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Why Joan?

by Eleanor Mercein Kelly · English · Gutenberg #34801 · 681,714 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Why Joan?

Author: Eleanor Mercein Kelly


        
Release date: December 31, 2010 [eBook #34801]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/34801

Credits: Produced by David Garcia, Mary Meehan and the Online
        Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
        file was produced from images generously made available
        by The Kentuckiana Digital Library)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHY JOAN? ***




Produced by David Garcia, Mary Meehan and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Kentuckiana Digital Library)









                              WHY JOAN?

                       BY ELEANOR MERCEIN KELLY

                  Author of "KILDARES OF STORM," etc.


    NEW YORK
    THE CENTURY CO.
    1919

    Copyright, 1919, by
    THE CENTURY CO.

    _Published, March, 1919_

                     TO
             MRS. RICHARD W. KNOTT
       friend and neighbor to many young
          women such as JOAN, whom she
    has helped to find the why of themselves;
          and whose life principle may
         be summed up in Virgil's phrase

            _Paulo majora canamus_--

        (Let us sing of higher things.)


    Aime-moi, parce que j'ai besoin de ton amour pour mes chansons,
    Va t'en, parce que j'ai besoin de pleurer pour mes chansons,
    Meurs, parce que j'ai besoin de chanter la mort pour mes chansons,
      Car je suis le Cobzar.

    _Quoted by Pierre de Coulevain from source unknown._

Rough translation:

    Love me, because I have need of love for my songs,
    Leave me, because I have need of tears for my songs,
    Die, for I have need to sing of death in my songs,
       For I am the Cobzar.


[Illustration]




FOREWORD


Some time since, the author had the temerity innocently to publish a
book ("Kildares of Storm"), which, like this one, employed for
background the country with which she happens to be most familiar, the
State of her adoption and of her affections. And great was the scandal
thereof. Neighbors insisted upon recognising themselves in it, to their
horror--or to their complacency, as the case might be. They also
recognized the house described; although if one heard with impartial
ear, the house appeared to possess as many different identities as
localities, and despite the fact that the author, in order to guard
against this very contingency, had taken many liberties with geography,
even to the extent of moving mountains--imagination being on occasion
almost as powerful as faith.

That history may not repeat itself, the author now hastens to assert
that no self-respecting creative instinct, with the whole world of fancy
at command, would care to inhibit productivity by the limitations
imposed upon photography, invaluable as that science is in its
place--which is not fiction. Ours the happy privilege of, for the moment
at least, "shattering the world to bits and remolding it nearer to the
heart's desire."

There is also among the craft an unwritten law against the holding up
for public inspection those people with whom one has broken bread, so to
speak; and as one is apt, in Kentucky, to have broken bread with all
one's acquaintance, neighbors, friends and enemies may alike consider
themselves safe from the present pen. If any think to recognize
themselves in this book, let them recognize themselves quite as readily
in the living people about them. For we are, after all, of one
substance, varying only with circumstance and the different stages of
development. And it is with these things only--with circumstance and the
stages of development, with truths rather than facts, with men and women
rather than personalities--that this author at least chooses to concern
herself.

ELEANOR MERCEIN KELLY.




WHY JOAN?




CHAPTER I


Young Joan Darcy leaned back luxuriously upon a cushion offered by the
obsequious porter (servants were usually obsequious with Joan, though
she was not at all beautiful and rather too shabby to promise much in
the way of largesse), watching the world go by with a dreamy, detached,
yet oddly observant gaze that missed no detail of the landscape through
which she passed and registered it in her subconscious mind for future
reference. It was a convenient receptacle, her subconscious mind--a sort
of strongbox into which went many things valuable and valueless, to be
brought forth when occasion required, quite intact. She tucked away in
it now not only the rushing landscape but the various people about her
in the Pullman: a dapper person, probably a necktie drummer, who had for
some time been discreetly taking notice and whom it was her pleasure to
occasionally regard as if he were so much thin air; an elderly lady who
beamed wistfully whenever their eyes met, and who, Joan decided, would
presently summon up courage to inform her that a little daughter, had
she lived, would have been about Joan's age; also another girl, dressed
as Joan would have liked to be dressed herself, who cast occasional
glances of indifference in her direction, noting, it was to be hoped,
the affluent litter of magazines and papers that surrounded our heroine,
the fading bouquet tucked into her belt, and the expensive box of
chocolates which lay open upon her knee, exposing to the world at large
a masculine card on top.

Joan discovered within herself a certain impersonal, appreciative
antagonism toward strange young women, such as knights may have felt who
met for combat upon the jousting field. Envy was the one tribute which
most assuaged her vanity.

She would have liked to sample the box of candy--a parting tribute from
a family friend who had a most discriminating taste in chocolates--but
she feared that it would place her hopelessly in the class of
school-girls, from which she had just emerged, as world-wise, as
sophisticated, as completely finished a young person as ever a convent
turned loose upon the unsuspecting world. "Tess of the d'Urbervilles"
was her favorite novel; she had smoked her maiden cigarette--in fact,
two of them; and she no longer subscribed to the stork-and-baby myth,
which seemed to her puerile.

She was still able, however, to savor keenly in advance the moment when
the Pullman would empty itself into the dining-car and she would be free
to approach her chocolates in the manner favored by true _bon vivants_:
i.e., by nibbling off one end, extracting the contents bit by creamy bit
with the head of a pin (preferably a large white-topped pin), and
finally crushing the emptied shell deliciously upon the tongue.
Conserved in this manner, one chocolate might be made to do the duty of
many chocolates, an advantage not to be despised where pocket-money is
limited to twenty-five cents a week.

The moment was not yet, and reflecting sedately that self-control is
good exercise for the character, she gave herself over to the pleasures
of recollection.

What a beautiful parting it had been! What floods of tears and kisses
and promises! Seven--no, eight--girls weeping around her while they
exchanged dramatic farewells; firm Sister Mary Joseph, the out-sister
who conveyed pupils to shops and trains and so forth, leading her aside
at the last moment to press upon her, heretic though she was, a tiny
medal of St. Joseph, known to bring good husbands to his adherents; two
youths from the near-by college (mere brothers of friends, but still
masculine); and, for _piece de resistance_, Stefan Nikolai, famous
though elderly, who had run over from China or Egypt or somewhere to see
her graduate. This was an attention Joan took quite for granted--he had
been a friend of her mother's, and distance seemed nothing to his habit
of life. But its effect upon her schoolmates, and even upon Sister Mary
Joseph, was gratifying in the extreme. With his dark, fine features, and
his foreign-cut clothes, he had not looked particularly elderly that
day. His eyes, Joan recalled, had always been peculiarly expressive,
like the eyes of a setter dog, which probably has nothing to express at
all; and she chuckled to recall how the out-sister's gaze had wandered
inadvertently toward the unconscious gentleman as she tendered her medal
of St. Joseph.

Joan was fond of Mr. Nikolai, and grateful to him. She even read his
books, though she preferred his letters, which had a good deal in them
about herself. His presence at her graduation, his chocolates, the
little sea of papers with which he sought to beguile the tedium of her
journey, had all helped to comfort her for the absence of her father. He
was, she thought warmly, almost as good as a father anyway; and far more
generous! Everything nice she had was a gift from Stefan Nikolai. Her
lovely Chinese shawl, her carved jade ring (Joan wished secretly that
there had been a diamond in it somewhere), the odd piece of clear blue
aquamarine he had brought her for a graduation present, that just
matched her eyes; books too, in beautiful covers, and some old prints
that were anything but beautiful, and a white bear-skin for her room.
She would have liked to suggest to him that, in place of such costly
trifles, occasional dresses might be acceptable, of the sort that come
from Paris; also frilly things, hand-embroidered, which he would not
have to choose himself, of course--there being women clerks for the
purpose. She was a little surprised that he had not thought of it
himself, aware as he must be of the scarcity of such desirables in the
Darcy family.

Still, one must not look a gift-horse in the mouth; and had he not been
such a lifelong friend as to be almost a relation, Joan would have
chafed a little, as it was, under her sense of obligation to Mr.
Nikolai. Her mother's daughter did not take kindly to a sense of
obligation.

It was not he, however (ah, by no means he!) who had provided the
flowers which drooped at her belt. For one moment the absence of the
donor of these flowers had threatened to spoil the pleasure of her
parting; and then had arrived, breathless, a messenger and a note. Joan
was able philosophically to reflect that if the gentleman had come in
person she would never have had the note. And there is something
delightfully tangible and lasting about a love-letter--if, indeed, it
was a love-letter?

That was one of Eduard Desmond's great gifts: elusiveness.

She put her hand to her blouse and felt the responsive crackle therein;
and the words of the note danced before her eyes in the form of little
cupids, bearing garlands:

     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 had done her thrilled best to understand, since it was expected of
her, but she felt rather puzzled. Was it that he feared his emotions at
parting might get beyond his control? Joan sighed. She could have borne
that. Or was it--here she frowned importantly--that his habits were
already resuming control of him, now that her hand was, so to speak, off
the rudder?

Eduard Desmond, as all the Convent knew, was a man of the world, with a
past. He was also in his lighter moments an artist. The Convent was
rather vague in its mind as to the form of art he pursued; but that it
included habits was unfortunately certain, and his young niece Betty had
vouched personally for the authenticity of his past. It had had to do
with a married woman. The Convent frequently prayed for him; though
unknown to the nuns.

Occasionally this distinguished-looking, fascinating, rather melancholy
young man came to take Betty and a few chosen friends to a matinee, out
of the kindness of his heart. Perhaps it was not pure kindness of heart
that had called to his special attention young Joan Darcy, with her
square chin, and straight black brows beneath which the eyes looked out
at you with an odd intensity; unless she smiled, when they danced like
blue water in the sun. She was not pretty, Joan, and boys rarely noticed
her, somewhat to her chagrin; but Eduard Desmond was no boy, and his
past perhaps had made him perceptive. The acquaintance between them
ripened to a degree unsuspected by the good sisters at the Convent, if
not by his family, who aided and abetted it, feeling that a young girl
might be rather good for Eduard. Doubtless she was. She entered into the
duty of "reforming" him with a conscientious thoroughness that might
have been trying to an artistic temperament, had he not got a good deal
of genuine interest out of the process himself; interest, and even more.
She had soft little confiding ways, like a friendly child's, combined
with the queerest flashes of cool understanding, anything but childlike,
which kept him rather in awe of her innocent vision. Indeed, that the
affair went no further than it did was due perhaps to Joan's perfectly
unconscious habit of withdrawing herself to see what was going on, of
being "not there when wanted," as Eduard put it to himself, annoyed. He
thought it deliberate, the reserve of the prude, or of the embryo
coquette; whereas it was really one of the crosses of Joan's life,
dreaded by her as the self-conscious dread attacks of shyness.

So far she had come out of what might have been an illuminating
experience bearing only two small trophies of the sort girls love to
whisper about together in bed after dances when the lights are out; one
rather lingering kiss upon her slim, brown paw (which did not startle
her at all, but made her want to giggle); and now this love-letter--if
it was a love-letter.

Again Joan sighed. She regretted with all her heart that queer aloofness
which came upon her in critical moments, making her notice that a man's
ears were put on wrong, or that her own finger-nails needed shining,
when she should have been surrendering her whole soul to emotion. Was it
always going to keep her from plumbing the depths of life?

"Oh, but it shan't!" she insisted to herself. "I _will not_ be an
innocent bystander! Things must happen to me; they must. All kinds of
things!"

It was the sort of challenge to which Fate is apt to give attentive ear.

Presently, out of facts and recollections she slipped, as was her wont,
into a game of Pretend, which had been a sort of accompaniment to Joan
from her cradle; growing as she grew, changing as life changed its
aspect to her eyes. She was no longer plain little Joan Darcy, returning
from school in a shabby suit which she had outgrown, to a shabby home
which she had also somewhat outgrown. She was a glorified young person
of the singer or actress variety, returning from a career of conquest in
foreign parts, with her maid Fifine traveling second class in the coach
behind, as they do in all the better novels. Her father, not much
altered from real life except that there were no spots on his clothes
(the Major's manner being grand enough for any circumstances), would be
at the station with the victoria and pair--or perhaps the limousine--and
would murmur to the second footman, "Home, James"; and at the door of
the family mansion, a pillared, fan-lighted door (Joan's mind lingered
lovingly over architectural details even in her haste to reach the
people in the doorway) would be Ellen Neal first, dropping respectful
curtsies--quite a stretch, this, even for Joan's imagination!--and
beyond her, in a lovely tea-gown, all silk and lace and newness, would
stand her mother with outstretched arms, waiting....

Here Joan became suddenly aware that she was dropping large, hot tears
upon her precious chocolates--she who had sworn never, never to cry any
more in all her life, because tears are only useless things that make
the nose red!

"But _why_ am I crying?" she demanded of herself, puzzled, still mazed
with her game of Pretend.

It was because her mother would not be in that doorway, waiting; nor
anywhere ever again--unless there really is a Heaven.

Joan sat there, too proud to bury her face in her hands or to search for
a handkerchief, intensely conscious that people were glancing her way,
praying wildly to all her gods to keep her from blubbering aloud; and
she looked so like a haughty infant in distress that the young man
opposite, he whom she had characterized as a necktie drummer, could not
long restrain active sympathy.

"Pardon _me_," he said awkwardly, leaning toward her. "Are you in some
sort of trouble? Anything I can do?"

Joan summoned all her scattered forces to meet this emergency in a
manner that would do credit to the precepts of Sister Mary Joseph. She
elevated her small red nose, and lifting her eyes to about the level of
his scarf-pin (a rather cheap scarf-pin) remarked: "You can go away. I
am telling myself sad stories of the death of kings."

The necktie drummer retired, permanently, to the smoking-car.

This victory cheered Joan into momentarily forgetting her mother.
Already an adventure to write to the girls! She wished that she had
looked a little farther up than the scarf-pin.

Shortly the old lady whose daughter might have been Joan's age if she
had lived, invited Joan to be her guest in the dining-car, and was
repulsed, coldly and firmly. One hears such tales of wicked old harpies
on trains leading trustful girls into the most frightful predicaments!

