In the heat of the following afternoon, while Effie May dozed unaware beneath an electric fan, with a box of chocolates convenient to her drowsy hand, Joan slipped out of the house very quietly and went down town. She had an odd feeling of exhilaration, as if she had already escaped—from what, it would have been difficult to say.
More than one glance of approval followed her slim figure as it flitted through the sweltering streets, the dark and grimy corridors of the office building which Richard Darcy had chosen to honor with his patronage. This, thought patient men as she passed, was as a girl should look on a July afternoon, all in cool white from her silver-buckled pumps to the wide hat with a big lace butterfly perched airily upon it. Surely it was fitting, they thought, that men should slave at their desks through the endless summer days in order that visions such as this might flit about the world in dainty idleness; and forthwith applied gallant noses once more to the grindstone. In the South the idea of economic independence for women will never be popular.
Joan, under these friendly glances, was conscious of blossoming into real prettinees. It was not the first time she had got this pleasant little sensation out of so simple a matter as going down town. She wondered whether in any other city of the world it was possible for a girl to walk the streets alone, receiving from every man who passed—be he gentleman, clerk, coal-heaver, or small, knowing news-boy—glances of commendation which were neither impertinent, nor bold, nor even personal, but simply, as it were expert; an appraisal which flattered without offense. It was as if, at the sight of a pretty woman, the town as one man lifted its glass to the toast:
"The Ladies, God bless 'em!"
It was this spirit, she thought, which had perhaps given Kentucky its reputation for feminine pulchritude. To be a beauty is not difficult where every one encourages the idea, where feminine charm is regarded as in itself an end and a purpose, to be fortified by every means at the command of art or nature.... Joan fluttered along with the best, modestly unconscious of the eyes that paid her homage, but aware nevertheless of her occasional reflection in plate-glass windows; and it should be recorded that before she went to her father's office she made the purchase of a stick of pink lip-pomade and a cake of solid face-powder, with a little puff and mirror included. Why these articles should have given her increased courage for an interview with her parent, is difficult to state; but the fact remains that they did.
She came presently to a doorway upon which was printed in large gold lettering: RICHARD DARCY. LOANS AND INVESTMENTS. Joan was secretly impressed. Perhaps the Office was not the mere figure of speech she had sometimes fancied it.
She knocked. No answer came. Listening, she heard inside the familiar whirr of an electric fan mingling with a sound she could not for the moment place—a buzzing as of many flies, but rising and falling at more rhythmic intervals.
She turned the knob. Within, drawn by an open window through which might be glimpsed the broad Ohio rolling drowsily, stood a decrepit Morris chair which Joan recognized as an old friend; wherein lay sprawled at comfortable length the Major. At his elbow stood a bottle and a glass, both empty. His handsome nose, forgetting for the moment all acquaintance with the grindstone, was tilted at the angle of least resistance, and from it issued the rhythmic buzzing that had puzzled his child.
"Daddy!" she said reluctantly. Somehow the Major asleep, with a plump leg draped over the arm of his chair and his mouth slightly open, made up in disarming appeal what he lost in impressiveness. He was like a gray-haired little boy, tired out with playing.
But, "Father!" said Joan more loudly. "Wake up, please. I've come to see you on business."
He opened his eyes with a jerk. "Eh? What's that, what's that, what's that? Tut, tut! Must have dozed off. What's that?" The eyes tried to close again, but he was firm with them, and presently recognized his daughter. "That you, Dollykins? Well, well, well! Come down to pay Dad a visit, eh? That's nice, that's nice!"
Suddenly he got to his feet and brought her a chair, reaching at the same time for his coat. Richard Darcy could not possibly have remained in a lady's presence coatless, no matter what the temperature. Her attention was caught by the garment into which he struggled, muttering apologies the while.
"Why, Dad," she cried, "whatare you putting on?"
It was not the immaculate gray flannel in which he had started that morning for the marts of commerce, but a thread-bare, shapeless, densely spotted garment which Joan recognized with a pang.
"Your old second-best!" she exclaimed.
Her father grinned a little sheepishly. "Why—why yes, I keep it here as an office coat, to save the others, you see. I'm sort of used to it," he added explanatorily. "It seems to fit into my curves. The new ones don't. One is supposed to fit into theirs!"
Joan patted the sleeve of the second-best affectionately. Her eyes were moist. She felt nearer to her father than she had for weeks. He had kept the old chair out of their home equipment; he had kept the old coat. Was he after all not so obliviously content as he seemed in his fine new surroundings? Did he remember, too, and was he homesick as herself for the shabby days when he and she and her mother had made a little world of their own, happy in spite of everything?
She said with a smile, "You'd better not let Effie May catch you wearing such a garment!"
"Heaven forbid!" he exclaimed. "I may confess that it was with some difficulty I rescued this coat from the ashman, to whom your mother had given it."
But his use of the phrase, "your mother," hardened Joan out of her momentary tenderness. Invariably he spoke of Effie May to her as "your mother," and of her real mother only as "Mary." The girl was too young to realize that this may have been because the name meant things to him which the phrase never would. Mary was something more to Richard Darcy than Joan's mother....
"I have come to talk to you," said Joan, "about business, Father."
"Business?" The Major's eyebrows lifted. Business meant money, and the ladies of his family never cared to talk about money! remarked those eyebrows. Though, to be sure, they sometimes found themselves under the necessity of asking for it—His hand went instinctively to his pocket.
"I suppose you are out of pin-money?" he interpreted. "Stupid of me not to have realized it, Dollykin, though I sent you rather a good deal to the convent, you remember?" He brought his hand out, filled with silver. "There! Spend it 'not wisely but too well'—not that one need give any girl advice on that subject! Dear, dear, how women can make the money fly!" humorously sighed the Major (whose debts had probably been paid by women ever since he had been old enough to make them).
"I should like a chance," said Joan soberly, "to make the money fly, Father. My money, you know."
He stared at her, really bewildered.
She refreshed his memory, flushing. "The money Mother left, with you as guardian—that I was to have whenever I asked—"
"Not that she ever expected such a contingency to arrive!" commented the Major with a sudden accession of stiffness. "You are not of age yet, my child."
"Was there any provision in her will about my being of age?"
"No," he admitted. "Owing to what was of course purely a technical error, I think there was not. My poor Mary was quite unaccustomed to the terminology of wills, naturally, and as she and a servant drew it up between them, you may imagine—" he shrugged indulgently.
Joan moistened her lips. She was finding the interview even more difficult than she had imagined. Her father's manner managed to put her somehow in the wrong. But she held to her purpose.
"I do not think it was an error, Father. Mother wasn't the sort who says things she doesn't mean. I believe she foresaw that—that something might occur which would make me wish to be independent, even if I was not of age. She could trust my judgment a little. She knew that I'd never dream of asking for her property unless I had a good reason—I have a good reason now, Father—I want to be independent." Her voice trailed off miserably. What she really wanted was to put her arms about his neck and have a good cry.
