Why Joan? Part 14

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 amus.e.m.e.nts which bade fair to be terrifying in this sporting community--particularly the embarra.s.sments of horseback riding. Joan was too much of an egotist to enter willingly into compet.i.tions 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 s.e.x, 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 appet.i.te. Lately his air of possession had become, to Joan's amus.e.m.e.nt, 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 p.r.o.ne 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!"