"No, thank you," said our heroine. "I never have much appetite on
trains."

Soon the car was quite empty, and Joan, mopping the last of the tears
from her eyes, selected the largest of the chocolates and drew from some
recess of her person a white-headed pin. There was also, to be discussed
later, a packet of sandwiches, typical Convent affairs--large slabs of
bread embracing pale and clammy ham. Joan thought of these with
resignation. The odor of broiling beefsteak came back from the car ahead
rather poignantly. Joan had lied to the old lady. At eighteen, with
every nerve and organ in healthy cooeperation, appetite is not likely to
fail, on trains or elsewhere. Nor was it as if she did not have the
necessary dollar in her pocket. Major Darcy always managed to rise to
the occasion somehow when the ladies of his family went traveling. He
had a horror of gentlewomen finding themselves among strangers
temporarily embarrassed for funds--quite a different affair from a
permanent condition of the sort when in the home circle.

She knew that it was expected of her to spend her dollar in riotous
living; but she could not forget (the Joans of the world never can
forget) that a dollar is the price of a pair of white gloves or a pair
of silk stockings. And so she munched her sacrificial sandwiches with a
considering eye on the future.




CHAPTER II


Later, as she lay propped up in her snug little berth (far the
pleasantest part of the journey to Joan), with her shade up for fear of
missing anything of the mysterious night that passed outside--strange,
silent cities, isolated farms asleep in the starlight, the glow of
smelting fires as they flashed by, like a startling glimpse into the
infernal regions--it suddenly occurred to Joan that her father had been
unprecedentedly lavish in his provision for her journey home.

"Money for good-by presents to all the girls; money for ticket, and
sleeper, and tips, and ten dollars besides--goodness! Dad must have
struck something!" she mused, deciding that it was really business that
kept him from coming to see her graduate, and not, to put it delicately,
the lack of business.

In the Darcy family things were always put delicately. The mention of
cost was deprecated. One never said crudely that a thing could not be
afforded. One "preferred not to bother about it just then," or one
"liked last year's hat so much better than any in the shops," or one
"enjoyed the freedom of being without servants for a while--it was a
relief."

Occasionally Joan's mother, before she overcame the blunter speech of
the North, had offended the family taste with plain statements about
prices and possibilities. Joan, observant from her cradle, drew her own
conclusions from the expression of wincing deprecation these faux pas
produced upon her father's face, or upon that of the cousin or aunt or
what-not in the way of Darcy relation that was usually visiting them.

"Mamma," she had asked once in the murmured intimacy that preceded
sleepy time, "isn't money a very nice fing?"

"A very nice thing indeed, babykins," answered the lady with a faint
sigh.

"Then why mustn't us never speak about it?"

It was not the only one of her daughter's questions that the harassed
woman had been obliged to parry with what skill lay at her command.
Honesty always came more easily to Mary Darcy than subterfuge.

Joan grew up into the family habit of euphonious speech; but, thanks to
a certain inheritance from her mother, facts had a way of presenting
themselves to her inner vision with a clarity, a brutal frankness of
outline, quite unprecedented in the mind of a Darcy.

Her facility in the valuable game of Pretend came from the paternal
strain. Richard Darcy was one of those fortunate spirits who move
through life to the sound of an invisible drum corps--a procession of
one, affably ready for whatever honors Fate chose to thrust upon him.
Joan, too, was quite prepared for the best the world had to offer.
Nevertheless, unlike her father, she was never unaware of the difference
between pretense and reality, nor of the fixed line dividing them. When
she lied, it was deliberately, with her eyes wide open.

Just now she chose to step over the dividing line firmly into reality.
Perhaps her dinner may have had something to do with it; a diet of
chocolates and ham sandwiches not being conducive to glamour of thought,
even at eighteen.

Joan wished, soberly, that she were happier at the idea of going home.
She wished that she were not haunted by a vague dread of it....

The Convent--with its daily round of prescribed duties and pleasures,
its fixed intimates and enemies, its atmosphere of simple piety, its
guardian nuns, striving conscientiously for that "detachment from place"
which is enjoined upon them, but lavishing all the pent-up
mother-passion of their hearts upon the young creatures in their
care--Joan, young as she was, visualized the place she had left as a
sunny haven, a little quiet eddy in the whirlpool; sheltered, secluded,
safe.

She frowned at the adjective. Surely her own home was "safe," too!
Surely the vague dread she felt had nothing to do with her father, for
instance--her own dear, splendid Dad, so handsome despite his frayed and
spotted clothes, with the courtly manner that had won both nuns and
girls to awestruck admiration, and that gave him far more distinction
than the fathers of other girls who did not wear frayed and spotted
clothes. No, it could not be her father she dreaded!

And it was certainly not Ellen Neal, the elderly woman who had followed
the Darcy fortunes in their waxing and waning for many a year--part
servant, part mentor, always friend; declining to be shaken off even in
those crises when Mrs. Darcy "enjoyed doing without servants";
supporting herself during such financial depressions by means of a
skilful needle--supporting, Joan sometimes suspected, others than
herself. The girl recalled one significant incident of her early
childhood; her mother, pale and anxious, arguing at the door with a rude
man who declined to leave without something she seemed unable to give
him, until Ellen appeared, half running up the street, opening her
shopping-bag as she came. And when she had thrust something into the
rude man's hands and slammed the door in his face, Mrs. Darcy had turned
silently to the servant and kissed her.

Joan's feeling for Ellen was one of the few she had never tried to
analyze. It was simply there, like her breath, her eyesight. She could
not be said to love her--there was nothing attractive about Ellen Neal;
yet her only quarrel with her father (if anything so one-sided could be
called a quarrel) was on the subject of Ellen. Once during Joan's
previous summer vacation, the Major, who disliked familiarity in
servants, had taken occasion to remind Ellen most kindly that his
daughter was almost a young lady now and should be spoken to as Miss
Joan, no longer as "Joie" or as "Baby." Joan had thoroughly concurred in
this opinion; until, happening to glance at Ellen as she left the room,
she saw that the servant's compressed lips were trembling. She had cried
out unaccountably: "No such thing, Nellen! You're to call me anything
you like, always!"--and then she had turned upon her father, scolding,
stammering out astonishing reminders, raising her voice, altogether
behaving in a manner most unbecoming a gentlewoman and a Darcy--as her
father quite obviously forebore to suggest to her. The quarrel had been
altogether a most unsatisfactory one. During her tirade the Major had
sat with poised carving-knife, regarding his daughter under mildly
raised eyebrows. When she had stormed herself out, he remarked quietly,
in quotation marks:

    "Her voice was ever soft and low,
    An excellent thing in woman."

But the matter of "Miss Joan" was, by tacit consent, never resumed
between them.

No, it was decidedly not Ellen Neal who was responsible for her vague
dread of home-coming. The girl, who had an odd dislike of anything vague
in her mental processes, pursued the fugitive sensation to its lair with
relentless precision.

Was it the poverty of home she feared, then? Surely not, for poverty was
a condition quite as much with her elsewhere--rather more with her
elsewhere, for among strangers it was impossible to practice those
useful little economies of ragged underwear and worn-out shoes which in
the privacy of home-life made an occasional extravagance possible. Joan
rather looked forward to the time when she no longer need be on
dress-parade, so to speak, at every hour of the day.

"If I wear cheap nightgowns, I can buy myself a good hat," was her
thought--a thought which may be said to sum up the philosophy of the
Darcy family.

And although it seems customary among novelists to gage the refinement
of their heroines by the daintiness of their taste in underlinen--no
matter if her outer wear be sackcloth and ashes, the lingerie of a true
fiction lady is invariably above reproach--one would like to submit that
an almost equal refinement may be indicated by the present heroine's
determination to make as brave a showing as possible before her world
with as little strain as possible upon her father's income....

Was it her mother's absence she feared then--still? Forewarned, Joan
resolutely kept back the nervous tears that threatened to rise again at
the thought of her mother; and she faced the possibility calmly.

During the summer before, alone with her father and Ellen, Joan had been
given plenty of time to get used to her mother's absence. Indeed, it
seemed to her suddenly that during the several years previous she had
been given time to get used to her mother's absence. It was as if Mary
Darcy, knowing that the hand of death was upon her, had deliberately,
gradually, withdrawn herself from the child she loved, in order to make
the final separation easier.

"That would have been like Mother," said Joan, nodding.

She understood, in that moment of clear vision, why she had been sent
away to boarding-school, despite her father's amazed protests--it was
unprecedented that Mrs. Darcy should remain so firm in the matter of
incurring unnecessary expense. She understood, too, why the narrow,
bleak house in Louisville, which was the latest of their many homes, had
taken on none of the look of her mother--that intimate, friendly,
stay-awhile air which Mary Darcy, with the aid of long practice, managed
to produce among the most unlikely surroundings within a few hours of
occupancy. True, the old furniture made its faithful reappearance there,
part of Joan's earliest recollections--the parlor suite of rosewood with
blue velour, the little cottage piano, the great bed in which she, and
her mother, and her mother's mother had been born, shorn long ago of its
tester to accommodate altered circumstances--all looking a trifle
shabbier, a trifle more battered after each adventure with fortune, but
still dignified and "good," with the unmistakable mien of gentlefolk in
reduced circumstances. For once, however, Mary Darcy had not been able
to accomplish her usual miracle with this furniture. Chairs, sofa,
tables, stood stiffly wherever the moving-men had chosen to place them,
making no attempts to hide the spots on the wall-paper; the thread-bare
velvet portieres which had separated parlor from hall in every home that
Joan remembered had never been altered to fit this one; stranger still,
there were no green growing things in the window-sills, nor even in the
can-strewn, sooty backyard. Joan could not recall any other home she had
lived in without some attempt at a garden, were it only a few geraniums
in the window-box.

"Mamma must have been very tired," she thought, soberly; and realized
that, far from dreading her mother's absence in that dingy, dreary
house, she was almost glad of it. When one is as tired as Mrs. Darcy,
rest is the great boon--rest from hopeless hoping, rest from making
homes out of patience and courage and a few old sticks of furniture,
rest from the anxious sorrow of loving.

Joan was young to understand such things; but at her birth the fairies
had given her the cruel gift of seeing out of the eyes of others....

She came to the conclusion at last the thing she had been dreading was
simply responsibility. Her play-time was over. No stretch of imagination
could make her a little girl again--not with her hair well up on her
head and a love-letter crackling deliciously under her pillow! Hereafter
it was hers to create the home her mother had relinquished; hers to make
ends meet somehow, if only in the accepted Irish way of "cutting a piece
off one end and tying it onto the other"; hers to keep out of her
father's eyes a certain baffled, hunted look which Joan associated with
men who came to collect bills, referred to grimly by Ellen as "the
Indians." No family of pioneers on the long-ago western frontier ever
lived in greater fear of Indians than did Richard and Mary Darcy and
their child Joan.

The girl sighed, bracing her slight shoulders. But still thinking of her
mother, she rehearsed sleepily one tenet of the little creed she had
made long since to fit her necessities:

    "It does not pay to be too unselfish."




CHAPTER III


Friends of Mary Darcy, in the distant days before they forgot to discuss
her surprising marriage with a promoter from who knows where, were wont
to say, "At least he makes a devoted husband and father!"

Which was perfectly true. His little family had always been, as he often
said, a passion with Richard Darcy. Perhaps his facility in saying
things of the sort was what had appealed in the first place to the shy,
undemonstrative Northernness of Mary. Though he was one of several who
had professed their willingness to live for her, he was the only suitor
who had offered to die for her--an attention she could not but
appreciate.

It was entirely for his child's sake (and, indeed, at some personal risk
to himself, had Mary but suspected it) that two years before Major Darcy
had so arranged the mysterious affairs he called Business as to be able
to return to the State and city of his illustrious birth; "where," he
explained with proud humility, "we are not quite nobodies, my darling!"

(The "who knows where" on the part of Mary's friends had been sheer
arrogant affectation; for nobody could have talked with Richard Darcy
for five minutes without learning that he had been born and raised and
hoped to die in the great Commonwealth of Kentucky.)

Joan had been quite as eager about the prospective move as her father,
marveling at the apathy of her mother, who said, "I never mind being
'nobodies,' Richard, so long as we have each other."

Romantic visions danced through the girl's head of stately pillared
mansions, of faithful negro servitors, of fascinating belles and
gallants on horseback (her mental language became quite stilted and ante
bellum to suit the picture), riding to hounds through meadows as blue as
the skies above.

"Though I don't suppose there's much bluegrass right around Louisville,
is there, Daddy?" she demanded, with the passion for truth that was in
her.

"Plenty of it, Dollykins, plenty of it--though of course Louisville is
not really in the bluegrass region, you remember. It belongs to the
beargrass district." (Joan nodded. Thanks to her father's powers of
reminiscence, she was well up on her Kentucky.) "Still, it isn't like
one of these soulless Northern cities, which regard land as so much
waste space on which to build monstrosities!" He glanced out truculently
upon the streets of Chicago, which had managed in some way to incur the
Major's displeasure. "No, no, there's plenty of bluegrass about the old
town still, plenty of space, plenty of room to breathe. And how my old
friends will take you to their hearts and love you! None of this
blighting Northern indifference to everything except the chink of money.
Money--_bah!_--It is God's country down there, my child--gentleman's
country."

This was not anti-climax on the Major's part. He visualized God at His
best as a superior sort of Christian gentleman, who, had America been
discovered at the time, would doubtless have chosen the Southern portion
of it for the scene of His nativity.

Of course the girl's anticipations of "God's country" were too glowing
not to foredoom her to disappointment. The bluegrass itself was a flat
failure; mere meadows of ordinary green, above which hung in seedtime a
purplish tinge, like smoke from burning leaves. Louisville, too, did not
quite meet the rosy expectations of a young person rather experienced in
cities.