Unconsciously the Major discouraged the impulse. "What is this nonsense about independence?" he demanded. "My dear Joan, you sound like a New Woman!" On his lips the phrase was a scathing denunciation.
Joan explained faintly that she wanted to go away somewhere, to live....
The Major was honestly aghast. "Leave your father's roof?" he cried incredulously. "My child! What is this folly? Never with Richard Darcy's consent shall a daughter of his leave her father's roof except for the roof of her lawful husband." (In moments of emotion, the Major was always liable to these attacks of circumlocution.)
Joan pointed out to him, still faintly but determinedly, that it was not herfather'sroof she wished to leave....
Even under his armor of complacency this shot told. He winced. "Have you been made to feel that? Has my wife ever caused you to believe that you were an unwelcome member of our household?" he demanded sharply, in a voice that boded ill for the present Mrs. Darcy if such were the case.
"No, Father! I shall never give her the chance to make me feel unwelcome. That is why I want my mother's money."
The Major toyed with a pen, and seemed to be thinking. "I am not at all sure," he said presently, "that the will Mary left was legal, my dear; whether it would stand in the courts—"
"What does that matter?" interrupted Joan, "when you and I know what Mother meant?" Something impelled her to add, "And when Ellen Neal knows, too?"
The Major looked quickly at her, and looked away. "Perhaps you are not aware that regardless of any will whatsoever the law entitles me to one-third of my wife's estate?"
Joan flushed with an embarrassment that was more for him than for herself. "You're welcome to it, Daddy; you're perfectly welcome to it, of course! It isn't that I want to take anything away fromyou. It's—oh, won't youpleaseunderstand, and not be hurt with me?" she implored. "I only want to know how much there is, how much money I can count on getting every month to live on. Just income, you know. I wouldn't think of touching the—principal, don't you call it?"
Richard Darcy rose abruptly and went to the window. It was a fine view that spread before him—a soothing, mellifluous landscape of golden river and hazy blue Indiana hills. Indiana, as he sometimes remarked, was delightful as a background though undesirable as a dwelling-place. He said so now. He had taken this office entirely for its view, he informed his daughter. The Major patronized Nature extensively, and believed that all gentlemen should do so; especially Kentucky gentlemen, to whom Nature has been so particularly lavish.
Meanwhile Joan waited. He recalled that her mother used to have the same habit of silent waiting. Some minds seem incapable of pleasant digression.
He sighed, and resumed the subject under discussion. His manner had changed somewhat, however. He spoke in the persuasive, frank, "he's-a-good-fellow-and-'twill-all-be-well" tones which he reserved for directors' boards, stockholders' meetings, and like courts of last resort, when things unpleasant had to be told and he was the one to tell them. It should be said in all justice that he rarely side-stepped these meetings, as he might have done, and allowed the unpleasantnesses to disclose themselves through others. Nobody could say that Richard Darcy was a coward.
"Well, about this little business affair of ours, Dollykins—Of course the property was never large, though properly invested it might have brought us in a decent income instead of the trifle Mary was content with. The merest pittance I assure you, the merest pittance!"
Joan nodded. She had heard before about the mereness of the pittance.
"Often during my wife's lifetime I took occasion to point this out to her. The question of securities and investments being one to which I have devoted the greater part of my business career, I think I may say without undue vanity that I am qualified to give advice on such matters! But Mary had a certain sentimental reluctance about changing investments which her father had made for her, and sentiment is a thing which I am always able to respect."
("Good for mother!" said Joan to herself.)
"However, after her death—" he paused to pay his Mary the tribute of a sincere though dramatic sigh—"I began at once to look about for a means of providing my little girl with more affluence than had hitherto been at my disposal. The best," he smiled, patting her hand, "is none too good for my Dollykins! And an opportunity shortly presented itself, a quite exceptional opportunity, not only of increasing our income materially, but of assisting to develop the resources of my native commonwealth." He expanded suddenly with public spirit. "What a State! Fortunes have been made here, but nothing compared with the fortunes which shall be made. People have dared to call us a 'pauper State'—'pauper,' if you please!—with wealth at our command, untouched, unguessed resources lying just beneath the surface of this beautiful soil, which would make Aladdin's cave look like—like—"
"Thirty cents," supplied Joan, in an anxious effort to get to the point. "I know, Father!—but what did you buy with the money?"
"Oil-fields!" he said largely. "Oil-fields! Or, to be exact, stock in a company formed for the purpose of purchasing oil-fields, in which by good chance I happened to be let in on the ground floor (as we say in commercial parlance, Dollykins. It is not an expression I should care to hear you use.) You are the part possessor of something like one thousand acres of virgin Kentucky soil!" He leaned back in his chair and beamed on her.
"Am I?" said Joan dubiously. "It sounds promising."
Something of her father's elation disappeared in a sigh. "Promising, yes!—but so far only promising. Oil has been struck all about us, but none as yet on our holdings. I have by no means given up hope, of course." (Richard Darcy had never given up hope in any of his lost causes.) "But I must confess that I have been disappointed. Worse than disappointed. For a while I was—well, really, desperate!" He smiled deprecatingly.
The smile did not for the moment touch Joan's heart; but it told her the truth she had dreaded. "Father! You mean you havelostthe money?—There's no income left?"
"Income? Alas, no. And even the principal—Still, the land is there, one thousand acres of it, and that cannot escape!" he added, brightening. "There were times when I thought of going to live on the land. Though my experience of agriculture has been practically nil, many of our ancestors were planters and stock-breeders, and, as you know, I am a firm believer in the power of heredity. However, I was credibly informed that the property would not lend itself to agriculture. I was at my wit's end. Fancy the position!" (The Major was beginning rather to enjoy his woe in the retrospect.) "Here was I not as yet firmly established on my feet (as we say in business parlance); deprived alike of helpmate and companion, with my child at an expensive boarding-school where I had promised my dead wife she should remain until the completion of her education—and I without a dollar I could call my own! Frightful! There were certain obligations to tradespeople as well.... I am sure I do not know how for a while Ellen Neal managed to provide us with necessities!" (Joan thought grimly that she knew how.) "It became necessary to—ah!—realize on my possessions. First the silver went—I daresay you have wondered what has become of our family silver, my child? It was sacrificed to keep a roof over your head. Then the more valuable pieces of furniture—"
"Oh, don't!" groaned the girl in a sort of angry pity, "Why didn't you tell me? Oh,poorfather!"
"You may well say, 'poor father.' It was for you I suffered most, for you I was afraid. A man alone can always manage to subsist in some fashion, but a man with a helpless female dependent on him—! Thank heaven," he said earnestly, "you can never know what it is to be a father! I thought constantly, 'What a home to bring a young lady into! What a situation for my child!' I may confess that I prayed—no gentleman need be ashamed to pray when he is in distress. And then like light in darkness the answer came to me. At whatever cost to myself, whatever sacrifice, I must provide comfort for Joan, a home suitable for the reception of a young gentlewoman. There was nothing left to offer except—myself. Therefore—"
His face shone with a noble sadness, and he waited for the generosity of his sacrifice to sink in.
