Without objections or even hesitation, Ariel used that live, lovely belonging of Grandam’s to dust the cobwebs and the dirt from the face of “Noon.” But she knew perfectly what it was she was doing. And Grandam knew that she knew. For the scarf was a rare and unreplaceable thing. Ariel’s tongue and lips were dry as the dust on the picture over which she worked and her heart beat heavily, like the waves on her home beach after a storm.
As she lifted the canvas up to position on the fireplace mantel and then brought candles from the piano to set either side of it, Grandam, with her face conscientiously turned away, was saying, “You mustn’t be disappointed, Ariel, if I don’t find ‘Noon’ so wonderful as Hugh and you and your father think it. I’m no judge of painting. Know next to nothing about it. It will be merely a matter of personal taste with me, and of no account whatever as criticism. But then no individual’s word can make a final judgment. Not Joan’s certainly. Not even Michael Schwankovsky’s. Not yours or mine, or your father’s. Least of all your father’s, Ariel. No one knows anything about his own creative work—whether it’s good or bad—any more than the soul knows its own state.”
But Ariel scarcely heard her or cared to hear her. The picture was placed. She moved back into the middle of the room, and looked. _And looked._
Home.... She had come home! Grandam’s room was a dove-gray wave on which she had been tossed up onto her and her father’s own beach, and she stood now in the hollow where her father’s easel had stood the morning that Hugh interrupted the painting of the masterpiece.... She had come home. _And her Father was not far off._ Her heart had stopped thudding. The waves on the beach were stilled in the noon heat. Tears overflowed onto her cold cheeks with grateful warmth. She tasted salt on her lips,—and thought it sea spray.
But now that she was blind, Grandam was seeing. Grandam, looking through white sunlight, saw an edge of curling wave, a white beach, rocks where the sunlight broke into purple pieces, and in the air just above the rocks, Ariel dancing. It was the Ariel of five years ago, and still it was the same Ariel, because the artist’s genius had caught her as she would be always, through eternity. It was her essence he had caught there, as surely as her grace. And he had got the beach in the same way,—the essence of it.