They were received at the station, not by a deputation of the old
friends who were to take them to their hearts and love them, but merely
by a cousin, one of three Misses Darcy who had paid lengthy southern
visits to the various places Joan had hitherto called home. By this lady
they were conducted volubly in street-cars (Joan had hoped for a
long-tailed carriage-pair) to an ancestral mansion which had loomed
large in the Major's reminiscences, but which, as he himself admitted,
appeared to have shrunk strangely, after the way of houses one has known
in early youth. It was one of a row of duplicate tall marble fronts,
stained and yellowed, unpleasantly suggestive to Joan's too-vivid
imagination of neglected front teeth.

From this shelter the Darcys soon departed. The cousins, while most
cordial, were under the necessity of letting their spare chambers to
paying guests, under which category their Cousin Richard could not with
any certainty be classed.

Joan recalled vividly the family search for a house that suited both her
father's taste and her mother's pocket-book. The streets had seemed to
her gray, endless canons, from whose pavements the heat arose and eddied
in dizzying waves. From within dark doorways women in dressing-sacks,
waving palm-leaf fans, gazed out at them languidly. Block after block
they traversed of houses that seemed as afraid of differing from each
other as men in evening dress; again they came to neighborhoods where
each dwelling stood at a bias angle from the street, as if hoping to
achieve an impossible privacy by turning a cold shoulder upon its
neighbor. And everywhere they huddled together as close as possible,
presenting a solid front of masonry to repel invasion. Where was the
space her father had boasted, the room to breathe?

Joan had gazed longingly down certain vistas of tree-lined avenues,
lined with pleasant mansions; or into compact green courts where there
were smaller homes, with gardens. But these the elders passed without
inquiry. They were as quick as house-agents at guessing rents.

At last an abode was found that seemed to the Major suitable upon all
counts. Mrs. Darcy, gazing up at its tall, narrow brick front, said with
a slight sigh, "Isn't there a good deal of it to keep clean, dear?"

It was the first time Joan had noticed her mother's new little air of
weary indifference.

"Ah, but in the South one cannot be cramped for room," replied the Major
largely. "There is hospitality to be considered! You must remember that
our daughter's debut into society will take place from this house, my
love. Who knows?--perhaps her wedding!" He pinched Joan's cheek
playfully. "How do you like it, Dollykins?"

"Not at all," she replied, too discouraged to be euphonious just then.
"It's hideous, and there's a grocer-shop opposite, and Mother'll never
sleep with these horrid cars jangling by. Why can't we have a house in
one of those pretty green courts, Daddy?"

The Major looked pained. Mary came to the rescue. A few years ago she
would have explained bluntly that they could not afford one of the
pretty green courts. Now she said with a rallying smile, "What! Not a
banal, stupid, uninteresting new bungalow such as one might have in
Pittsburgh, or Oshkosh, or Kalamazoo, Michigan! Where's your sense of
local color, child? The atmosphere wouldn't be right at all!"

Joan thought that the atmosphere of this neighborhood seemed to be
largely compounded of soot and sewer-gas; but she did not say so.

Richard Darcy, brightening, pointed out that while the house indeed
faced a grocery-shop (so convenient for Ellen!), its rear was separated
only by an alley from the rear of a house which faced upon a very fine
avenue indeed; a backyard in which at the moment lingerie of a faint
flesh-pink disported lacy ruffles and kicked airy silken limbs upon a
clothes line. (Of this lingerie more anon.)

"Evidently," pronounced the Major with an unconscious eye upon it, "a
desirable neighborhood in every way."

So the lease was signed, and Ellen Neal and the furniture sent for, and
the first month's rent paid in advance; and these feats having been
accomplished, Mary Darcy took to her familiar bed and died there,
promptly and unobtrusively as was her way, without leaving any
inconsiderate doctors' and nurses' bills behind her.

That first summer in Kentucky was a strange time to Joan. It was filled
with dim memories of the books she read aloud to her father day after
day, in the futile effort to be a companion to him; of long walks she
took with him in the cool of the evenings, through streets and parks and
suburbs that were as strange to the man who had come back to them, Joan
suspected, as to herself; and far more desolate. For the ghost of a boy
haunted them; a mischievous, headstrong, innocent lad who had meant no
harm to the world, nor to himself, in those days.

Sometimes in the older streets he pointed out to her houses which came
near to fulfilling her best hopes of pillared Southern mansions.

"Tim Throckmorton used to live there," he would say, forlornly; or
"Many's the time I've courted pretty Sally Field in that parlor!"

Now there were "Furnished Room" signs in the windows, or shops in the
lower floors, or, worst degeneracy of all, signs of negro habitation.
For many a day the two hunted for a certain dearly remembered pond where
a boy named Dick and his friends had been wont to repair for fishing and
swimming and many a feat of derring-do. But they never found it; only
houses already old, and even office-buildings, in the place where it
might have been.

And in those long and lonely walks they met no friends. It was as if for
Richard Darcy the streets of Louisville were peopled by the dead.

Joan had suffered for her father even more than for herself. Somehow she
felt that she was better able to bear things than her father. And in her
inner consciousness, lonely as she was for her mother, and must always
be, she knew that the misery in her heart was a thing that would pass.
She was too young to be so sad for long.

Old Ellen wisely kept her busy with her preparations for
boarding-school, her father having announced his intention of complying
scrupulously with his dead wife's wishes, no matter at what cost to
himself. Joan thought this very generous of him, although the cost was
figurative rather than literal, as Mrs. Darcy's little property was
willed to her child, with himself as guardian. Sometimes she had been a
little ashamed of herself for the willingness with which she prepared to
leave him, the eagerness with which she longed for the merry
companionships and irresponsibilities of school again. But perhaps it
was natural enough, considering that throughout that dreary summer her
sole companions had been her grief-stricken father, the servant Ellen,
and the sympathetic maiden cousins, who would have felt it indelicate to
so much as smile in the presence of such deep mourning.

Toward the end of the summer she made one other acquaintance, thanks to
the above-mentioned lingerie. One of the sudden summer wind-storms which
occur sometimes in the Ohio Valley landed in their yard one Monday
morning a garment that had strayed unmistakably from the clothes line
across the alley; a trifle of palest silk and lace and blue ribbons
which Ellen Neal eyed with dark suspicion, but which Joan privately
determined to copy for herself so soon as finances permitted.

Monday being the day when Ellen's temper was at its most difficult, Joan
decided to abate her dignity to the point of returning the article
herself; and so she made her way, looking very young and touching in her
homemade black frock, to the front entrance of the house across the
alley. And there by good luck she met, just alighting in her
porte-cochere from a most imposing limousine, a person who was
indubitably the owner of the strayed garment; a plump, blonde, dimpled
lady who suggested pink _crepe de Chine_ and blue satin bows all over
her. She greeted Joan with an effulgence that seemed out of all
proportion to its cause, until in the course of conversation it
transpired that she, like the Darcys, was a newcomer in Louisville, and
rather lonely. Her name was Mrs. Calloway, and she came, as she vaguely
explained, from "across the river."

"It isn't as easy to get acquainted here as I thought it would be," she
admitted naively, "Still," she added with her dimpling smile, "I expect
folks will be friendly enough, once they get to know me, don't you
think?"

"Of course they will!" murmured Joan quite sincerely; for despite the
woman's patent vulgarity, there was something attractive about her. One
felt above all things that she was kind; and just then kindness meant a
good deal to the lonely girl.

This kindness began at once to manifest itself. Elaborate desserts and
salads, in very ornate dishes, made their way across the alley to the
Darcy table; obligations scrupulously returned by Ellen with pickles and
preserves of her own making. There were other generosities, more
difficult to return in kind; candy, automobile drives, hothouse flowers,
the latter evidently meant for the grave where Mary Darcy lay among
strangers.

Over these attentions Ellen Neal grumbled frequently. "Your pa certainly
ain't noticin' much these days, or he'd never let you get so thick with
a strange woman we don't know nothin' about, Joan."

"A strange _lady_, Ellen," corrected Joan with dignity.

"Humph! Lady is as lady does. Look at her face, all painted up like a
sign-board!"

"Southern ladies quite frequently rouge," said Joan out of her recent
observations; but she did not pursue the subject, for she herself had
doubts as to her father's approval of this new acquaintance. Richard
Darcy was no democrat. He had been heard frequently to state, as one
rather proud of the confession, that he had no use whatever for the
_canaille_ (which he pronounced "_canile_.")

Hence she was a little embarrassed and uneasy when, one Sunday morning
as she and her father were starting on their weekly visit to the one bit
of his native soil owned so far by Richard Darcy--his wife's grave--a
limousine drew up at their door, out of which beamed the face of Mrs.
Calloway, beneath a broad pink hat.

"I suspected you'd be off to the cemetery this fine morning," she called
out cheerily, "and I thought I'd come and take you, you and your father.
Hop right in, both of you. No, it won't be a bit of trouble. I've
nothing else to do, and I always did love a cemetery anyway--it's the
first place I go to whenever I strike a new town."

Joan glanced nervously at her father, wondering how he would take this
initial encounter with Mrs. Calloway. But after a moment's pause of
sheer astonishment, the Major's native gallantry came to the rescue, and
he advanced for the introduction with all the manner of one about to be
presented at court.

They found themselves bowling along at a smart clip among the
churchgoers and the more lively joy-riders, out for a Sunday's pleasure,
which thronged the avenue that sultry August morning.

"Now isn't this better than a poky old street-car?" demanded Mrs.
Calloway archly.

The Major responded in kind. "Undoubtedly! Particularly in the matter of
company."

Joan's liking for her kind-hearted neighbor had suffered a sudden
eclipse. Ellen was right about her--"Lady is as lady does." It was worse
than vulgar to force herself upon them at such a time--it was unfeeling,
indecent. She envied her father's poise. She had never seen him appear
to such advantage as upon this trying occasion, in his new, cheap black
suit which had not as yet had time to acquire spots and wrinkles, his
fine features showing the ravages of sorrow, his handsome gray head bent
courteously toward this voluble companion as though her every word were
priceless. Manners, she reflected, cannot be assumed on occasion like
garments, but are a part of the very texture of a personality. She could
not imagine her father anything but suavely courteous, even under the
most untoward circumstance.

Nevertheless, beneath her pride in him lingered an odd fear lest, now
that he had an audience, he might be moved to oratory over her mother's
grave. With Richard Darcy emotion and the expression of it were usually
simultaneous. Joan's unresponsiveness (a trait which she hated in
herself, but could not help) had hitherto kept her father somewhat in
check; but in the presence of a kindly warmth of sympathy like Mrs.
Calloway's there was no telling what might happen.

The Major, however, contented himself with murmuring, as he approached
the grave, "She was very, very dear to me!" in so touching a voice that
Mrs. Calloway openly wiped her eyes, exclaiming, "You poor man! Don't
you think I understand--I, who've laid away two of them?"

Joan moved hastily out of earshot, leaving the pair to reminiscence.
Talk of things that hurt was to the girl like pouring acid upon an open
wound; but if it helped her poor father, by all means let it help him.
She had never made the mistake of thinking that because his grief was
facile it was any the less strong and real. His utter helplessness, his
stunned amaze that the wife he so sorely needed could have gone away and
left him to bear the vicissitudes of life without her, were as piteous
to his daughter as the wailing grief of a child. If she could have
comforted him in any way other than by speech she would have done so. In
the presence of great emotion she was dumb--though she sometimes thought
she might be able to write him what she felt. Often at night she lay
awake for hours, wondering how she could drive out of his eyes that
baffled, frightened look which always came when things went wrong with
him, and which only her mother had been able to banish....

It haunted her all through the months which followed, that look of her
father's; and sometimes in the midst of school-girl gaieties she would
fall suddenly silent, thinking that she had no right to enjoy herself
because he was there alone in the city of his childhood which seemed to
have forgotten him. Joan was not yet quite the hard young egotist she
intended to become.

And so when toward the end of her journey the train slid into a pleasant
country, mellow with the evening sun, long reaches of rolling pasture
and hill and fertile bottom-land that meant Kentucky, something welled
up in the girl's heart deeper than glamour of place, stronger than
regret for her sheltered little past, than fear and hope for her
unguessed future; perhaps the deepest and strongest feeling life plants
in the human soul--the blood-tie. Weak or brave, fraud or fool or
honorable gentleman--perhaps a little of all these things--it was her
father who waited there for a woman to come and make him a home again;
and Joan was ready.




CHAPTER IV


The fellow-traveler who had incurred Miss Darcy's displeasure by a
too-active sympathy was much pleased, being of a sentimental turn of
mind, to witness a family reunion which presently took place in the
station at Louisville. A tall, slender gentleman of a youngish
Confederate colonel type--gray mustache and imperial, with a soft hat
set very slightly to one side of his handsome head--detached himself
from the crowd with a cry of, "Here I am, Dollykins!"

Whereupon the girl dropped all her belongings, and cast herself upon him
speechless, to be lifted well off the ground and hugged and kissed very
thoroughly.

"Fine! She's got a father, anyway, and a bully old bird at that,"
thought the young man, who had never owned either father or mother or
much of anything else that he could remember. It was his further
privilege to hurry after the pair with a suit-case, some magazines, and
a box of candy which both had characteristically forgotten.

He was thanked by Major Darcy with an affable smile, and by his daughter
with a curt, impersonal nod of dismissal after Sister Mary Joseph's best
manner; which also pleased him, for he was by no means a thin-skinned
young man, and preferred his gentlewomen haughty. He followed the pair
far enough to observe the vehicle to which the father was obviously
conducting her.

"Humph!" he said to himself; "rich people!" and turned away, rather
disappointed. (Why this should be, the writer cannot say, being merely a
chronicler of facts.)

Joan's flow of excited babble paused as she herself saw this vehicle.
"Goodness! Are we going home in a taxicab? What grandeur!" she murmured,
mentally figuring out the tariff. Then the monogram on the door
enlightened her.

"Oh, it's Mrs. Calloway's," she said, relieved, a little ashamed to have
quite forgotten the existence of their well-meaning neighbor. "How good
of her to send it for me!" she added with a giggle, recalling her recent
game of Pretend. "All you need to do to complete the picture, Daddy, is
to say, 'Home, James!'"

Major Darcy obligingly murmured, "Home, James!" The chauffeur touched
his cap, and enclosed them in the perfumed elegance of the limousine.