"You mean," said Joan slowly, "that it was for my sake you married Mrs. Calloway!"
He bowed assent. "Why else? She is an excellent woman, a kind and excellent and devoted woman. But under happier circumstances, a man of my position, my traditions, my—shall I say fastidiousness?—" He shrugged, and allowed the ungallant suggestion to complete itself without words.
"I think," said Joan quietly, "we'd better not say 'fastidiousness.'"
She was struggling, struggling so hard that her hands were clenched, to do justice to her father. Had she misjudged him? Was his marriage after all not the horrid thing she had thought it, but an honest effort to atone to the child he had beggared? Something within her cried "No!" Her father had sacrificed nothing in the marriage. He had simply yielded, without a struggle, to the lure of the flesh-pots. Worse than this, the girl recalled honeymooning incidents that often made her shudder with mental nausea; certain billing and cooing which she had not always been able to avoid. It was not only the flesh-pots that had lured him....
"Cad!" she cried to herself fiercely. "Cad and liar!" And the terrible thing was that he did not seem to know he was being a cad and a liar.
Aloud she said, "And what did Mrs. Calloway get out of the bargain?"
The Major stared at her, astounded. It was a question so absurd that he literally could not answer it. Quite unconsciously his eyes strayed beyond her after a moment to a mirror, as if for reassurance.
Joan burst out laughing. The laughter was so palpably close to tears that her father forgave it, and held out his arms to her. "There, there, my poor child! You're overwrought," he murmured. "Come to Daddy!"
She had lost all desire to weep on his shoulder now, however, and Richard Darcy shrank from the look she gave him, as a more innocent man than he might have shrunk; so level it was, so keen and without mercy. She saw her father in that moment not only as cad and liar, but as something very close to a thief. As surely as if she had been told in words, she knew why her mother, after fighting for years to keep her bit of property safe for her child, had at the last left it to the guardianship of her husband. It was to show him she trusted him, to put him on honor, as it were; to bolster up his waning self-respect by this final supreme act of faith in him. And he had betrayed her.
Joan shrugged, and turned to go. Her head hung in shame, and Richard Darcy knew that the shame was not for herself. What passed through her brain then was for the moment clear to him, as it is sometimes with people of one blood.
"I dare say," he said very low with a sort of dreadful questioning, "that the law might—might hold me responsible as guardian of your property, my daughter. If you cared to—if you wished to—make an issue of it?"
"What good would that do" she replied brutally. "The money's gone, isn't it?"
Then, glancing back, she surprised in his face that look she had almost forgotten—the frightened, baffled, anxious expression which she associated with the days when, as Ellen Neal put it, "the Indians were after him."
Instantly the reaction came. It was she he feared now, not "Indians"—she, his own little girl, Joan!
She ran and put her arms around him tightly, protectingly. "Nonsense!" she cried, her voice beautiful with the instinct of all the mothers who had made her. "The law'll never know a thing about it. What has the old law got to do with you and me? You've done the best you could, Daddy, I'm sure."
Richard Darcy answered humbly, like a repentant child, "I have, daughter, truly I have. I'm sorry...."
Later, as she walked wearily homeward through streets that no longer exhilarated her, no bachelor-maid now with a latch-key, nor yet an independent young traveler in foreign lands, but merely a poor relation dependent on the bounty of a step-mother, Joan made for herself a new beatitude:
"Blessed are the weak," she thought stoically, "for they have got to be taken care of."
The two rooms in which Ellen Neal had established herself were on the second floor of a house that had gone some decades since into a state of senile decrepitude. But such was the fashion of building in its day that it showed no particular signs of its approaching end beyond a slight tilt to leeward and the rather eczematic effect of its stuccoed brick facade. A high-waisted door surmounted by a fine fan-light and supported by slender columns which had once been white led into a square panelled hall from which curved a staircase of exquisite proportions. These things in a city of larger growth and greater sophistication would have marked the house as the natural abode of artists and their ilk; but in Louisville, where art is yet chiefly a thing to be taken in courses by the elect, it let itself out in rooms for light housekeeping and other humble purposes. The slender columns were defaced by such signs as, "Feather Cleaning and Artificial Flowers,"—"Furniture Upholstered,"—"Plain Dressmaking," etc.
The neighborhood, except for this one decrepit mansion standing well in from the sidewalk with an ancient sycamore for company, had long since forgotten its former claims to fashion; but it was still respectable. Trust Ellen Neal for that! She had the same flair for respectability as had the Misses Darcy for gentility. No doubtful character, whether in house or individual, could fail to yield up its weakness to the corrosive rectitude of Miss Neal's shrewd eye.
Joan liked to come to this house, not only because Ellen and the familiar home furniture were there, but because it carried her romantic fancy back into the Louisville her father sometimes talked about, the old South with all its lost glamour of gallantry and derring-do. "Les belles dames du temps jadis" was a phrase that invariably came to her mind as she entered the graceful, defaced portal. Nearby stood a street-pump where an actress who was one day to make the charm of American women world-famous, used to come each morning to draw water, in her shabby little slippers with a rope of hair over each shoulder—a lovely young Rebekah at the well. Around the corner stood another old mansion, now debased to commercial uses, in front of which the townspeople used to gather daily at a certain hour to watch the languid progress from door to carriage of a beauty so widely heralded that her name and her many love-affairs have become history. Here and there in a neglected fence-corner a ragged rose-bush, or a clump of larkspur bravely in bloom, spoke to a few observers, such as Joan, of gardens which had been the lovely setting of lovely ladies long since dead and dust.
Twilight was the hour for that neighborhood. Joan liked to fancy Ellen's house as the darkness fell, with candle-light streaming from the wide-flung windows, and glimpses within of bells in crinoline and beaux in tight wrinkled trousers, dancing a quadrille. Among them moved negro servitors with trays of frosted silver cups, and syllabub (though she had no slightest notion of what syllabub might be), and black cake, and small, pricked, beaten biscuit with ham in their insides. And there would be carriages stopping constantly at the door, to emit more belles and gallants, girls hoop-skirted and beshawled, who ran lightly up the curve of the long staircase, with apologies to the couples they disturbed in passing....
Always the house brought such fancies to Joan, and so clearly that she sometimes wondered whether they were less fancies than race-memories, souvenirs of Darcys who might have lived and made merry there in the halcyon days when the old gray river-town was at its zenith; truly, as it boasted, the Gateway to the South, stopping-place for all travelers on these floating palaces which no longer ply their leisurely journeys down the Ohio and the Mississippi to the Gulf.
Once she had questioned her father about it. "No, that's not one of our houses, I think," he replied interestedly. "Though it might have been. Your ancestors were very fond of change, Dollykins—as I am myself. We seem to have lived in half the houses in Louisville, at one time or another. But that one has been shabby and tumbledown ever since I can remember. In my boyhood it was a cheap boarding-house, for actors and people of that sort, I believe. I knew no one who lived there."
