“Life is strange, isn’t it!” Anne observed, with as fresh a wonder as though the idea itself were fresh. “Do you know, I hardly was aware of _you_ at all during vacation except toward the last, when I hated you so. Before that I only thought of you in your relation with Hugh. I thought it a pity you weren’t colorful enough to make some sort of a stab at cutting Joan out with him. Not colorful! Stupid, even! Imagine! And now I know that you’re the best thing in the Weyman family, except, possibly, Grandam. But you and Grandam might be sisters. No, not family—race! You are beings of the same race. That’s it. The angel race.”
“Oh, hush! How idiotic!” Ariel wasn’t flattered. She was humiliated.
“As much? But not like me, I know. You’ve never been lost. You haven’t been what Prescott said I was—eaten into by love as though love was a cancer and a destruction. He said that the people who let it take them like that were disgusting slaves, and not worth anybody’s loving. He was right. My love was cancerous, not beautiful. You know, yourself. You saw it without understanding it and you say it horrified you. Then no wonder Prescott was put off by it. But it’s not like that with you. I can sense things as well as you can, you see! You’ve stayed yourself, kept the integrity of your personality. And your pride. I know it. You’re pure, clear like a diamond. And by ‘pure’ I mean your will is untouched. Unsmirched. Diamond-hard and diamond-clean. Aren’t I right?”
Ariel responded nothing. And after a while Anne went on, urging her confidence: “Do you suppose Joan and Prescott have something alike in them? They’re both so finished, complete in themselves! That’s the sort of person real people love, isn’t it! How can you expect to be loved if you’re not living your own life but all the time trying to break through into another person’s life instead? That’s what I’ve been trying to do with Prescott. He said so. If I’d any authentic life of my own, then he mightn’t have got scared at my loving him too much. I wouldn’t have such terrifying potentialities for being a limpet.... And isn’t that the trouble between Joan and Hugh! I bet it is! She’s complete, finished without him. Authentic! And Hugh—Poor dear! He’s always trying to break through into that authentic, completed circle. If he’d only make a circle of his own and then loop it on to hers, there might be a chance for a happy relation between them. But what he’s concentrating on is not the harmony in his own psyche, but to storm the harmony in hers. He isn’t fit for love—and I’m not going to pity Hugh now any more than I pity myself, please God. Neither of us is fit to be loved, or we would be.”