Joan gave a crow of laughter, and rubbed her cheek affectionately
against her father's sleeve. This was like old times indeed, happy old
times, when in his lighter moments the Major had frequently entered into
the spirit of her play. The contact of his sleeve was unusually soft,
and she suddenly held him at arm's length to see him better.

"Why, Major Darcy! If you haven't gone and bought yourself a new suit in
honor of the occasion. A beauty, too!"

He surveyed what he could of himself complacently. "The fellow has given
me rather a good fit, I think."

Joan gasped. "'The fellow!' Then it's not a ready-made--you've actually
been to a tailor for it? Oh, Daddy darling!" she cried excitedly, "have
you been making money?"

The Major's eyebrows lifted. "I believe," he remarked, "that I have
usually made money, have I not? Sufficient, at least, to keep my family
comfortable."

Joan was reminded with a jerk of Darcy traditions. "Of course!" She
flushed. "I didn't mean--"

And suddenly she realized that the look she had been so long dreading to
see in his eyes, that expression of anxiety which was almost fear, had
quite disappeared. There was an air about him of security, of
nonchalance, as one who would say, "Bring on your Indians! Who's
afraid?" (Not that the Major would have condescended to know the meaning
of the family expression, "Indians.")

Joan gave his hand a quick little squeeze that was oddly maternal. "I'm
so glad, Dad," she said quietly; and went on to speak of other things.

They turned into the street where home was. Silence fell upon her. The
prospect of facing her mother's absence was more difficult than she had
thought it would be. At least there was Ellen to comfort her; gruff,
matter-of-fact old Ellen, always at her crossest when most deeply moved.
She pinned her thoughts to Ellen.

The Major's recent prosperity seemed not to have affected his
dwelling-place as yet. As they drew near, Joan saw even in the dusk that
the little lawn in front needed attention; nor was there so much as a
light in the window to greet her--Ellen was always so careful about the
gasbill. Then, as the limousine did not stop, she realized the For Rent
sign on the door.

"Why, Dad, we've moved!" she cried with an odd pang at her heart. "Oh,
but where?"

"Wait and see. 'Lay-lows for meddlers,'" he smiled, pleased with his
little stage-effect.

The limousine bowled smoothly around the corner into the fashionable
avenue beyond; and Joan thought, with a habit of anxiety beyond her
years, that the new money would not last long if they were to live in
such a neighborhood as this. But they stopped at a door she remembered,
an imposing door with a porte-cochere, where, still as in her game of
Pretend, a lady in a tea-gown stood waiting for them. Not, however, her
mother.

"Here you are at last, girlie!" cried the cheery voice of Mrs. Calloway;
and she was received into a voluminous pink chiffon embrace, highly
scented with the latest thing in perfumes.

Joan fought her way quite rudely out of this embrace, feeling
suffocated. Her knees had begun to tremble.

"Are--are we visiting you!" she quavered, piteously putting off the
inevitable.

The lady laughed, a laugh as plump and soft and cushiony as the rest of
her. "There, now, Dickie; I don't believe you've had the nerve to tell
her yet!"

She rustled over and stood beside the Major, slightly in front of him,
so that she could lean back archly against his shoulder; a position
which seemed to bring an arm automatically into position about her
waist.

"Dollykins," said Richard Darcy, clearing his throat and not quite
meeting the girl's wide gaze, "this is my--my graduation gift to you.
Your new mamma!"




CHAPTER V


Joan was alone at last in such a bed as she had never occupied in her
life, even in her most luxurious games of Pretend. To her inexperience
the sheets felt as if made of softest silk--at its crest the Darcy
establishment had never run to fine linen--and they were edged with lace
which Joan longed frugally to transfer to a best petticoat; only that
there seemed no need for her to trouble further about best petticoats,
nor about anything else. Under the eager guidance of her "new mamma,"
drawer after drawer in the room she occupied had been opened to disclose
piles of exquisite underthings, of the sort Joan had first encountered
upon the Calloway clothes lines, except that these were white instead of
pink.

"Pink's _my_ color," explained the former Mrs. Calloway. "Besides, white
lawngerie seems sort of better for a girl that's never been married,
don't you think? Even if it isn't so becoming. 'Tain't as if there was
anybody to see her in it," she added, with a conscious blush.

Joan found no suitable comment to make upon this treasure-trove. Her
lips would not utter anything beyond a perfunctory "Thank you," even
when further investigation discovered a closet hung with dresses of
every sort, with peignoirs, with motor-coats and dainty wraps, with
everything in the way of finery which every girl alive hopes at some
time to possess, but which the daughter of Richard Darcy had learned to
look upon from afar with an air of indifference.

"Are these all for me?" she asked dully.

"Of course they are! Just a few little models I had sent up on
approval." (The ex-Mrs. Calloway invariably referred to her costumes in
affectionate diminutives, as "little gowns," "little negligees," "little
hats," etc., though the adjective could rarely be said to fit them.) "If
these don't suit we'll get others--though anything ought to look good on
your form, dearie." She added, clasping her hands, "It certainly is fun
shoppin' for a daughter of your own!"--an outburst which might have
struck some responsive chord in a heart less young than Joan's, less
hard and tight and bitter with the tears that would not come.

Major Darcy had observed her apathy under this rain of largesse with
some disapproval. It was not the first time he had secretly wished that
his daughter might have inherited a trifle more of the Darcy manner. At
length, as the girl stood looking about her new room silently, still
with the strange lack of comment that seemed like indifference, he
ventured a remonstrance.

"I don't think you quite realize how much time and thought and trouble
your--er, your mother and I have expended on these little surprises for
your home-coming, Dollykins. Or you would be more appreciative."

"_My mother!_" repeated Joan to herself with a sick gasp.

It was the bride who came to her rescue. "She's tired out, Major, that's
all. And no wonder! She hardly ate a bite of dinner. You go right to bed
and sleep, girlie," she advised comfortably. "In the morning you'll be
better able to enjoy all your pretties."

So Joan was at last alone, wondering whether she would ever be able to
enjoy anything again; alone in a strange room crowded with large blond
bird's-eye maple furniture which reminded her oddly of her step-mother;
with pale blue walls, a blue rug, blue silk covers on chairs and bed,
blue stationery spread out on the desk, all to match. There was nothing,
not a chair, nor book nor picture, to remind its forlorn inhabitant of
home; until suddenly, lost amid the glitter of the silver on the
dressing-table, she discovered a faded photograph of her mother which
her father had for many years carried in his pocket. This she jerked out
of the opulent silver frame that disguised it, and held hungrily to her
cheek, going to bed with it finally under her pillow. It did not occur
to her to wonder who had put it there. (But it was not Richard Darcy.)

Yet still the tears would not come. She lay staring into the dark with
hot, dry, aching eyes, repeating agonizingly to herself the questions
she had not found courage to ask her father--foolish, trivial questions
that seemed almost irrelevant in the face of this overwhelming
calamity.... What had he done with the furniture, their furniture, the
dear, shabby tables and chairs and hangings which were part of the home
Mary Darcy had given her life in making?... And where was Ellen? What
had he done with Ellen? Was there to be nothing left?

Once she whispered aloud, "How _could_ he?"--but resolutely turned her
mind away from that. It did not bear thinking of. The luxury of the room
seemed to crowd upon her, choking her.... The price of her father's
shame!...

It seemed to her near morning when her door opened, softly. She began to
shiver, thinking it must be her father come for the intimate explanatory
talk which was inevitable between them. What could she say to him? How
could she ever find anything to say to her father again?

But it was not Richard Darcy who tiptoed in. The lamp beside her bed
clicked on, revealing a good deal of the former Mrs. Calloway in a
marvellous nightgown, her golden head as carefully coiffed as for a
ball.

"Major's off and going strong," she announced, "so I slipped away to see
how you were gettin' on, dearie. I Had a kind of feelin' you wouldn't be
asleep yet. I'm like that myself in a strange bed.... Look here," her
voice changed as she saw the white and miserable face among the
pillows--"you aren't holding it against your papa and me, girlie,
because we sprung this on you as a surprise? I _told_ Major we ought to
wait till you came home! But it was you who introduced us, you know; and
I knew it would be all right as soon as we got to know each other
better. And Major wouldn't hear to waiting, was bound and determined to
have me just as soon as he could get me. Men,"--she laughed her plump,
merry laugh--"are such babies when it comes to havin' what they want
right away, ain't they?"

"Are they?" said Joan dully.

"You take it from me they are! A man that doesn't want you quick don't
want you at all. And I must say your father needed marryin' more than
any one I _ever_ saw! Spots all over his clothes, and that shiny in the
back you could see your face in him. Your mother must have had a time
keepin' that man neat! Besides, if we'd waited till you came, what would
we have done with you on the honeymoon? Not," she added coyly, "that
it's over yet, by any means! When he was on his death-bed Calloway said
to me, says he, 'Effie May, our honeymoon never has been over, has it?'
Some women are that way, just naturally affectionate and fond of makin'
men feel at home. And both of us were real lonesome.... You don't blame
me for marrying Major, do you?" she finished rather wistfully.

Joan said after a long pause, "No, I don't think I blame you, Mrs.
Calloway."

The other gave an unexpected squeal of mirth. "Goodness' sakes, don't
call me _that_! If you don't feel like callin' me 'mamma' yet"--(there
was a hopeful pause, which Joan did not fill)--"then you might as well
call me Effie May. I'm not so awfully much older than you, I guess--I
was only sixteen when I eloped with my first. But there's one thing I
wanted to tell you"--(her voice lost its confident note and became
rather shy). "I married your father as much to get you as to get him,
dearie. A man's easy enough to pick up anywhere, goodness knows! if
you've got the looks. But a child--" she sighed. "That's something else
again. I used to think I'd like to adopt one, only Calloway didn't want
to be bothered--Say, it was more fun than anything I've ever done in my
life, shopping for lawngerie and little models and all, and telling the
girls in the stores they were for my little girl just coming home from
boarding-school!..."

At this juncture, for some inexplicable reason--perhaps the warmth of a
kindly human presence, perhaps sheer rage with the vulgar, impossible
creature who, having purchased her father, expected also to purchase
her--whatever brought them, Joan's tears suddenly arrived--a torrent, a
deluge of them; in the midst of which her new mamma, with more tact than
might have been expected of her, disappeared.




CHAPTER VI


"Get up, Jo! Time you was gettin' up. Come, come--it's ten o'clock!"

A familiar, relentless voice penetrated Joan's consciousness at last,
and she screwed her swollen eyelids down tighter and even managed a
reproving snore, wondering whether the halcyon days would ever come when
she might be allowed to sleep her sleep out in the morning. Probably
not, so long as Ellen Neal was within calling distance. The woman had a
horror of what she called shiftless ways. Once in a moment of special
exasperation she had been heard to mutter, "That's the chief thing
that's the matter with your pa--he's never ready to get up in the
morning!"--a remark which had remained in Joan's memory.

Now the sheets were suddenly jerked off her, and the relentless voice
continued, "No use pretendin' you're asleep when you ain't. Here's your
breakfast they've sent up to you, child, just as if you was sick a-bed.
Humph!"

Suddenly reality came back upon her with full force--horrible reality;
and she jumped up in bed and flung her arms around the old servant's
neck, clinging tight, as she had done many a time before when something
frightened her.

"Oh, Nellen, Nellen!" she moaned. "It's you! I thought you had deserted
me, too!"

The woman stood immobile in this embrace, making no effort to return it.
But her eyes blinked a little.

"Sho! What would I want to do that for? Don't be silly--Look out! There
now, if you haven't gone and upset the coffee all over them fancy
sheets! Coffee's hard to get out, too. That's what comes of havin' your
vittles in bedrooms, where they don't belong."

The tears, which had threatened to take possession of Joan again, turned
into a burst of wild laughter, "No matter! Plenty more where they come
from, Nellen. What is a lace-trimmed sheet to my new mamma? I expect the
very dishcloths are hand-embroidered. Behold the abode of cash, Ellen,
cash! Isn't it grand? Oh," she cried, her voice breaking, "_why_ didn't
you come to me last night! Didn't you know how I'd need you?"

"I didn't know you was here, child, till I come this morning to see when
him and her was expectin' you."

The girl's face fell. "Why, Ellen! Aren't you living here?"

"Me? In this house? I wouldn't so demean myself," said the other primly.

"Do you mean to say"--Joan's cheeks were hot--"that after all these
years, and everything you've done for us, my father has _let you go_?"

Ellen tossed her head. "'Twan't none of his lettin', child. I told him
that all things considered I'd ruther sew for my livin'. And so I would.
Your time's your own that way, and you see more of folks. I like folks.
I must say," she added conscientiously, "that woman--your pa's wife--was
real kind about offerin' to get me work with a dressmaker. But Ellen
Neal don't have to be beholden to nobody, thank you!"

"And where do you live?"

A mysterious smile twinkled in the woman's eyes. "Some day when you're
good and sick of all this fancy flubdubbery" (she indicated with a
disparaging hand the elegancies of the blue chamber) "you come and see
where I live, Jo, and come often. I've got me two as nice rooms as ever
you seen. And--I got my own furniture for 'em, too, real grand furniture
I bought up cheap at an auction room. There's some carved chairs, and a
walnut desk with a bookcase on top, and some blue velvet porteers, and a
mahogany bed with the tester sawed off--"

Comprehension dawned on Joan. "Ellen! _Our_ furniture!" she cried.

Ellen nodded. "Some of it. As much as I could git. I'm keepin' it for
you till you git a home of your own to put it in, Joie. I sort of
thought your ma would want me to."

Joan was weeping again, not the devastating flood of the past night, but
sweet and healing tears, as good for strained nerves as a summer rain is
good for flowers.

"You old wretch!" she gulped. "Where did you get the money?"

The other grinned. "Any time Ellen Neal gets caught without plenty in
her stockin'-fut, you may be sure the Scots blood is failin' her! I'm a
whole lot richer than I'm willin' to let some folks know. Why, I could
set idle, if I'd a mind to, the rest of my life--only I don't hold with
settin' idle just because you got a right." (Long afterwards it occurred
to Joan that Ellen, who was not given to discoursing on her own affairs,
must have had some reason for thus bragging of her unsuspected riches.)
"There's nothing," she added rather irrelevantly, "that makes a person
contented with the place she's in like knowin' she can go somewhere else
if she's a mind to."