Joan was disappointed. She would have liked to claim the old mansion as a relative.
As she went wearily homeward from her disastrous interview with her father, Joan suddenly bethought herself of this house, and of Ellen. She was in no mood just then for the cheerful vulgarities of her step-mother. On the impulse, she went into the nearest drug-store and telephoned that she would not be home that night for dinner.
"Ellen shall cook me some pancakes, and I will help her," she decided, comforted by the idea. It must be remembered that Joan was only nineteen.
Inhabitants in suspenders and dressing-sacks, seeking air on the doorstep, stared at the girl inquisitively as she entered; but once within the dimness of the panelled hall she was able to forget these anachronisms. The quaint elegance of an earlier day was proof against even Expert Feather-curling, and Upholstery Done Here.
From above came a sudden tuneless whistling, and then a thump on a door and a man's voice calling, "Say, Mrs. Neal! Here's a bushel of fine assorted socks for you, and if you can get enough out of the lot to keep my feet off the cauld, cauld ground till pay-day, I'll be yours truly."
She heard Ellen's voice replying in more muffled tones, "All right, sir, just dump 'em in the door, will you? My hands are in the dough."
Joan was amused to hear Ellen Neal called "Mrs."—she who was so unmistakably and truculently a spinster; also she was surprised at the politeness of her "sir" in response, for Ellen was not given to the small amenities of social intercourse. The Major himself was rarely "sir" to Ellen.
The whistling resumed itself, coming rapidly nearer; and around the curve of the stairs, which he took two at a time, bounded a young man, who brought himself and his whistling to a full stop just in time to avoid carrying Joan with him in his downward course.
"Whew!—just missed you!" he exclaimed aghast. "You startled me. For a minute I thought you were a ghost!"
"Perhaps I am," murmured Joan, and demurely passed on up the stairs.
He turned and stared after the white ascending figure. She was aware of his eyes following her. Suddenly he chuckled, "I knew I'd find you again. And I found the quotation, too! 'Richard the Second,' by William Shakespeare."
Joan glanced over her shoulder. "I do not know what you are talking about," she said frigidly, "and I do not know you from Adam!" She had brought the impertinence upon herself, but she felt quite able to handle it—particularly with Ellen Neal just a few steps away.
Even as she spoke, however, she was aware that she did know this young man. Something in his voice, in his awkward, deferential manner, brought back to her memory the too-sympathetic drummer on the train. She lifted her eyes from his necktie to his face, remembering past regrets. His ears stuck out.
"Like the Yellow Kid's!" she thought disgustedly.
There is nothing in the least romantic about a man whose ears stick out. He might as well be fat....
"'Sad stories of the death of kings,'" he was explaining eagerly. "I looked it up myself. Sort of sounded like Shakespeare."
"Oh! I thought it was 'Alice in Wonderland'!" Joan was surprised into speech.
"That's a new one on me—'Alice in Wonderland,'"—commented the young man. "Is it good stuff?"
"You've never read 'Alice in Wonderland'? What a queer childhood you must have had!"
"Didn't have any," he replied, smiling up at her. Then he removed the smile, made a respectful little bow, and went on out the door.
Joan found that she was blushing, hotly; and no wonder. She was shocked by herself. She, one of Sister Mary Agnes's best exemplars of decorum, had deliberately started and continued a conversation with a strange young man met by chance on the dark stairway of a house where assuredly gentlemen did not live. ("Unless very poor gentlemen," she amended; for, ears or not, he seemed somehow to belong in the category of gentlehood.) Nor had she even terminated the conversation. It was he who had done that. He had shown more sense of the fitness of things than had she, Joan Darcy!
It was all the effect of the hospitable old hall, Joan decided. The house, like the roof of a friend, had introduced them. But what was he doing in such a house? It was not the sort of abode that would appeal, she fancied, to necktie drummers.
She opened Ellen's door without knocking. "Hello, there! Who's that I met on the stairs, and why does he call you 'Mrs.,' you giddy old fraud?"
A spoon dropped to the floor with a clatter as Ellen turned, beaming. "Land sakes! You might as well kill a person as scare her to death," she complained, far too pleased to admit it. "What you doin' down town this time o' day, all dressed up like lady-come-to-see? What do you want, eh?"
"Pancakes," explained Joan, ripping off her long gloves. "I'm going to stay to supper, Nellen, so get me an apron and let's begin."
Ellen's smile widened. "Pancakes! On a hot night like this?"
Joan nodded. "Um-humm! And lemonade," she said, "and anything else you can think of that's indigestible. Got any pickles?"
"What would a lone woman be doin' keepin' house without pickles?" replied Ellen scornfully, producing them. "And there's a batch of cinnamon rolls in the oven this minute, just as if I was expectin' you."
With a sigh of content, the girl reached down a yellow crockery bowl out of the cupboard—she was on quite intimate terms with Ellen's cupboard—and tying a gingham apron about her neck, proceeded to stir batter. It was the same crockery bowl, and perhaps the same gingham apron, in which she had stirred batter so long ago that she had been obliged to stand on a footstool in order to reach the kitchen-table. There was something substantial and fixed and unchangeable about Ellen Neal and her possessions, something that spelled home, though it was only home for other people.
"But you haven't distracted my mind," said Joan judicially, "from the fact that a young man of your acquaintance calls you 'Mrs.' without correction. You haven't eloped or anything lately?"
Ellen Neal bridled. "How you do go on, Joan! It makes it look better for a lone woman to be livin' by herself if she's called 'Mrs.' Men ain't so apt to get fresh with her."
"No?" murmured Joan. She gazed at Ellen's gaunt unloveliness with twinkling eyes. "Don't tell me men have been getting fresh with you, Nellen!"
The other's jaw snapped. "They have not, and they better not try it."
"Don't you think it's rather a risk darning their socks, then?" murmured the girl wickedly. "It might give them false ideas."
"I only do it for one of 'em, and he pays me good. Anything's proper so long as you get paid for it."
Joan laughed aloud. "Why, Mrs. Neal, Mrs. Neal, you shock me! What a perilous idea!"
"You're awful smart, guyin' me, but I'd be ashamed to think the kind of thoughts you're thinkin' now," said Ellen Neal, unsmiling. "And you a spinster yourself! Thoughts are as bad as deeds, any day—worse, 'cause they come easier. That's one thing I've noticed about you lately, Joan. You seem to know about things that ain't ladylike, somehow. Something's happened to you, child. You ain't the nice little girl you used to be."
"No," admitted Joan, "I'm not. And the world's not the nice little world it used to be, either." She went over and laid her head on her friend's bony shoulder. "Don't scold me to-day, dear. You're right, but—Oh, Nellen, father's lost our money! And there's nothing in the world I can call my own. Just absolutely nothing!"
A silence fell. "So," said the old woman. "You've found out, at last, have you? I've wondered how long it would take. And now what you goin' to do about it?" she demanded suddenly. "Are you goin' to law?"
