schwankovsky think him the fool he pretended. It didn’t matter to him in the slightest. For Hugh had never, at any period in his life, and least of all at this minute, aspired to be considered “a man with taste” in any sense that Schwankovsky would credit. If he had married Joan she, like so many other American wives, would have had the responsibility for all that sort of thing. And for the past five years Hugh had come more and more to consider himself a business man with very little that was æsthetic in his make-up. He acknowledged to himself now that if to-day he should see “Noon” for the first time, there was a large likelihood that he would not even make a stab at coming to any opinion for himself as to whether it was good or bad. Certainly he would not be pierced to his soul by the white light—which, then, years ago, when he was young, had seemed to him to come from some esoteric birth of beauty behind the light itself. So he neither blamed Schwankovsky for his choking sputterings nor felt insulted. He had the grace to realize that five years ago he would even have been in sympathy with him.
But although he did not really mind Schwankovsky’s rage at himself, some unhappiness was clawing at his inner consciousness, some psychic pain, unlocated. Was it Joan’s cool, smiling silence? Joan could and should be defending him against this hot-tempered friend of hers, he realized. If she began to, he would hush her up, of course; but she was not even starting.... But perhaps it wasn’t Joan. He didn’t think it _was_. Was it Ariel? That Ariel should be looking at him as she was now! Her hand lay on Schwankovsky’s mammoth arm, the fingers clutched and lost in his great fingers. That was a little sickening to Hugh. But it was her face, its expression, which actually stabbed. Had Schwankovsky succeeded in making Ariel believe what was, indeed, the truth—that Hugh had failed her father?