What barrier there had been between servant and mistress--a fluctuating
barrier at best, dependent upon Joan's varying conceptions of her own
dignity--had gone down forever under that rain of grateful tears, and
Joan felt free to ask some of the questions of which her heart was
full--how, for instance, the affair between her father and Mrs. Calloway
had begun.

"How?" repeated Ellen grimly. "Well, when a lone female and a lone
he-male ain't got nothin' to keep 'em apart but an alley-fence, and her
with paint on her face till she looks like a fat sixteen, and food on
her table every day as good as a two-dollar table d'hote, what can you
expect? I wa'n't surprised myself. Nor," she added quietly, "I don't
believe your ma would be, Joan."

"Oh, but how it must have hurt her!"

Both spoke in low tones, as if the spirit of Mary Darcy might be
lingering near enough to overhear.

"I ain't so sure about that," mused Ellen. "I ain't so sure! Your ma
always set great store on havin' the Major comfortable--'Ellen,' she
said to me that last day, when we knew what was comin'--'Ellen, be sure
to keep him _comfortable_ here at home, so he won't be lookin' for it
somewheres else.' There's worse things can happen to a widow-man than
gettin' married again."

"Oh, but if I'd been here to look after him myself!" wailed Joan. "If
you had only told me what was happening! I might have come back and
stopped it!"

"About as much chance as stopping a fire-hydrant that's blown the top
off. You're a smart child, Joan, always was; but you don't stand a show
against that woman your pa's married--nor I wouldn't want you to," she
added cryptically. "You wasn't raised that way.--Anyhow it wasn't none
of my business. And just remember this, child, it's none of yours. It's
none of yours!"

After she had gone, a sense of something heartening and bracing remained
with Joan; and as she brushed out her straight, heavy hair with new
silver-backed brushes which bore her own initials, a typical Ellenism
recurred to her: "There's nothing that makes a person contented with the
place she's in like knowing she can go somewheres else if she's a mind
to."

"At least," she thought suddenly, "I'm independent of father. Mother
left her property to me--I can get it whenever I ask for it.... And now
I understand why!"

Mary Darcy had been a very far-sighted woman.




CHAPTER VII


It was long before Joan recovered from the dazed sensation her father's
little surprise had produced in her mind. Perhaps she never did quite
recover from it. Something died within her; a naif belief in the wisdom
of her elders, the ultimate rightness of existing things, which once
gone never returns again. If it is true that we live in experience
rather than in years, Joan came to her majority over night.

It was her father's attitude which amazed her most. Had he seemed in the
least apologetic, in the least ashamed or embarrassed by the quality of
the woman he had put into her mother's place, she would have been ready
to pity and console and help him make the best of a grave mistake. But
the Major's attitude was that of the cat which has not only eaten the
canary, but digested it and found it extremely beneficial to the system.
Far from seeming apologetic, he appeared rather proud of his
performance. There was something almost pathetic in his content with his
new prosperity, with the ease and luxury of the establishment of which
he found himself head.

Joan sometimes thought, with a scornful sort of pity, "How Dad must have
_hated_ to be poor!"

Certainly he took to wealth, to which he had always professed himself
indifferent, with an alacrity which surprised his daughter.

She had opportunity to notice, too, for the first time in action,
Richard Darcy's chief and perhaps sole equipment for the unequal battle
of life; his talent for making friends. Not for keeping them--that is a
separate art, calling for certain efforts, certain reticences, above all
certain abstentions of which Richard Darcy was temperamentally
incapable. But in the art of creating admiring and useful acquaintances
out of raw material he had few equals, even among his own profession.

Mary Darcy had kept herself and her child for the most part aloof from
these easily acquired friends of her husband, though they were
invariably quite presentable--(as has been hinted, the Major had no use
whatever for what he called "the canile"). Possibly this was owing to
some odd Puritan scruples on Mary's part about combining business with
pleasure....

But now that business had no longer to be combined with pleasure,
Richard Darcy was free to exercise to the full his gift for being
agreeable, without afterthought. It was perhaps fortunate that his new
wife had made few friends of her own, a fact which left him unhampered
in the matter of what he called quite seriously "resuming his position."

Joan found that he was no longer forgotten in the city of his youth. The
older residents had already been made aware by means of engraved and
crested announcements that Richard Throckmorton Darcy had returned to
their midst for the purpose of wedding one Effie May Smith Calloway, and
that the bridal pair would be at home after a certain date at a very
good address on Elmtree Street. Whither quite a respectable number of
them hastened, if only out of curiosity, to leave cards.

What they found was an extremely affable, leisurely, and
prosperous-looking host, an establishment which appeared able and
willing to maintain those traditions of Southern hospitality which have
latterly fallen somewhat into disuse, and a rather silent young girl
whose manner atoned for the perhaps excessive cordiality of her
step-mother. Some of the callers did not come again, even under
pressure; but on the whole Joan realized that the old friends in whom
she had almost ceased to believe were about to take the Darcy family
belatedly to their bosoms, indifferent to the substitution of a Mrs.
Calloway for her mother.

It was the girl's first experience of the omnipotence of money; an
experience which if it comes young enough will make a cynic out of a
congenital optimist, which Joan was not.

To do the new Mrs. Darcy justice, she was an adaptable and, in her way,
a tactful creature who had already in her admiration of the Major and
his daughter, learned to modify her speech and behavior rather
touchingly. And her frank delight with what she called "breaking into
society," may have been rather disarming to society; or to such portion
of it as found its way to the imposing house on Elmtree Street. She was
extremely cordial to her guests, urging them to come often, to have more
iced tea and cake, to take candy home to the children, to try the
Major's cigars and whisky, for which he had an undoubted palate. If the
women looked at her a little askance, the men were loud in her praises,
and obeyed her urgings to come often.

Effie May, encouraged, began shortly to seek new worlds to conquer.

"Well, what next?" she demanded one night at dinner, after an afternoon
of callers, stifling a wide pink yawn with the palm of a much beringed
hand. "Your old families are all very well, Dickie boy, refined and
classy and all that--but, my God, they ain't exciting! Now are they?
Isn't there anybody in Louisville born since the Civil War?"

"If there is, I'm afraid I don't know it," admitted the Major, smiling
indulgently. "You see the people who were young when I left are young no
longer."

"So we've noticed," murmured his bride, making a companionable grimace
at Joan. "But we don't want to spend the rest of our lives in the
baldhead row, do we, girlie? You've got to find us something under sixty
to pal around with, Hubby mine, that's all there is to it. See?"

One of her step-mother's most unbearable traits, to Joan, was her habit
of calling the Major absurd comic-supplement pet names. But his dignity
seemed not to suffer from it. In fact he expanded visibly under the
treatment, like a dog whose ears are being tickled.

"Your commands are law, my angel," he said. "Just how would you suggest
that I go about it?"

Effie May ruminated, while the two Darcys watched her--with, however,
somewhat varying expressions. The Major appeared to be admiring, indeed
gloating over, the appearance she made at the head of her bountifully
appointed table, in a dress not niggardly in its display of her
bountifully appointed charms. His eye followed appreciatively the curve
of her plump arm as it disappeared into enveloping laces.

Joan, on the other hand, watched her step-mother warily. There was
something about the woman she could not fathom, for all her surface
simplicity. She felt, beneath the other's careless, easy good-nature, a
certain force, a driving power, in the grip of which she and her father
were mere helpless puppets. Effie May would use them always for her own
ends--whatever those ends might be. Why had she chosen to saddle
herself, free and rich and independent as she was, with an impoverished
gentleman and his grown-up daughter? Certainly at that age, thought Joan
(Effie May was in the neighborhood of forty), people could not possibly
fall in love! No, there was something mysterious about her
step-mother....

"I have it," said the lady suddenly. "The Country Club! I see in the
society column that everything nowadays is going on at the Country Club.
We'll have to join that."

"I believe," interposed Joan, flushing, "that people have to be invited
to join a club, don't they, Father?"

"All right--We'll _be_ invited. Won't we, Dickums?" said the bride, with
a ravishing smile in the Major's direction.

He rose to the occasion. "Certainly, my love," he replied.

And they were invited. At any rate, a week or two later found the Darcy
family dining alone at the Country Club, among various other little
table groups, all of whom seemed to know each other intimately.

To be in and not of this friendly assemblage filled Joan with that most
miserable of all sensations, crowd-loneliness. Even the Major wore a
rather fixed and nervous smile, and mentioned to his wife and daughter
at intervals that Louisville society had changed very much since he used
to frequent it. Only Effie May seemed quite unperturbed, gazing about
her smilingly, and tapping her slippered foot, and nodding her head in
time to the music; meeting the curious glances which strayed in their
direction with a frank interest of her own which might have seemed bold
if it were not so like a pleased child's.

Joan, intercepting one or two of these glances, looked her step-mother
over critically, and to her relief found her less flamboyant than usual.
She was dressed in white--"Handsome white, not girly-girly muslin like
yours. I'm too stout for that," she had said wisely to Joan--The girl
reflected that it is difficult to look vulgar in white. Mrs. Darcy was
not appreciably different in appearance from many another rather
overdressed matron there, even in the matter of rouge and touched-up
hair.

As for her father--Richard Darcy would have been a distinguished figure
in any assemblage he chose to enter, with his six feet of gallantly
carried avoirdupois, his finely modeled head, his gray mustache and
imperial concealing a mouth that might otherwise have left something to
be desired. He wore that night--and wore well--clothes of the palest
gray flannel, with socks and buckskin shoes to match, and a gray stripe
in his white tie, and a gray monogram embroidered upon the exquisite
cambric of his handkerchief. This was the parent who a few weeks ago she
had associated irrevocably in her mind with spots and frayed collars!
She found herself wishing that her mother could see him now--she would
be so proud of him!...

To her own appearance Joan gave little consideration. She had discovered
that the great advantage of good clothes is that you no longer have to
think about them. She was quite unaware of the value in contrasts she
afforded--her small, dark, smoothly combed head lifted proudly on its
long neck, the awkward grace of her thin young body, the pale oval of
her face lit by surprisingly vivid eyes, of the sort that are dreamy and
shadowed until excitement turns them into soft blue fire. She was
excited that night, a little frightened. She did not smile at all, but
there was that about her lips--sensitive, wistful, faintly
drooping--that made more than one person who glanced at the Darcy table
wonder what the smile would be like if it came.

When the dancing began, Effie May's exuberance could no longer contain
itself.

"This is something like!" she cried. "This is what I call life! Come on,
Dick--'Waltz me around again, Willie, around, around, around!'"

"But," protested the Major, "it is some time since I have waltzed, my
love--"

"Never mind, you'll waltz with me! Anybody can dance with me. The boys
used to call me Lightfoot Ef--Oh, but you'll have to get a partner for
Joan, first, of course; I forgot we had a family along."

The girl flushed, aghast at the thought of her father whirling in the
midst of that whirling throng. "No, no, Effie May, please--!" she urged.
"Let's just sit here quietly and look on."

The other laughed aloud. "Naturally! That's what we've come to a dance
for, to sit against the wall and look on--Nonsense! Go and find your
child a partner, Dick, and hurry back. My feet just won't keep still."
She was humming gaily in time with the orchestra.

The Major, gazing a little blankly at the crowd of strangers before him,
obediently went forth to do her bidding, and Effie May seized the
occasion to give a little womanly advice.

"Don't you fret, Joan--remember there's as many young fellows in the
world crazy to know girls as there are girls crazy to know them. And
dearie"--her voice sank to a friendly whisper--"warm up to 'em a
little, can't you? Jolly 'em along. Hot air, you know, talk! No
matter what you say, just keep talking. That don't-touch-me,
butter-wouldn't-melt-in-my-mouth air may be all right with the nuns and
the old families but it won't go down with the men. Believe me, dearie!
I know."

It was a well-meant effort, which had the effect of congealing the
already subdued Joan into something resembling a marble effigy.

The Major shortly returned, bearing urbanely in his wake a blond young
man who seemed not too unwilling.

"I want you to meet my wife, sir," he was saying. "I want to have the
pleasure of presenting you to my daughter. Fancy the coincidence, my
dears--this gentleman turns out to be the son of an old schoolmate!"

Effie May welcomed them with enthusiasm. "Good for you! I had my money
on you, Dickums! Five minutes, and the son of a schoolmate! It's a
record!--Ta-ta, young people! Enjoy yourselves," was her valedictory as
she whirled the Major away, waving her hand over his shoulder.

Joan stared aghast at the blond young man, who said, "She is an awfully
jolly sort, your mother, isn't she?"

"Very jolly," agreed Joan faintly. "But she's not my mother."

"Oh!"

A silence fell. He seemed to be waiting for her to break it. She gulped,
and said in a firm voice, "Did you come to ask me to dance?"

The young man indicated politely that such was his intention.

"You couldn't very well help yourself, could you?" she remarked, and
suddenly burst out laughing--rather hysterical laughter in which the
young man joined embarrassedly.

"Of course if you'd rather talk--" he murmured.

Joan jumped to her feet. "Oh, but I wouldn't! I'd rather do _anything_
than talk--no matter what I say, just talk, warm up to 'em, hot air--I
mean," she explained desperately, "I'm much too shy to talk!"

"You don't sound very shy."

"I know--they're the worst sort, the ones who hide it."

They commenced silently to dance. Presently he confessed, "I'm
rather--shy, myself."

"Goody!" she exclaimed with relief. "Then we needn't bother to talk at
all."

They parted quite reluctantly when a whistle blew for the "circle"--a
useful innovation for breaking up relations, by whose aid Joan found
herself exchanging partners at intervals throughout the evening without
finding herself too long on the hands of any. She blessed the inventor
of the circle. Youth and a pair of winged feet came to her rescue, and
she forgot her strangeness in sheer joy of motion. The people she danced
with that night were not men; they were as trees walking, for all the
personal memory she kept of them.