Joan shook her head. "You know what Mother would say to that."
Ellen sighed. "I suppose she wouldn't hear to it." It was a curious fact that when these two spoke of Mary Darcy, they always spoke as if she were still alive, and near them. "Anyway, you can't squeeze blood out of a turnip—though I must say I'd like to seesomethin'squeezed out of them kind of turnips, if it's only insides!" she added quite blood-thirstily. "Oh deary me, deary me! How often I've begged your ma to sneak what there was left out of his reach and put it away where I keep mine."
"Where's that, Nellen?"
"In an old stockin'-fut under my bedtick, where you can bet no man on earth ever laid eyes on it, or ever will!"
The smell of scorching bread suddenly filled the room. "Land sakes, my cinnamon-rolls! And I'd promised that boy to save him some for breakfast."
"Breakfast?" exclaimed Joan, glad enough of a diversion from discussing her undiscussable father. "You mean to tell me you're not only keeping your young man darned, but breakfasted? Nellen, I'm positively jealous!"
"You wouldn't be if you could see him eat," said the other seriously. "Acts like he ain't had enough food to fill him sence he was born. He was gettin' all his meals out to a restaurant before I come, a place he calls 'The Sign of the Dirty Spoon.' Jokin', I suppose—he's a great one for jokes. But he looked so skinny, and was always takin' something for dyspepsy, so I told him I'd give him a good breakfast anyway, just to start the day on. Say, Joan, you ought to see him put it away! He says once, 'I 'spose this is what you call home-cookin', ain't it?' 'Land, sakes,' says I, 'don't you know home-cookin' when you see it?' 'I ain't never seen it before!' he says, laughing."
While she talked Ellen was bustling capably about, laying a cloth, getting out dishes, dropping Joan's batter into a sizzling saucepan, from whence arose dense, pleasing vapors.
"Here, Joan, mix some cinnamon in that sugar, 'less you'd ruther have molasses on 'em. You ought to see the room he's got. Nothin' but books, all over the tables, piled up on the floor, even on the window-sills—"
"Books?" said Joan, pricking up an ear. She had not imagined the wide-eared young man in his dapper clothes a student.
"Whatever people want all them books around for I can't see," said Ellen. "Dust collectors, I call 'em; but he says they're his college career. Always will have his joke! And the dirt—! He had a colored woman in to do for him before I come, and guess what she used to do with her dust?" She paused dramatically, arms akimbo.
Joan admitted her imagination unequal to the task.
"Swept it under the bed and left it there! Land!" said Ellen Neal, "how I do hate a nigger! You can bet I got that place to rights in a jiffy."
"I can indeed," murmured Joan, "and I can also bet he couldn't find a thing belonging to him for a week afterwards."
Ellen grinned. "You've the truth of it. There wasn't a morning for about a week but what he'd thump on the floor and yell down the chimney, 'Mrs. Neal,oh, Mrs. Neal! For heaven's sake where is my blue necktie?' or, 'In the name of Jehoshaphat, what have you done with my other pair of pants?' It kind of reminded me of your pa," she said, sighing. "I been lookin' after him ever sence. There now, ain't you goin' to eat your pancakes now you've got 'em?"
Joan drew up her chair to the oil-cloth covered table, and, despite the heat and her troubles, made such a meal as she had not eaten for weeks at her step-mother's elaborate board. Ellen sat opposite her, with no servant-and-mistress nonsense to complicate the pleasure of hospitality. Sometimes the old woman waited on Joan, and sometimes Joan waited on Ellen, all in a friendly democracy that would have caused Major Darcy's hair to rise on end. It had been his conscientious effort for years to keep Ellen Neal "in her place." The difficulty was in the ups and downs of the Darcy ménage to know just what might be considered Ellen's place.
Not troubling themselves with any such niceties of status, the two ate their pancakes and drank their lemonade and otherwise courted indigestion contentedly, meanwhile chatting about the young man from upstairs, who for some reason began to appeal to Joan's imagination. His name, it appeared, was Archibald Blair.
"Archibald Blair! Nellen, how romantic! Like an English novel. Young Lord Toodledeboots ruined at Monte Carlo, hiding his poverty and a broken heart in lodgings. I suppose these might be called lodgings? If only his ears had been made to fit him!"
She no longer thought of him as a necktie drummer. The books made a difference. It seemed unlikely that necktie drummers would be on terms of first-name intimacy with Shakespeare. Moreover, his awkward yet somehow easy and unassuming air, like that of a friendly young dog who takes for granted that the world will be glad to see him, marked him as one not belonging to what her father called "the canile." No, he was a student and a gentleman, stranded by some freak of fortune in this near-slum, a youthful Beloved Vagabond. (It was the year when Locke's great book cast a glamour over all strange men in shabby clothing.) Although Archibald Blair was by no means shabby; on the contrary, rather appallingly dapper.
"I wonder how he happens to be living in a house like this?" she ruminated aloud.
"And why wouldn't he be living here?" demanded Ellen tartly. "It's cheap and decent, and there's some folks that don't like to go forever hoppin' from one place to another, like fleas on a dog's back. He's lived in that same room upstairs ever since he can remember."
"Oh, has he?" Joan's eye kindled. It occurred to her that the young man's history might have some connection with the history of the house itself. "Ellen, I have it! It's the old family mansion, belonged to his father and grandfather and great-grandfather, andof coursehe wants to go on living in it. I would myself!"
Ellen grinned. "If there's a romantical notion to be found, trust you for finding it. But if you really want to know, folks do say—" She hesitated, under the hallucination (which many virtuous women share) that she disliked to repeat gossip.
"Yes, yes? Do go on, Nellen!"
"Well, they do say that if he's got a father at all it's more than he knows, let alone a grandfather, and great-grandfather. I had it from a woman downstairs (her that curls feathers, and she got it straight from somebody who used to live in the neighborhood when this was a actors' boardin'-house), that he got left here when he was a little boy, by his mother, in hock for her board-bill. And she never come back for him."
Joan gave a gasp. "Oh," she cried. "Oh! poor woman!"
Ellen eyed her curiously. "Poorwoman? I should think you'd say 'poor child'!"
"Poor both of them! But can't you see how much greater the tragedy must have been for the woman, who knew—who was to blame? Imagine how she must have dreamed of that pitiful little boy with his nose pressed against the window-pane watching for her—and she not able to come for him! Ellen—That's what he's doing here now! Waiting for his mother to come back!"
"If he is, I hope it's with a club in his hand," muttered the other angrily. "Why wasn't she 'able to come,' I'd like to know?"
"Perhaps she died. Or, she couldn't get enough money, or oh—oh, Ellen, don't yousee? She didn't dare to come for him! He was getting too big, noticing things. For his own sake she had to give him up!" There were tears in Joan's eyes, ready to spill over.
Ellen paused and stared at her. "Well!" she said at last. "If I had your imagination, Joan Darcy, I'd go to a hospital and get it cut out. It ain't safe! Here you are blubbering over the troubles of a woman who maybe never lived, and probably was a bad lot if she did—and a'most making me blubber over her myself!"
