Her father took a satisfaction in Joan's house and husband and general
condition of modest prosperity which surprised and rather touched the
girl. It was as if he found in her well-being a justification of
something that needed justifying. "I may have my weaknesses," his manner
seemed to say, "but observe how well I have provided for my child!"
He dropped in almost daily for his afternoon julep on the shaded porch
that overlooked her garden. Effie May had the tact rarely to accompany
him, and Joan found herself seeing more of her father than she ever had
under his own roof.
"I don't know just what it is, my dear," he once said, musingly.
"Possibly the familiar furniture, or the presence of Ellen Neal (quite a
fair cook, Dollykins, though her manner leaves something to be desired).
But somehow in this little establishment of yours I always feel as
if--well, as if Mary were about somewhere." He sighed sentimentally. "I
feel as if she might at any moment sit down beside us and take out a bit
of sewing. She was rarely without sewing, you remember?"
"I remember." Joan patted his hand, a demonstration rare with her. "I am
glad you feel that way, Father. Mother always does seem very close to
me--especially just now." An odd feeling of sorriness for her
step-mother came over Joan. "You are sure," she asked on an impulse,
"that Effie May does not object to your coming here so much without
her?"
"Object? To my visiting my daughter under her own vine and figtree? It
would hardly be within her province to object," he commented regally.
"But, as it happens, she is the one who frequently suggests my visits.
She quite understands that under the--er, the happy circumstances--you
cannot come much to us, not caring naturally to appear any more often
than is necessary in public." The Major adhered rigorously to every
tenet of the old school.
He had recently presented his daughter with a low, comfortable phaeton
of the sort which, as he explained, the gentlewomen of his day were
accustomed to drive; and Pegasus was learning to adapt herself demurely
to the role of a family horse. Joan found this phaeton a great
convenience for shopping and marketing and her rare visiting (she saw
very little of her friends that summer); and in the evening she and
Archie went for long drives about the parks, covering less ground than
they had covered in the ill-fated Lizzie, but making up for this by a
more intimate knowledge of what they passed.
"It's good to go slowly enough now and then to see the wayside flowers,
and smell the fern, and hear the bird-calls, isn't it?" she said once as
they jogged along.
"Sure it is! Now and then," replied Archie guardedly. A rising young
business man of the present time could hardly be expected to find
phaetoning an exhilarating means of locomotion. But "anything goes just
now," as he said to himself, happily.
He was not able to take as many of these drives with her as he should
have liked. The cares of business were beginning to sit upon him with
increasing heaviness. "A man's business has got to grow with his
family," he was fond of saying, importantly; and Joan was left alone
sometimes, even on Saturday afternoons and after supper in the
evenings--those periods sacred in these our States to the uses of
domesticity.
But she did not complain. She was even, secretly, a little glad, for she
had always enjoyed being alone. There were so many books to be read,
letters to be written, thoughts to be thought in which Archie, for all
his loyal efforts, could not quite share; and there was her music. One
of her step-mother's several wedding presents had been a small grand
piano, as companionable to Joan in this "pasture-time" as a dog is to
some women.
Archibald, too, loved music. He frequently urged her to play and sing,
and was as proud of her rather indifferent performances as a _maestro_
of a star-pupil. But he had an innocent, disconcerting habit of patting
time with his foot, or bursting into the air at unexpected moments in a
large, booming tenor that never by any accident quite found the key.
Music was one of the things Joan found herself unable to share with her
husband.
She objected sometimes to his growing preoccupation with business, on
his own account. He began to look a little thin and fine-drawn; the
typical American husband, she told him reprovingly.
"You're neglecting your exercise, Archie dear! You never go to the Y. M.
C. A., or play around with the boys any more."
"Got something better to do," he beamed at her.
"Goose! But it isn't good for a man never to have any fun at all. 'All
work and no play'--"
He took her in his arms. "Fun! What do I want with fun?" he exclaimed
quite fiercely, lifting her face to his. But before their lips met, he
let her go.
"No rough stuff," she heard him admonish himself under his breath.
He kissed her hand instead....
The Darcys too, were spending rather a quiet summer. Now that they had
no debutante daughter in prospect, their names figured leas prominently
in the social column. With his growing avoirdupois, the Major appeared
to be abandoning the one-step in favor of the easy-chair, which was to
be found in greater perfection at home than at the Country Club. If his
bride regretted this lapse into settledness, she showed no signs of it.
Her avoirdupois, also, was getting rather out of hand, despite constant
attention to massage and sporadic attempts at dieting.
"It ain't how _much_ I eat, seems like--it's _what_ I eat," she said
once plaintively to Joan. "Everything tasty turns to flesh on me; and
God knows, I hate a poor table!"
But Joan realized that it was not entirely physical inhibitions which
were retiring the Darcys from the social arena. Her step-mother had
delicacy enough to understand that her place was not among Joan's
acquaintance, now that the girl had discovered her history. Joan liked
her the better for it. She was punctiliously careful to invite Effie May
to her house at frequent intervals, and always accepted such invitations
as the other offered in return. The Major, never observant, was quite
unaware that the relations between his wife and daughter had suffered
any change. As he once remarked impersonally, "You and my wife would
naturally find very little in common, excellent creature though she is.
Why should you, indeed? Your antecedents, your early environment, have
been entirely different. And as one grows older, those are the things
that really matter," he added, with a complacency that sat rather oddly
upon him in the circumstances--On the whole, Joan began to feel
distinctly sorry for her step-mother.
The older people came sometimes to take her for long automobile drives
into the State; expeditions which Joan enjoyed thoroughly. Her father's
imperturbable good manners and Effie May's amiability made them
excellent traveling-companions, proof against all hazards of the road;
tire trouble, bad going, even delayed and poor meals. And they both
treated Joan with a new consideration, oddly wistful on the woman's
part, to which she responded gratefully.
It shamed her somehow to see how kind the world was to her nowadays; as
if, in following the line of least resistance, she had done something
very commendable indeed.