But when the music finally thumped itself out, and Effie May, a trifle
blown and moist about the brow, again resumed charge of her scattered
family, saying, "Well, dearie, you've had a pretty good time, haven't
you?"--Joan was able to answer with some surprise that she had.

"Dancing," commented the Major, puffing, "is a very healthful exercise;
indeed, an esthetic exercise. The Greeks practised it, as I recall,
extensively, even in their riper years. My love, with a little
experience I think I shall easily master that step you call the fox
trot."

"Sure you will," encouraged she who had been called Lightfoot Ef,
patting his cheek maternally.




CHAPTER VIII


The Darcys' social career appeared to be well launched. Each Saturday
night found them at the Country Club, and no longer dining in
loneliness. Effie May speedily collected about her a group of congenial
spirits, for the most part young people, among whom she was extremely
popular--far more so than was Joan, who sometimes felt as if she were
the only elder present. Theirs was usually the most hilarious table in
the room. Corks popped freely, and there was much horse-play, and
throwing about of bread, and at a certain stage of the evening rather
frank persiflage in which, to Joan's relief, her step-mother took no
part. She laughed her cheery, plump laugh, and made no comment; but more
than once with a glance at her step-daughter, she managed quite deftly
to steer the conversation into other channels. Joan came to the
gratifying conclusion that her father's wife was afraid of her.

The Major at his end of the table devoted himself assiduously to his
duties as host, seeing that glasses were filled, distributing gallant
remarks among the ladies, constantly signing tickets. He was in his
element; expanding, positively glowing, with hospitality.

"Another cigar, my boy? Try this brand! Take several! Fill your pockets
with them. I can recommend them personally!"

There came to be several brands which he could recommend personally,
several vintages as well. The waiters hovered about him like cherubim
about the throne of grace, and he knew them all by name, and took an
interest in their families.

This lavish generosity, Joan reflected, was the spirit which gave the
old South its glamour, its traditions--to say nothing of its consequent
poverty. There was something rather fine and large about the Major's
apparent obliviousness of the fact that the money he spent so royally
did not belong to him.

"If Effie May does not worry, why should I?" argued his daughter with
herself. Her father's affairs were no longer her concern; if indeed they
had ever been. But she could not help taking a certain uneasy interest
in them.

"How do you happen to know enough people to invite to all these parties
of yours?" she asked Effie May, aware that the Darcy family was doing
rather more than its share of entertaining.

"Oh, you don't have to know people well to ask 'em to parties,"
explained the other innocently. "And once they eat with you, they're
your friends."

"That depends upon what you give them to eat!" interjected the Major,
chuckling.

It seemed a primitive conception of social relationships, but not on the
whole a false one. Joan thought of the Arab and his salt....

"Food," she wrote to Stefan Nikolai, "appears to be the Tie that Binds."

"What about drink?" he inquired on a post-card. (They did a good deal of
this staccato correspondence, Joan liking to exchange deep thoughts with
him, as she expressed it, "while they were hot.")

"Drink," she replied on another, "is the Tie that Loosens!..."

Stefan Nikolai was the only one of her friends with whom she had found
courage to discuss her father's marriage. Writing things out to him was
almost like writing them out to herself. It served somehow to clear her
mind. It is probable that Mr. Nikolai, a student of various phases of
the human problem, got a good deal of valuable vicarious experience out
of young Joan's letters. Certainly he encouraged them.

It was to him that she confided her discovery that social life is far
more pleasing after dinner than before. She was learning to count, as
surely as does many an experienced hostess, upon the help of the Tie
that Loosens. While she herself had not as yet developed her father's
palate for cocktails and fine vintages she appreciated their effect upon
her partners--for to her men so far were merely partners.

It was after dinner that Joan's part of the evening began. Then, thanks
to the Tie that Loosens, there was no longer need to make banal
conversation nor to listen to it, no need to pretend friendly interest
in young men to whom she was incurably a stranger, no need of anything
but to yield herself to the music and the first pair of arms that
offered, and float away into Dreamland.

There was something curiously sensuous to Joan about dancing. It acted
like a drug upon her fancy, stimulating, soothing. She was hardly aware
of whom she danced with, if he could dance. If he could not, she
stopped. This odd impersonality of hers was rather piquant to her
partners. Many a youth who was afraid to talk to "that quiet Darcy
girl--you never know what she's thinking about!"--was not afraid to
dance with her, whenever he got the chance.

At such times Joan had her rare moments of beauty. With flushed face,
loosened hair, and wide, dreaming eyes, she was as graceful as one of
the three circling maidens in the Primavera--the one who looks wistfully
over her shoulder at the oblivious youth. Unfortunately her lot was cast
among people who did not think in terms of Botticelli. Her step-mother
wondered sometimes whether curling-tongs and perhaps a little rouge
would make her look more like other girls....

Sometimes people came to the club who attracted Joan's
attention--quieter people than Effie May's friends, more simply dressed,
who never seemed to join in the accentuated hilarity after dinner. Once
in such a group she recognized the girl who had eyed her aloofly on the
train coming home from boarding school. Joan suddenly yearned to do some
aloof eyeing on her own account, now that she was no longer shabby but
wore a frock as smart as any in the room.

She watched her opportunity, and followed the stranger into the
dressing-room with some such truculent idea in view; but was disarmed by
the courtesy with which the other made room for her at a mirror, where
they powdered their noses side by side in amity. As she was leaving the
room, however, she heard the aloof one murmur to a friend: "What a lot
of strange people one sees at this club nowadays! I wonder where they
all come from? It's getting very mixed."

Joan went white with anger. She struggled with the temptation to explain
proudly that she was not a strange person, that her name entitled her to
any society she chose to enter, that it was her step-mother who was
"mixed," not she....

And then she remembered that it was only thanks to her step-mother that
she happened to be there at all.

For the moment this encounter with the enemy took away Joan's heart for
dancing. Crowd-loneliness got her by the throat. Was there always to be
just one of her, and so many of everybody else?

She slipped out on to a terrace that overlooked a valley with the great
river gleaming far off, still holding some faint glow of the sunset's
aftermath. There was a bench at the far end, lost in shadow, and she was
about to seat herself there when she saw that it was already occupied.

"Oh," she said, drawing back. "I didn't notice you!"

"Women rarely do," remarked a plaintive voice with a smile in it. "I'm
used to that. And yet I notice them, dreadfully!"

Joan laughed a little, and retreated. "I won't disturb you," she
murmured; but the voice held her.

"Oh, please! Please do. I want to be disturbed. I simply came here to
see my moonrise." A shadowy arm pointed out a dim glow over the trees to
eastward.

"Why _your_ moonrise, especially?"

"By right of discovery. I seem to be the only person aware of it.... May
I share it with you?"

"You are sure you wouldn't rather see it alone?"

"Goodness gracious!" cried the voice quite querulously, "what human
being ever wanted to watch a moonrise alone?"

Joan chuckled, and sat down to the first conversation she had enjoyed
since her last one with Stefan Nikolai--one of the few real
conversations, she thought afterwards, in her life.

Yet it was difficult to remember the many things they talked about.
Smoke, for one. He pointed out the dim loveliness of the city below,
towers and battlements and the airy span of a bridge against the
gray-gold sky.

"'Many-storied Camelot town,'" he said, musing. "Without the shrouding
smoke, what would it be? Factory chimneys, iron smoke-stacks, a
filtration plant--Ugliness, ugliness! Yet there are people in that town
who want to rid themselves of those billowing mists of rose and violet
and silver."

"I suppose," said Joan, "the beauty of smoke depends upon whether you're
down in it, getting smuts on your nose, or looking on from a hilltop."

"A question of perspective, you think? Hmnn--yes. Well, then" he said
reasonably, "by all means _get_ your perspective. Stick to the
hilltop--especially at sunset."

"We haven't all got wings to reach a hilltop with, you see. Nor yet
automobiles."

"I haven't, myself," he said. "I use trolley-cars.... Did it ever occur
to you what a marvel the trolley-car is? For a nickel--or at most a
dime--all Nature is yours to command; beechwoods in their autumn field
of the cloth of gold; little whispering streams breaking their winter
silence, fireflies dancing--to the tune of the 'Merry Widow' waltz," (as
that melody of the moment made itself audible from the house beyond).
"What a twilight! Fireflies, an afterglow, and the moonrise set to
music, all at once," he said under his breath. "And some one to share
them with!"

Joan was silent, flattered by the knowledge that this whimsical
gentleman was letting her into his thoughts.

"The beauty of such a moment is that one never loses it," he mused. "One
puts it away as people press flowers in books, to be looked at
when--when pleasant things need remembering. I thank God for a mind well
stocked with beautiful occasions!"

"Wild Evenings I Have Known," murmured Joan, frivolously, because for
some reason she was rather touched.

He nodded, "With wild people in them. Like you."

"Me! Wild?"

"Oh, I know on the surface you're a demure, well-behaved young miss, but
underneath--good gracious! You'd shock these people to death!"--he
indicated certain hilarious couples who had waltzed onto the terrace
near them. "Yes, you're quite untamed, my dear. Wild as a--chipmunk."

Joan leaned toward him, "How did you guess?"

"I've watched you dance. And then--well, I've never quite got used to
the cage myself, perhaps." He began to hum under his breath a tuneless
little ditty:

    "It is a very dreadful thing
    To be so fat a child,
    To have to sit around all day
    And yet to feel so wild."

"At least," laughed Joan, "I'm not fat!"

"No!" he said soberly, "never get fat. It is the beginning of the
end.... By fat I mean old. And cautious. Ugh!"

How the conversation came about to apple-trees, Joan never was sure; but
he told her about one he had discovered somewhere in the deep woods, all
in bloom, a little old gnarled affair hidden among giant first growth
sycamores and elms and beeches.

"An apple-tree lost in the woods! How do you suppose it got away from
civilization?" wondered the girl.

"Some bird, perhaps; or Johnny Appleseed."

"Who was he?"

"Fancy living in Kentucky without knowing about the first and greatest
of our pioneers! He was a daft old creature--an innocent, as the kind
phrase goes--who used to wander away from the settlement where he lived
into the wilderness, scattering apple seeds. All over this Ohio Valley
he journeyed, sowing his orchards for the benefit of those who were to
follow. The Indians let him pass, the wild animals did not harm him;
only his friends locked him up whenever they could catch him, because it
seemed such a silly thing to do. Friends are that way ... Years later,
when the pioneers fought their way at last over the mountains to stay,
they found here and there apple-trees blossoming and fruiting in the
great, lonely wilderness; and wherever that happened their wives made
them build cabins and settle down, for of all things that grow an
apple-tree most suggests home. So mad old Johnny Appleseed was the
founder of many cities."

"And yet there is no monument to him!"

"Except the cities...."

Here a young man appeared to claim Joan for the next dance--the blond
young man with whom she had commenced her dancing career, and who had
formed quite a habit of looking for her whenever the music played.

She rose with reluctance. "I wish _you'd_ come in and dance with me,"
she said to her new friend. "I'm sure you could!"

"I'm sure I could, too," he replied, "if I hadn't my body with me. As it
is, I'll just sit out here and make believe I'm dancing with you--In a
starlit glade. With the other young nymphs and dryads..." the whimsical
voice followed her.

The blond young man stared. "Of all the assorted nuts!" he remarked,
when they were out of earshot.

"Yes--but who is he?" demanded Joan eagerly.

"Something on the stock exchange. I see him there every day."

"The stock exchange!"

"Yes. Oh, he writes poems and things for the papers, too, I think. Quite
a literary guy." He mentioned the name.

It is a name known and remembered wherever there are moonrises and
fireflies, smoke against the sunset, apple-trees in bloom--all the
everyday lovely things people forget to see unless there are poets to
remind them...

It gave Joan quite a new zest in living to realize that at any moment,
even at Country Clubs, it is possible to run across a poet.




CHAPTER IX


Richard Darcy was accepting the change that had come into his life much
as he had accepted others of a less fortunate trend. He had become at
last what Nature had always intended him to be, one of the world's
chosen, a rich man--or, what was even better because less troublesome,
the husband of a rich woman. He was also once more an honored citizen of
his native commonwealth--where he had not always been entirely an
honored citizen, owing to one of the unfortunate mistakes to which youth
is liable. There had been some disagreement with an early employer about
the right of employees to divert the firm's funds, temporarily of
course, to private uses. Only family influence had prevented this
misunderstanding from resulting in truly disastrous consequences, which
he shuddered to this day to contemplate. But it had prevented; and the
early employer was dead (as Richard Darcy had taken pains to ascertain
before returning to Louisville), and the few who knew of this painful
episode at the time appeared to have forgotten it.

Very good! He was quite willing to forget it himself. It was Richard
Darcy's creed that a gentleman takes whatever comes in his stride,
without too many backward glances; and his stride was just now adapting
itself gracefully to the one-step.

Joan, watching her father sometimes with a faint recrudescence of pride
in his sheer good looks, decided that he was the only stomached person
she had seen who could perform the one-step without loss of dignity. He
footed the measure indulgently, as a bishop or a cardinal might have
footed it, with an air of spiritual detachment, as it were, while yet
seeming to receive and to bestow a priceless privilege. Even lively
young girls liked to dance with the Major. It made them feel uplifted.
If he pressed the hand or the waist of his prettier partners more
closely than necessary, the pressure seemed almost impersonal, a mere
tribute to a sex which he could not but regard with tenderness, being
himself a husband and a father.

In addition to this valuable social acquirement, the Major further
fortified his popularity by inventing and promoting (uncommercially, of
course) a beverage which shortly bade fair to make him famous, and which
was christened by grateful habitues of the Country Club the "Dick Fizz."
Its ingredients were--but that is a secret not at the author's disposal.
Suffice it to say that the "Dick Fizz" achieved results that were all
and more than could be expected of it. (Among others, the Major's
election to a certain gentlemen's club which had hitherto remained
annoyingly unaware of him. So much for the power of the Tie that
Loosens!)

It was thanks to the "Dick Fizz," too, that there presently came about
between Richard Darcy and his daughter that heart-to-heart interview
which had been postponing itself from week to week, with the tacit
consent of both parties; an interview dreaded by Joan perhaps even less
than by her father.