Joan laughed and jumped up. "Here, let me help with the dishes. You wash and I'll wipe. But what a funny, pitiful little boy he must have been with those stick-out ears and those big, innocent-looking front teeth of his! I wonder why it is that big front teeth always do make a person look so innocent, Ellen?"
"Seems to me you noticed a lot to have seen Mr. Blair only once."
Joan did not think it necessary to mention that she had seen him more than once.
"I always notice things—I can't help it. Anyway, I'm glad you keep the poor thing darned and comfy! It's only charity."
"Charity nothing. He pays me good, and prompter than I ever got paid before in allmylife," disclaimed the other rather tactlessly.
While she washed and put away her dishes, the girl made a tour of inspection about the rooms that were so full of associations to her. She smiled and nodded at the two familiar Landseer dogs on the wall, which had been a familiar part of every dining-room she remembered. She patted the worn chairs affectionately, and went in to pay her respects to the shorn four-post bed, which looked more at ease in its present surroundings than in others where she had seen it. The panelled walls, as nearly white as scrubbing could make them, the wide-silled windows with arched casements, the tall mantel-shelf, the finely molded ceiling which years of coal soot and cobwebs and general neglect had not sufficed to rob of dignity, all made a more suitable setting than Ellen guessed for her mistress's household goods; and to Joan these two bare and shabby rooms had become a haven of refuge. Tenement though it was, there was more of genuine beauty in the place where Ellen did plain dressmaking for very humble customers than in all the elaborate establishment with which Richard Darcy had managed to provide his daughter. Joan was very dependent upon beauty.
Later, Ellen walked out with her through the languorous summer evening to the house which she never called home. Nothing more had been said between them of the loss of her independence; but the girl felt soothed and comforted, strengthened as the heart is always strengthened in the presence of a deep though inarticulate devotion. She slipped her hand into the other's thin arm, and so linked they walked along without much talk between them, listening as they passed to pleasant sounds from many a shadowed porch and garden, guitar music, singing, the inevitable hushed murmur of boy and girl voices commingled, which is as natural to a summer gloaming as the twitter of birds in spring.
There came again to Joan, for the first time in weeks, something of the glamour, the sense of promise, which had touched her in the summer past when she walked at night with her father through the strange city where he had once been young. It was as if Romance brushed her in passing with shadowy skirts, and Joan felt that she must catch at them, cling to them, before it was too late. Youth is so short, so short!...
Ellen, too, felt the witchery of the soft night; but to the Ellens, Romance comes only vicariously.
"Joie," she said after a long silence, "ain't it time you was having some steady company yourself, child?"
The girl did not smile at the phrase. It voiced too well her own secret thoughts. There had been something strangely unreal, unnatural, about the past weeks. She had brought nothing out of her experience with life so far, not even a friend—for Stefan Nikolai was merely an inheritance.
"You're right," she said soberly "I suppose I ought to have a 'steady company' at least by this time. That ought to be simple enough!—Marriage is about the only thing left for a girl in my position, isn't it?"
"Who's talking about marriage? You don't have to marry every fellow you walk out with, I should hope," said Ellen surprisingly. "I've walked out with quite a few myself!... But as to gettin' married, Jo—it's about the only thing for a girl in any position, I guess, even if she finds out afterwards that she's picked a lemon. Lemons are better than nothing."
"Why, Mrs. Neal!" laughed Joan. "What sentiments from a confirmed spinster-person!"
To which Ellen replied quietly, "It's the spinsters who know."
The discovery of her dependence upon her step-mother marked an end to one period of Joan's existence: the apathetic period. Heretofore she had allowed their daily life, their amusements, their acquaintanceships, to remain in the hands of Effie May. If that lady chose, as she naïvely put it, to "break into society," and society was willing, Joan was amenable, though a little dubious as to society's taste. She was amenable, that is, so long as she was not called upon too actively to assist in the process. Pride forbade her making any effort to interest or to be interested in people who chose to accept the present Mrs. Darcy as one of themselves. To the Louisville she knew so far, she was merely the appendage of her parents, a captive chained to the triumphal chariot-wheel of her step-mother.
That was all very well so long as she knew that she might snap the chain at any moment and be free. But a dependence that seemed likely to continue indefinitely was not to be borne by what the Major would have called "the proud spirit of a Darcy." Joan, waking in the early dawn, rose and dressed (not in negligée), demanded breakfast at an hour when the astonished servants were barely awake themselves, and proceeded to clear her decks for action....
Ellen had sowed a useful suggestion in her brain. There was one freedom open to all young girls who were not too exacting in their demands: the freedom of marriage. Joan decided to marry. She also selected the victim.
It was the first time she had thought of him for weeks; or of "the girls," those heart's companions with whom she had shared for two years her inmost hopes and desires (to say nothing of hats and gloves and handkerchiefs); with whom at parting she had exchanged vows of lifelong fealty. Their letters had accumulated unanswered. In the shock and shame of her father's marriage, she had put away childish things, among them her schoolmates, who seemed in the retrospect immature and puerile. Even Eduard of the interesting past had been put away for the moment with outgrown things, and had remained (fortunately) unthanked for his parting flowers. As for the love-letter which had accompanied them—Joan wondered with a start of dismay what had become of it.
She found it neatly smoothed of its tell-tale wrinkles (the reader will remember that for a day and a night it had reposed against Joan's heart), filed among the letters in her desk, where it had been duly placed after being duly read, doubtless, by one of Mrs. Darcy's efficient housemaids.
The girl studied it with a more dispassionate eye than she had brought to its first perusal:
My flowers must tell you what I dare not, dearest little girl of my heart. You will understand why I cannot say good-by. Truly, "to part is to die a little." Forgive me!—Eduard.
My flowers must tell you what I dare not, dearest little girl of my heart. You will understand why I cannot say good-by. Truly, "to part is to die a little." Forgive me!—Eduard.
Joan decided that this could not, after all, be called a love-letter; or if so, it was of a noncommittal type distinctly piquing to the vanity. She had given a good many of her precious holidays to the reforming of Mr. Desmond.
"So!" she thought, with a small gleam in her eye. "I was merely a child that amused him for the moment! He was probably laughing at me.... I wonder if he would laugh now?"
She went to her mirror and examined the reflection within impartially.
Something of what she had always candidly recognized as her plainness seemed to have disappeared. She was no longer scrawny, for one thing. Her lazy life of the past weeks, and possibly Effie May's beauty experts, whose ministrations she accepted so ungratefully, had put a gracious covering over her young bones, and she discovered with some excitement the rudiments of a figure. Her straight, burnished hair (she had so far resisted all temptations to "marcel" it) gave her what she fancied a ratherdistinguèair, and her skin had that rare, pale transparency of perfect health which is lovelier even than rosiness. Her eyes had always given perfect satisfaction. She nodded to them in affectionate fashion, as to good friends (she had always fancied that one of them was her brain and the other her soul, and even suspected which was which—the left wearing rather a twinkle, in comparison with the right, which had a mild, innocuous expression). Her mouth was too large.
