The long windows leading onto the terraced rose-garden were open throughout dinner. Candlelight, moonlight, rose scents and the glowing colors of the other women’s evening frocks were all mingled for Ariel in a web of sensuous pleasure which mixed with a mind almost as anguished as her friend Anne’s.
Schwankovsky occupied the head of the table, where he played host spectacularly, with a noisy zeal. Ariel, in whose honor the party had been planned, was given the place of honor at his right. Mrs. Weyman was opposite Ariel at his other side.
Glenn on Ariel’s right remembered poignantly the first meal she had had with them, how she had been as silent as now, but with a different silence. Then she had bent with the flow of talk as forget-me-nots bent in a grassy stream, flowing with it, not obstructing it. But to-night she was withdrawn, on purpose. And she looked often at Anne, Glenn noticed, with a tender, watchful regard. Why, Glenn could not imagine, for Anne by this time was entering into everything exuberantly, as she had promised him and herself she would. Charlie Frye, quite over his earlier irritation with her, was merry as a grig. Anne was flirting with him, a little clumsily, perhaps, but effectively, if one judged from the man’s reactions. What Glenn did not notice, but Ariel did, was that Anne, on the evening when Joan Nevin had left off her rouge, had painted her own face most brilliantly.
The talk flowed on. Chatter about summer plans, their own and other people’s. Gossip about Doctor Steiner who had just been given a degree by conservative Harvard. Would he go to make his home in Vienna next year, as he was threatening, or stay to enrich America with his knowledge and genius? Some desultory discussions, too, of music, plays, books and painting.
Suddenly, in a way that he intended to be confidential and intimate but could not make so because of his size and the timbre of his voice which even when consciously lowered compelled the attention of the whole table, Schwankovsky leaned to Ariel and took her wrist in his fingers. “My own darling child, you are _triste_. At this, your own party! But, believe me, some day very soon, it will be forgotten.... You’ll be rid of grief.... Your old friend knows.... And grief so pure as yours is pure, unstained by remorse, leaves no sediment of heaviness when time has once flowed over it and past. It is a good fortune to have youth and grief together. Some day you will think so.... This is a very beautiful aquamarine, Ariel!”