They were returning one night from one of their most successful
evenings; Joan as usual on the front seat beside the chauffeur, where
she might enjoy the rush of the cool night air upon her face, and hear
as little as possible of the billing and cooing of the honeymooners in
the tonneau behind. There seemed more of this than usual, little
giggling exclamations and audible embraces which made the girl wince and
the chauffeur grin surreptitiously.

"Really, Father!" protested Joan over her shoulder. There was something
physically nauseating to her in those amorous echoes from the tonneau.
No wonder servants laughed! It made of love a travesty and a mocking.

She was glad when they reached home. The Major stepped out gallantly to
assist the ladies, but miscalculated his impetus, and after a series of
complicated maneuvers brought up seated upon the curbstone. The
chauffeur burst into an uncontrollable guffaw, in which his mistress
heartily joined.

"Oh, you Dick Fizz!" she laughed, wiping her eyes. "I knew it would get
you yet. _Look_ at your funny papa, dearie! Lit up like a
Christmas-tree!"

The Major murmured something reprovingly about the duties of
hospitality, which he found some difficulty in pronouncing; but once
upon his feet, he gave an arm to each of them and managed the steps
without further mishap.

In the hall Joan, who had not laughed, said to her step-mother in a low
voice, "Is he--drunk?"

"Oh, not enough to hurt," replied the lady, still laughing. It occurred
to Joan that she herself was a little flushed and expansive. "I can
handle him, all right. Don't you worry! I always know a gentleman by the
way he carries his liquor."

"Do you?" said Joan.

"Sure thing! And Major's a perfect gentleman always. Don't you fret."

Joan mounted quietly to her room, and undressed in the dark. She did not
want to see her face in the mirror, afraid of the disgust, the loathing,
that must be reflected there--Her father--drunk! The man to whom her
mother had given her love and her life, tipsily furnishing amusement for
a woman who judged gentlemen by the way they carried their liquor!...

She recalled one other time when she had seen her father in his present
condition. She remembered her mother's stricken, tragic face as she
hurried him out of sight, explaining tremulously, "Daddy's ill, darling.
No games with Daddy to-night--he's ill."

"But he wants to play! Look, mamma, he _wants_ to play!" the small Joan
had insisted, to no avail.

And when this strangely interesting Daddy was safe in bed, with Ellen
Neal mounting guard, Joan had been hurried out to the nearest church
(which happened to be a Catholic one, for Mary's was a casual sort of
religion that boasted neither creed nor prejudice); and there, before a
statue where little lamps burned, the child had prayed hard, as she was
bid, that her father might never be ill in just that way again.

"God may listen to you, even if He's tired of listening to me!" the
mother had whispered, desperately.

It was because God had listened that Joan was sent later to a Catholic
convent. Mary Darcy's was not the nature to forget favors; and it
occurred to her that there might be worse protectors for a girl who must
one day be motherless than Our Lady of Sorrows. Not every faith is
strong enough to go through life without some creed to cling to. Mary
had offered her child what she could.

Lying there in the darkness, Joan understood. She wished that she might
have been able to take what her mother offered. She yearned for the
anodyne of simple, unquestioning prayer, for the mesmeric comfort that
comes to the believing from the slipping of rosary beads between the
fingers; above all, for the right to kneel unrecognized in a quiet
confessional and learn from some priest wiser than she in the ways of
men where her duty lay and how she was to follow it. The confessional is
perhaps the secret of the hold the oldest of Christian churches keeps
upon a world which would seem to have outgrown it. That is a
self-reliant nature indeed which does not sometimes feel the need of
guidance at once human and detached.

But Joan's creed and confessional alike were contained in her troubled
young head; and where a happier woman would have wept and said her
prayers, she set herself sternly to the task of thinking. It seemed to
her that throughout the past weeks she had been shirking an issue,
deliberately drugging her wits with anything that came to hand. Now she
faced conditions squarely. There must be no more drifting.

She focused an unsparing vision upon her father. Already there were
changes apparent in him, signs of deterioration not entirely physical.
His features seemed slightly blurred from their fine chiseling, there
was a relaxed look about the lips and chin, about the very poise of his
figure. He had lost a little of that indefinable something which gave
him distinction, even in the days when the women of his family tried in
vain to keep him pressed and unspotted. Prosperity was not going to be
good for Richard Darcy.

Joan pronounced ruthless judgment upon her father:

"He's done for!"

And, as Ellen had warned her, it was none of her business.... What then
was her business? Clearly, to keep from being "done for" herself.

She saw quite clearly that she had been in danger of this. There was
something curiously enervating about the atmosphere of her step-mother's
house, a _laissez-faire_ that was almost--the girl sought for the word
and decided upon "lascivious." Luxury, ease, pleasure--these were the
ends for which her step-mother strove--or rather accomplished without
undue striving, an ability to which the girl gave full due. She knew
that it must take more than mere money to keep so elaborate a household
running without apparent effort. The servants were efficient and
unobtrusive, the accounts scrupulously kept, every nook and cranny clean
and in order. Even Ellen Neal, who knew whereof she spoke, admitted that
the ex-Mrs. Calloway was a housekeeper of parts. But...

Joan tried conscientiously to fathom the meaning of her "but." She
decided that the house was too like its mistress--over-bathed,
over-perfumed and dressed and manicured--to be quite nice. The windows
were too fluffy with lace, the drawing-room too pretty and satiny, the
library too red. ("Why is it," she had written to Stefan Nikolai, "that
people who never open a book invariably have a red library?")

A fantastic thought came to her. She wondered whether those strange
houses which are sometimes whispered of even among convent girls, those
palaces of horror where women's bodies are bought and sold, might not
perhaps resemble this home to which her father had brought her ...

Then she smiled at herself. Vulgar, her step-mother might be; hopelessly
underbred; doubtless in some previous manifestations a shop-girl, a
dressmaker; possibly one of those anomalous beings known in race-towns
as "race-horse women." But she was unmistakably respectable. There was
not a picture on her walls, nor a novel on the shelves of the red
library, which was not, as she herself once remarked to Joan
complacently, "perfectly refined." The girl recalled her evident
uneasiness when sometimes at the dinner-table the talk had waxed a
little too free. She did her step-mother the justice to believe her a
quite decent woman.

Perhaps the curious sense of enervation was due only to the heat of
midsummer in a Southern city. Now and then the elder Darcys spoke
vaguely of going away, only to decide that it was too much trouble. It
was easier to stay where they were. In a Kentucky July, one follows the
line of least resistance.

Joan, like the others, slept late into the mornings, and had her coffee
in bed, or went down to the dining-room for it with a negligee over her
nightgown. (Her father had become quite reconciled to negligees, which
at first startled him, accustomed as he was to the neat morning ginghams
of his Mary.) Sometimes she found him departing reluctantly for the
mysterious place he called the Office. Later, people would arrive
connected with the rites of the toilet--the hair-dresser, the manicure,
the masseuse--a chatty person who performed on Effie May what she called
her "facial"; and other things. Cleopatra herself could have devoted no
more time to the care of her body than did the ex-Mrs. Calloway.

"You've got it to do if you're risin' forty and like to eat," she
explained once to Joan, simply.

After luncheon, which was brought on a tray--a large tray--to wherever
it happened to be convenient, the ladies once more resumed nightgowns,
if indeed they had ever discarded them, and napped and read until the
sun was low in the sky; when the house like the city woke into
animation, and they prepared to fare forth like fireflies to the evening
revel. Then there were automobile drives to little beer-gardens, where
they ate and drank and sat about among whitewashed tree-trunks, feeling
Bohemian; pleasant moonlight excursions up the Ohio in launches, with a
picnic provided which consisted largely of thermos-bottles; and the
Country Club, always the Country Club. Joan wondered what people had
managed to do with themselves in summer before the days of Country
Clubs.

It was a life that somehow suggested the Orient, women of the harem
coming forth at sunset to bask on the roofs of the houses; a placid
existence; aimless, perhaps, but pleasant enough. Joan was puzzled to
find the harm in it. Yet that harm was there, she knew. The touch of
Puritanism in the girl told her that to live from day to day with no
duty but pleasure made of pleasure something akin to vice.... And often
in the midst of this harem life she remembered almost with passion that
out beyond her shuttered windows, beyond the clangor of trolley-cars and
the hum and clatter of the dirty streets, was summer--summer, the
loveliest of the year's phases; leaf-shadows on wimpling water, lush
meadows sparkling with the sunrise dew, green-gold glades of the wood
delicious with the smell of warm pine-needles; all the world at fullest
bloom, open like the heart of a rose, waiting.

It was a sort of nostalgia that took her then for the country she had
never known, not Country Club country, nor the conscious, well-kept
wildness of the parks which give the old river town its only claim to
beauty--but simple wood and meadow and field, where homely folk live
close to the soil they till, concerned with crops and the breeding
season. It was this country her father had meant when he bragged about
Kentucky. It is this country which, deep down under the surface things,
means home to all people of Saxon blood, no matter how far astray they
wander....

And as she lay there, as if her wistful thoughts had conjured it into
being, came a whisper of song from the leaves of the magnolia tree just
outside her window; a murmur that died away, and began again, and rose
and soared, melody on wings, above the clang of a trolley-car and the
honk of passing motors. It was a mocking-bird, that voice of the
Southern summer, singing in the glare of the arc-lamps, mistaking it
perhaps for moonlight.

Joan tiptoed to the window and listened, an aching lump in her throat.
It was her first mocking-bird; she had not known they sang at night.

"You lovely thing!" she whispered to it. "What are you doing in this
place?... And what am _I_?"

Then and there she made her plans to get away.

The thought frightened her a little. She had, despite the ups and downs
of her father's fortunes, led hitherto a very sheltered life.
Fortunately there was her mother's money, hers whenever she chose to ask
for it. She would not be quite penniless. But where to go?

She thought first of the Misses Darcy, her father's cousins, who had
been most affectionate and kind, particularly since her father's
remarriage. Sometimes she wondered whether this was because they
sympathized with her, or (with a touch of her new cynicism) because they
did not. Effie May had been very generous to the Misses Darcy, remarking
once that she knew what it was to be poor herself. They came frequently
to dine at her lavish table; they appeared occasionally in _chic_ black
costumes, as good as new, which Joan recognized as having served to
mourn the late Mr. Calloway; the limousine was often at their disposal;
and a limousine with a liveried chauffeur was a touch of distinction
hitherto lacking to the Darcy fortunes, even at their palmiest.

Joan suddenly doubted whether her father's cousins would welcome her
under their roof at the risk of alienating that limousine. She did not
blame them--poor, anxious ladies to whom life had not been very kind.
She simply realized that they were of her father's blood, not her
mother's.

Her mother's people she did not know. Mary Darcy had managed somehow in
her wanderings to loosen all the ties that bound her to her youth. It
was as if she had deliberately lost herself, hidden herself away with
husband and child from the loving eyes that are too quick to see.... It
was the sort of pride Richard Darcy was quite incapable of
understanding, though pride was a word often upon his lips. But Mary's
daughter understood. Never through her should the quiet tragedy of her
mother's life be revealed to those from whom her mother had chosen to
hide it.

She wished that Stefan Nikolai were not a man; or that, being a man, he
had a home to which she might have invited herself. But he was a
confirmed wanderer, and Joan felt that a young lady companion, desirable
though she might be as a solace for his declining years, would
undoubtedly hamper his movements.

It left only Ellen Neal to rely upon. Perhaps there would be enough
money to take a little flat somewhere, with Ellen Neal for servant and
chaperone. A bachelor maid, with a latch-key!--the prospect was rather
alluring. But not in Louisville. She could not leave her father's home
and set up an establishment of her own in the same town without creating
"talk," and, to Joan's training, "talk" was the one thing impossible.

They would have to go away somewhere, she and Ellen. And study
something, she decided vaguely. Music, art, social service--whatever it
was people did study. Her eye began to kindle. She was the true child of
Richard Darcy, rolling stone by nature and profession; and to such, "the
grass is always greener down the road." New York, Boston, swam before
her dreamy vision; even London, Paris, Rome....

She brought herself back to the ungrateful consideration of ways and
means. She feared the money would not run to much in the way of travel.
"A mere pittance," her father had once scornfully called it. But she
knew, or guessed, that all three of them had managed to live on the
income from this pittance during many a period when the Major's star was
not in the ascendant, and she thought that what had provided, however
scantily, for three might be made to provide well for herself and Ellen.
She wished that she had asked questions at the time her mother's will
was read to her. It had seemed so unimportant then. What was hers
belonged surely just as much to her father, guardian for the little
property until such time as she chose to ask him for it.

Now that the time had come, Joan faced it with some dread. How could
they talk about money, she and he--about her mother's money? It seemed
indelicate, unfeeling, a desecration of sacred things. Nevertheless she
faced it. She solemnly promised herself that not another day should pass
without a complete understanding between herself and her father.

Possibly she was the only one of Richard Darcy's creditors who ever
managed to put this promise into execution.




CHAPTER X


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, "_what_ are 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
her _father's_ roof 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 from _you_.
It's--oh, won't you _please_ understand, 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 have _lost_ the
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, _poor_ father!"

"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."




CHAPTER XI


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 see _somethin'_ 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 menage 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, and _of course_ he 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. "Poor _woman_? 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 you _see_? 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 all _my_ life," 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."




CHAPTER XII


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 naively 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 negligee), 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.

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 rather _distingue_ air, 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 hear _my daughter_ speak 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. _She_ wouldn'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--marriage _with 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.




CHAPTER XIII


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 crepe 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!"

"What _are_ you 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 of _her_?" 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, "that _all_ Southern 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 role 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 glad _I_ don'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.




CHAPTER XIV


Joan's respect for the sterner sex, never very exaggerated, was not
increased by the avidity with which they swallowed, one by one, her
inexperienced hook, bait and all. Evidently her fellow-men had very
little use for nice, intelligent, modest young girls in comparison with
the Brazen Hussie.... For Joan had no illusions about herself, either.
She had joined, temporarily it is true, and for what seemed to her
legitimate reasons, the order of the Brazen Hussies.