"But then," she reflected, "large mouths are very much worn by heroines nowadays, and mine isn't mushy or loose at the corners, anyway. There's a draw-string to it."
Of the nose the less said the better. It was merely a nose.
On the whole, standing there in her pretty morning dress, with the grace and freshness of nineteen years about her like an aura, young Joan decided in all modesty that she was one of the women who have their moments, and that such moments ought not to be wasted.
She sat down at once and indited a little note to Eduard Desmond expressing gratitude for "flowers which had meant so much to her," and explaining that she had not written before "because it had seemed best not to"—the inference being that now danger was past, and time had made it safe for her to think of him.
"That," mused Joan nibbling her penholder, "ought to make him sit up and take notice, I should think?" She had been from her cradle something of a student of her fellow-creatures.
She wrote to his niece, her friend Betty, as well; a long, confidential screed, mentioning the fact of her father's marriage without comment and allowing her friend to read between the lines. Betty had an adored mother of her own.
Then Joan rested on her oars and awaited results, which were prompt in coming. Not for nothing had she been the prize letter-writer of her school, entrusted by friend and foe alike with the handling of anything that was most delicate in the way of correspondence.
A few days later she was able to remark to her family that she had been invited to visit her schoolmate, Betty Desmond, at the Desmond country place near Philadelphia.
"The people you spent the Christmas holidays with in Washington? A fine old Irish name," commented the Major, who made something of a specialty of names. "I have not the pleasure of their acquaintance, but I am sure the good Sisters would not have permitted you to visit them if they had not been—ah! desirable acquaintances."
"They are quite rich, if that is what you mean," said his daughter bluntly. Her manner to her father had latterly undergone a change which was not altogether nice.
The Major's eyebrows shot up in pained surprise. "Joan! That is certainly irrelevant, not to say—"
"And there's an eligible young man in the family," continued the girl imperturbably.
He stared at her, speechless. "My child!" he exclaimed after a moment. "One would suppose you were actually—"
"Hunting for a husband? I am," she finished. "What else did you expect me to do?"
A burst of laughter from Effie May relieved the situation. "Of course she's hunting for a husband! All girls are, unless they're lookin' for trouble. Good for you, dearie! You'll land him, too, I'll bet my hat. Men? Lord," she cried, "they're as easy as fallin' off a log, once you get the hang of 'em!"
But the Major continued to gaze at his daughter incredulously. "To think," he murmured, "that I should live to hearmy daughterspeak in such a manner!" It was evidently not the idea which shocked him, so much as the indelicate expression of it.
Joan rose suddenly and left the table.
Effie May came to her afterwards, intent on comforting. "There, there, girlie, you mustn't mind what your papa says; he's just a man. Besides, he's so genteel in his instincts he's hardly human. Your mamma would have understood, just like I do.Shewouldn't of thought you'd said anything unrefined!"
"Thank you," muttered Joan bitterly.
"Why, it's the most natural thing in the world that a girl wants a house of her own, and a man of her own, and so forth! Only most of 'em ain't honest enough to come out flat and say so.... I'm for you, dearie. You're to have the trip, of course, and anything else you want, just let me know. As if I was really your mother—I mean it!"
"Thank you," said Joan again.
It was not the first time she had been disconcerted to find the enemy fighting her battles. What is to be done with an enemy which will not keep its proper place?
Effie May concerned herself in the preparations for departure with a whole-hearted generosity which occasioned Joan some secret pangs of remorse. As a step-relative she knew that she herself had left much to be desired. In vain the girl protested that she had already too many clothes, too much finery.
"Nonsense! A girl can't have too much finery," was the rejoinder. "Even if you don't get to wear all your pretties, it makes you feel sort of easy, sort of good-as-anybody like, just to know you've got 'em in the closet."
With her own hands she ran ribbons and rearranged trimmings and packed, to the secret jealousy of Ellen, keeping up a constant stream of shrewd comment and advice, some of which Joan found worth remembering.
"The trouble with you is, girlie, you think too much," was one of the pearls that fell from her lips. "Just let go and have a good time, and don't take yourself so hard. You can feel as different as you like inside, just so folks don't know it. Folks are sort of leery of what they aren't used to. See?"
Joan often wondered in what school of experience her step-mother had gleaned her curious wisdom.
Ellen Neal was the only one of the three elders who watched her going with any uneasiness.
"Look here, Joan," she said once, abruptly. "When I spoke like I done about marriage being the best thing for a girl, I meant marriage with love, child—marriagewith love. Like your mamma's."
The simile was unfortunate. The eye that Joan believed to be her brain twinkled mockingly. "Do you mean to insinuate that marriage and love are not always synonymous? Why, Mrs. Neal, you put so many strange ideas into my young head lately! Seriously," she added, seeing that the other's anxious gravity did not relax, "I don't believe it would be hard to pump up a little love in return for—lots of it, say, and a place of your own in the world, and independence."
"Where there's love there ain't apt to be much independence, I've noticed," remarked the other.
"All the more reason to do without love, then!" cried Joan, with triumphant logic.
But she hugged Ellen remorsefully, glad that the good woman could only guess at what was going on at the moment in her nursling's brain.
Her step-mother's casual advice and her own inner musings had resulted in one firm determination. If she missed romance, experience, all the real things of life, it would not be for lack of meeting them halfway. She would be no longer a passive agent. She would be bold and reckless—even if necessary a little Fast; though how to go about being Fast was somewhat of a puzzle to Mary's daughter.
"If people want to say things, or squeeze my hand, or anything like that," she told herself rather vaguely, "I must remember not to hold back and be standoffish.... How do I know what I like unless I try?"
But while the noun on her tongue was plural and indefinite, the noun on her mind was single and masculine and very definite indeed. It behooved Mr. Desmond to look to himself.
Joan, already exhilarated by a foretaste of independence, and enjoying to the full what Turgenev calls "that carelessness, that deuce-take-it air which comes out so naturally in foreign travel," changed at Broad Street for a local train that stops at all the smart little flower-bedecked stations which make the environs of Philadelphia so charming to the eye. Neat turnouts were waiting at most of them, dog-carts with dapper grooms at the horses' heads, big machines driven by bare-headed young people in sports clothes; here and there a quietly elegant brougham or limousine with men in livery on the box.
As her train passed, she caught glimpses of mellow, red-brick houses that gave the effect of age without decadence; tree-lined avenues, hot-houses, gardens, velvet lawns. It was country that lacked the broad, picturesque loveliness of Kentucky landscape, but it had a definite charm of its own—a well-ordered, leisurely, finished permanence which reminded one that not only American history but American society had its stronghold here, changing less than elsewhere in our adolescent land. There was no suggestion, as in the South, of having seen better days; no raw, temporary promise of the future as in the Middle West. Joan remembered having heard that many people who danced in the Philadelphia Assembly of to-day bore the same names as those who danced in it when Philadelphia was the country's capital, and Mr. Washington its first President. She wondered hopefully whether Desmond was one of those names....
