Why Joan? Part 13

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 tr.i.m.m.i.n.gs 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 pa.s.sive 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 pa.s.sed, 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 a.s.sembly 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 grat.i.tude 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 p.r.i.c.ked an ear.

"Gra.s.s 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.