She put into practice as many of her step-mother's precepts as she could
recall, and found that they worked astonishingly well. She also
cultivated a beauty-manner, modeling herself on a certain Louisville
belle whose manoeuvers she had observed with interest. She became
helplessly sweet and very, very feminine; and she smiled whenever there
was an excuse for smiling. It was a new smile she had practised before
the mirror; an intimate, confiding, personal affair that crinkled up her
long eyes charmingly, and showed at least two thirds of her good white
teeth. Eduard Desmond occasionally referred to these teeth as "pearls,"
though they were hard and sharp and strong as a young squirrel's: Eduard
being the sort of person who takes his similes ready-made out of poetry.

Surprisingly enough, considering the sporting nature of the community in
which she found herself, Joan heard a good deal of poetry during this
visit. The moon happened to be full, and Longmeadow edged upon a river;
one of those pleasant, cosy little streams that are designed by an
all-wise Providence for canoes to float upon in summer evenings. By day
other girls had their innings on golf-links and tennis-court (though
even by day our heroine was not idle). But at night with the moon she
came into her own. She made her canoe engagements days ahead, not too
frequently with Eduard; and she came to the conclusion that just as
infants at a certain stage must go through the teething period, so
somewhat later they must go with equal painfulness through the poetry
period. It gave her quite a motherly feeling toward her admirers; which
fortunately she was able to dissemble.

By contrast with the sportsmanlike young women of the community, Joan,
in her frills and wide hats and small, beaded, high-heeled slippers,
seemed to fill a long-felt want. Her role was by no means an
uninteresting one. Occasionally in the course of events she got almost,
if not quite, kissed; and she became expert in deflecting the course of
inconvenient emotion.

"It's suggestion does it," she wrote to her friend Mr. Nikolai. "Given a
moon, fluffy ruffles, and the Kentucky-belle tradition--and they seem
helpless, poor dears!"

But perhaps it was not entirely the power of suggestion that made her
success. Joan was enough of an artist to do whatever she did with a
certain finish.

Her difficulty, however, in the heady game she played, was to
concentrate on the purpose in hand. At the end of two weeks, she began
to fancy a slight diminution of cordiality on the part of both Betty and
her mother, and she realized that her visit was growing longer than
seemed usual. Other guests came and went, remaining only a few days
before going on to the next engagement. Accustomed to the indeterminate
visits of the South, she had not thought to set any definite time for
her departure; but now she felt uncomfortably that the hour had come to
bring things to a climax. She gave herself one more week at Longmeadow.
Surely three weeks is a short enough time in which to provide oneself
with a future and a husband!

She was by no means counting without her host. From the day of her
arrival Eduard had taken no pains to hide the fact that he considered
her his especial property. While his manner was still that of one who
would not willingly brush the bloom from off the peach, there had always
been in it a disturbing hint, a slight flattering suggestion, that
peaches are tempting even to the jaded appetite. Lately his air of
possession had become, to Joan's amusement, decidedly tinged with
jealousy. He viewed his more youthful rivals with no attempt at
equanimity.

Joan was aware that people were beginning to discuss the affair, and to
watch her curiously. It put her on her mettle. She intended to satisfy
their curiosity very shortly; but--she wished the thing might be managed
without the necessity for so many tete-a-tetes.

It was not that she did not like her future husband. On the contrary she
liked him so well as to find herself a little shy with him. She
preferred his attentions to take place against a background of society;
as for instance, at a dance, when his eye could be as significant as it
chose without alarming her; or at table, where under cover of the
general conversation, they managed some moments of real intimacy.

There was much to be said, thought Joan, for the French method of
vigorously chaperoning young love up to the very threshold of matrimony.

As it was, his foot seemed uncomfortably prone to rest on hers beneath
the table; and once when he stooped to recover a dropped fan, his lips
had brushed like a touch of delicate flame along the bare length of her
forearm--But these indications of what was to come the startled girl was
able to ignore as accidental. (She had decided, it will be recalled, to
be if necessary a trifle Fast.)

At last she steeled herself firmly to the necessity for tete-a-tetes,
realizing that even so finished a performer as Mr. Desmond could not
well manage a genuine proposal during the intricacies of the tango, or
at dinner between the soup and the entree. There were certain
accompaniments, she fancied, that made the idea of a proposal in public
impracticable--Joan's imagination was frequently as useful to her as
experience.

She had managed to escape the perils of horseback riding by an inspired
expedient. Duplicity, she found, came easily with practice.

"Straddle a horse? Oh, honey, I couldn't!" she had murmured at her most
Southern, when informed that there were no side-saddles in the
Longmeadow stables.

"Why," protested Betty, "there's not a side-saddle to be had this side
of Kentucky, Jo--they're as extinct as the Dodo! And even if there were,
papa would never allow one on any of our horses. You haven't your habit
here, anyway. Do be sensible, dear. I'll let you ride the Rabbit!"

Joan shook her head, regretfully but firmly. "If my father were to see a
lady of his family straddling a horse, in trousers," she said, "I think
he'd have a stroke!"--which was doubtless true.

It was necessary, therefore, for Eduard's increasing desire for solitude
to take the form of canoeing, or driving in the dog-cart without a
groom; or preferably, strolling through a certain bit of near-by
woodland.

Here he liked to fling himself at his handsome length on the moss at
Joan's feet, and read to her chosen bits out of the "Rubaiyat": a work
much in favor at the moment, which would appear to have been translated
by Mr. Fitzgerald for the express purpose of uttering Mr. Desmond's
sentiments.

Joan murmured "Um-m-m!" and "How true!" and "Exquisite!" in the right
places; but she was not often listening to him. She was watching the
play of light and shade on his fine, waving hair; she was studying more
keenly than she knew the chiseled features, bearing those slight marks
of manly dissipation which are for some reason never wholly displeasing
to the young feminine eye; she was noticing the smallness of his hands,
the really beautiful cut and quality of his clothes.

What sort of person was he under the agreeable surface, this chosen
husband of hers?

An artist, people had called him: but Art in his case seemed not the
exacting mistress she had fancied it. Or perhaps the artistic
temperament required long periods of recuperative leisure.... She had
decided that it was wiser not to fall in love, at least till after
marriage: but she did choose that her husband should be the sort of
person it was possible to fall in love with; well-bred, fastidious,
cultivated, thoroughly a man of the world. All these Eduard Desmond was,
and more. He had a real and unaffected taste for music, books,
nature--for what Joan called to herself "the real things." It argued
well for future companionship.

There was, to be sure, the disability of what she thought of vaguely as
his "habits." But there had been no sign of them in the two weeks she
had lived in the same house with him; and even if he had not as yet
completely overcome them, there was no reason why he should not do so
later, with a watchful wife to help him. On the whole their chances for
happiness together seemed quite as good as those of most people she
knew, thought Joan, with unconscious cynicism.

The material side of the arrangement did not occur to her. For all her
calm calculations, Joan was not mercenary. All she asked was a place of
her own in the world, a sense of permanence; she longed quite wistfully
for a background that "stayed put." Romance was a thing she felt she
could do without forever, in return for independence from her
step-mother, and perhaps a little home of her own with a garden to it.
She believed that to any man who would provide these few essentials she
could be a faithful and a loyal wife.

What would he expect of her in return? Would she have to go on all her
life being Southern and winsome and alluring? Would he prefer her, after
the honeymoon, say, to go in heavily for sports, like the women of his
set? Or might she presently venture to be just herself again--just Joan,
whatever that might be! The gayest of roles becomes a trifle wearing for
everyday use.

She sighed; and looking up from the Rubaiyat, he caught her eyes fixed
upon him, wide and speculative.

"What is the little girl thinking of?" he asked tenderly.

She answered at once, with a return of her gay daring, "You--of course!"

But under his intensifying gaze her own dropped, and he went on reading;
in a voice that shook, however.

"Now for it!" said Joan suddenly to herself. She dropped her hand
negligently on the leaves, close to his.

She resisted the temptation to jerk it back as soon as she was aware of
its contact with another. Very slight the contact was, no more than the
touch of a leaf. She pretended not to notice it; but the blood sang in
her ears, her cheeks burned--she wished suddenly that he would take her
hand, if he was going to; hold it tight....

Heavens! What was happening to her? She _wanted_ the touch of his hand;
she liked it! Did she care for him, then? Was this being in
love--already?

"Joan," he whispered. "Look at me!"

The spell was broken. She jumped to her feet. "Come, we must be getting
back," she said hurriedly. "It is late."

"Ah, but how cold you are!"

"Yes, I am, a little," she said innocently. "These woods are damp."

But all the way home, beneath her relief, lingered a sense of annoyance,
of disappointment.

"What a prig I am," she thought disgustedly. "It would be all over now
if I'd only--let him!"

That night she wrote at unusual length to Mr. Nikolai. It was almost
like writing to herself; and Joan frequently felt the need of seeing
what she was about set down in black and white, for greater clarity.

She had not meant to tell Mr. Nikolai of her imminent engagement till
the thing was _fait accompli_; but she knew that everything would be
settled by the time her letter reached him. She wanted to be reassured
about her odd and unexpected emotion during the contact of her hand with
Eduard Desmond's. Was it so, then, that people fell in love, just
suddenly without any warning? And had the mind nothing to do with it
whatever?

For mentally she was not altogether pleased with herself.




CHAPTER XV


The idea that Betty and her mother were eyeing her somewhat askance
troubled Joan not a little. In her heart of hearts she preferred women
to men, and believed their friendship more of a compliment. She would
have liked to make a friend of Mrs. Desmond, had there been time,
envying Betty's camaraderie with her mother; although Mrs. Desmond
presented a golfing, bridge-playing, sporting type of motherhood quite
new to her experience.

There was a peculiar intimacy and freedom among all this group of
people, who seemed to spend most of the year together either in
Philadelphia or Aiken or Ormond or these long-established country-places
surrounding the Longmeadow Hunt Club. It was like a curiously ramified
family, in which husbands and wives seemed to have changed partners
rather frequently, and were still in process of changing. It was Joan's
first glimpse of a society in which married women hold the center of the
stage rather than young girls, and she was just a little shocked by it.

There appeared to be no age limit here. It was not so much that these
women concealed their age, after the rather obvious fashion of Effie
May, as that they simply ignored it. Even Mrs. Desmond, dignified and
well-bred though she was, had a devoted attendant or two, spoken of
casually by Betty as "mamma's flames," and during Joan's visit at least
Mr. Desmond remained merely an abstraction. Conjugal affection was
distinctly not the fashion in the Desmond circle.

But this casualness of relations did not extend to the young girls. They
had no such freedom as Joan was accustomed to in the South. Betty, at
eighteen, was as carefully guarded as if she were still a child. She was
not permitted to go into the city without a maid or an older woman; she
neither drove or canoed alone with men, nor "sat out" with them at
dances. And it did not occur to her to protest.

"That sort of thing isn't good form," she explained once to Joan. "For
us, at least--Of course with Southern girls it's different."

But Joan began to suspect that even Southern girls were expected to hold
in regard this one fetish they had elected to worship, Good Form; and
that according to this standard she had already been condemned.

At first the younger women had made some effort to include her in their
various activities, golf, bridge, tennis. But latterly they had left her
alone, not severely but tolerantly, as one dedicated to other pursuits.

"Miss Darcy? Oh, she's from the South, you know--awfully busy with the
men," she overheard one of them explain to a newcomer; and she had
resented the remark keenly, not only for herself, but for the women of
her adopted home, who at least are rarely "busy with the men" after
marriage.

The person who made this remark was a Mrs. Rossiter, a pretty, boyish
creature, already divorced and remarried at thirty, and bearing her
present conjugality rather lightly. She was on terms of great intimacy
with the Desmond family, Eduard included; and Joan fancied that she
might have been one of the "widows" mentioned by Betty as her uncle's
chosen companions.

But if it had been so, her day was done. Eduard had palpably no eyes for
her now, and Joan could afford the generosity of admiring Mrs. Rossiter.
She was so natural and frank, and so royally indifferent to others'
opinion. Joan, who had a fatal propensity for acting as the people about
her expected her to act, envied her this assurance, and wished that she
could make friends with her.

The truth was that the girl, despite her success, felt utterly lonely.
She saw very little of Betty. Mrs. Desmond was an experienced hostess
who made no attempt to regulate the comings and goings of her guests,
and the girls made separate engagements. Even bedtime confidences had
ceased, owing to the fact that when Joan came up to her room, Betty was
usually asleep.

But on the night of her illuminating afternoon in the woods with Eduard,
Betty appeared to be waiting up for her. She came yawning into Joan's
room to watch her friend undress, and established herself sleepily on
the foot of the bed.

"What a pity you can't wear your hair down all the time, Jo! Men adore
hair, don't they? And yours has a regular patina on it, like old
bronze."

"Not greenish, I hope," laughed Joan.

"No--sort of orangish. Dark, with an orange lining."

"Betty! It sounds horrible!"

"Well, you know very well it isn't.--May Rossiter thinks you are awfully
clever to wear it that simple way, too, so straight and plain, when the
rest of us stick out like mops. She says you're awfully clever about
lots of things--too smart for the likes of us."

"Does she?" Joan was a little startled and not quite pleased. She had
not intended to give the impression of cleverness. It was out of her
present role entirely. "I wonder what Mrs. Rossiter meant by that?"

"Oh, men, of course," yawned Betty. "You see you've annexed a few of
hers, which naturally makes her peevish."

"Have I?" murmured Joan. "Who, for instance?"

"Well, Uncle Neddy, for one."

"Oh! So she _was_ one of his flames, then?"

Betty sat up. "You mean to say you didn't know it? One of them! _The_
one, my child! Surely you remember about his broken heart?--the married
lady he was recovering from in Washington last year? Well, May's it. Of
course I'm not supposed to know, being an _ingenue_--but our Neddy was
frightfully gone on her, and she returned it, and the husband she had
then got jealous (rather a bounder he was, not one of us, you know), and
there was some sort of excitement, and she divorced him. Every one
thought to marry Uncle Ned, of course. But instead she upped and married
Mr. Rossiter! Joke 

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