People got in and out of the train, carrying golf-bags and tennis-rackets. Joan smoothed the skirt of the "little model" Effie May had provided for traveling purposes; a fawncolored crêpe with lacy cuffs and collar, which had at first given her qualms of uneasiness. There was a long cloth coat to match, and a hat of the costliest simplicity; and she was not used to traveling dressed as for a party. Now, however, she was grateful for her step-mother's insistence, with a gratitude which increased in proportion to the distance between them.
"Always dress up on a train," was Effie May's sage counsel, "so that people will notice you're a lady, and treat you according."
People had undoubtedly noticed, and she had been treated "according"; and now toward her journey's end it was particularly agreeable to feel that among these fellow-travelers on pleasure bent she need have no qualms as to her personal appearance, at least. Underneath she might know herself to be plain, poor little Joan Darcy, an adventuress in search of a husband; but on the surface she was as affluent a young lady as ever rang for the porter to lower a shade that was within two feet of her hand.
It may be premature to state that our heroine had already adjusted her future to her present pleasing environment; but the fact remains that when the train stopped at the station for which her subconscious mind had fortunately been listening, Joan was just in the act of moving Ellen Neal and her mother's furniture into a large Quaker house with a gambrel roof....
Betty was waiting for her in a dog-cart; brown as a berry, with sleeves rolled up, and a bare, tousled head, quite a different young person already from the shy little girl who had been her slave at the Convent.
"Hurry up, old Joie!" she called, wrestling with the cob, who rose on his hind legs to snort at the snorting engine, while a diminutive groom tried with frantic leapings to reach his head. "The Rabbit hates to stand! Run and get Miss Darcy's things, Jenks" (this to the groom) "and be quick about it, will you? You see," she explained as Joan climbed perilously aboard and was duly kissed, "when I left, Mother was two up and four to play, and it's the finals, and she's already got a leg on the cup. Great, isn't it? We'll have to gallop all the way to get there before it's over!"
"Whatareyou talking about?" asked mystified Joan. "A leg on the cup—!" Hitherto golf had not entered into her vocabulary; though she had gazed at it from afar, wondering at the strange ways men choose to waste their golden hours.
"Why, the tournament, of course! Didn't I write you? We're deep in it. Where are your clubs, by the way?" She glanced at Joan's bag and parasol-case. "Oh, dear! Have you left them on the train?"
"Clubs?—You mean golf-sticks?" asked Joan, with misgivings. "Why, I haven't any. I don't play golf."
"Don't play golf?" cried Betty in genuine dismay. "What ever will you do with yourself here? And how on earth do you amuse yourself in Kentucky? Just ride?"
"Why, yes," said Joan feebly, "we—we ride."
Once, indeed, during a period of comparative affluence, the Major had possessed for a while a horse of the family type; and under his instruction Joan had occasionally mounted the complaisant beast and propelled it fearfully about back streets, feeling that something was due her Kentucky traditions. But suppose she were expected to mount, for instance, some such fire-eater as the Rabbit!
"I don't believe I've brought my riding-clothes," she murmured hastily.
"Goose! Why not? But I dare say Mother can fit you out with trousers," said Betty, glancing casually at her friend's slim length of limb. "Mine'd be too short. With trousers and a sweater you'll be all right."
Joan's eyes opened wide, but her mouth remained closed. After all, she was out for experience. If it included meeting a violent death while clad in trousers and a sweater, so be it.
"Uncle Neddy'll find you a decent horse somewhere," Betty was running on. "He's awfully keen about your coming, Jo. I'm afraid you're going to have him on your hands a lot, especially if you don't play golf."
Joan brightened. "Why? Doesn't he?"
"Lord, no! Too much of a duffer. Likes to do lazy things, like riding, and fooling around in a canoe, admiring nature. With widows and such!" She made a face.
"Widows?" Joan pricked an ear.
"Grass or sod. It's all one to our Neddy," murmured his flippant niece. "Girls are not grown up enough for him, of course—Except you. He always did take notice when you were around. I remember. But then you were always more grown up than the rest of us, somehow." She gave her friend a glance full of the old shy admiration. "Do you know, you've gotten to be awfully pretty too. Perhaps it's all those grand clothes!"
"Perhaps it is," smiled Joan, flushing.
At school she had been the poor girl of her group, the one who had most often to borrow and least often to lend the simple fineries current among them for special occasions. Now under her friend's appraising eyes she was a little uncomfortable, wondering whether the dress she had on was perhaps a little too "grand" by comparison with Betty's plain linen. Linens she owned herself, but braided, embroidered, lace-inserted out of all recognition as such. It was a physical impossibility for Effie May to select anything plain. Under her manipulation, the merest shirt-waist became what the salesladies refer to majestically as a "bloose." Sartorially Joan was entirely in her step-mother's hands.
"But Southern girls always do dress up a lot, don't they?" said Betty, innocently continuing her line of thought. "You ought to have seen the one the Ritters had visiting them last month! All ruffles, and parasols, and chiffon veils. Couldn't swim or go for a ride or do anything on account of her complexion. All she did was to dance and sit out in corners with people. It was disgusting!"
"And didn't your uncle take notice even ofher?" murmured Joan.
"Oh, of course. She was as good as a widow, you see—she'd had so many affairs. The men simply flocked. Whenever she came on to the tennis-court she'd break up the game, and we could hardly find enough men to make up a foursome, they were all so busy hanging around. It was too queer! I never could see the attraction in rolling your eyes, and flashing your dimples, and dropping your r's like a colored servant, could you?—Not," she added hastily, "thatallSouthern girls are that sort, Joie dear! You, for instance!"
"I should hope not," murmured Joan; who had decided on the instant to be exactly that sort herself, so far as in her lay. It suited the elaborateness of her wardrobe; it saved her from golf and tennis and other amusements which bade fair to be terrifying in this sporting community—particularly the embarrassments of horseback riding. Joan was too much of an egotist to enter willingly into competitions where she had no chance to excel.
No; the languid beauty was her rôle for the next few weeks; and she flattered herself that after several months of Louisville she ought to be able to drop her r's and roll her eyes and flash her dimples with the best, particularly if the audience were not too experienced in Southernism. In school theatricals she had always distinguished herself. Moreover, she had the advantage of a lifelong model to work from; for Richard Darcy was one of those sons of Dixie whose characteristics become more markedly Dixotic the farther they travel from base.
Let the Ritters' guest look to her laurels!
By way of preparation Joan got out her lip-stick and her powder-puff and did what she could to improve on nature, Betty watching her the while in amused respect.
"I'm gladIdon't have to mess my face up with things like that," she commented frankly. "But I suppose when one goes in for a real complexion it's got to be taken care of."
Joan murmured something explanatory about the ravages of a Southern sun; and so entered upon her brief and eventful career as a Kentucky beauty.