She had forgotten that Grandam’s first words to her at luncheon had been “They tell me that your father was a painter.” “Noon” would have made that speech impossible, if Grandam had the picture. But their flight together into understanding had followed that opening too swiftly for Ariel to remember it now.
How did one get to the attic? Were there stairs? She had heard mention of an elevator. But she wouldn’t know how to run an elevator. There must be stairs as well. She hurried away to look.
Ariel found the attic stairs in the wing opposite hers at the other end of the house. At the top she came out into a long hall. It was almost dark up here, the only light coming through two low little dormer windows at the farthest end. Ariel had never in real life been in an attic, but she had been in plenty of them in books, and this long, dim hall with narrow doors in its walls somehow did not seem like her imagined attics.
Behind which of the several doors would she find Grandam’s living room? And above all, through which door would she come to “Noon”? No wonder the dim hall was as fascinating as a fairy-tale’s beginning.
She tried first the door on her right, knocking tentatively. When there was no answer she opened the door and looked in. Transparent cubes of gold, which were sunlight aureoling dust, slanted between her and the low chain of windows out at the base of a far-away sloping roof. This was the real attic, all that Grandam had left of it, after making her own apartment. It covered more than half the big house, and trunks, discarded furniture and files of old magazines were stored here, much as in all attics. There was the smell of dust and of leather, a glimmer of cobweb curtains. Spaces. Shadows.
This was, no doubt of it, an attic. And had Ariel expected the lovely Grandam to live here, in such an environment? To tell the truth, deep in her heart, though not with her mind, she had. For Grandam had become to her imagination, even before seeing her this noon at luncheon, and more vividly since then, a fairy-like, spiritual entity, twin sister to that other fairy or spirit (who knows which?) the great-great-great-great-grandmother who was so loved by the princess in George MacDonald’s true and beautiful allegory, “The Princess and the Goblins.” So, with her heart, but perhaps not her eyes, Ariel sought for her here, dreaming her visible, if one only had eyes of the seeing kind, in a cloud of invisibility.