to say that!
But Phyllis took it beautifully.
"No reason why you shouldn't look just exactly like folks," she
soothed. "This is lovely, too, this silver tissue. Goodness, what a
lot of material there is in these angel sleeves!"... She held it up
consideringly... "Wait a minute, Joy, I think I read my title
clear." She ran out of the room, coming back in a moment with a
life-size dress-form in her arms, which she set down.
"Here's Dora, the dress-model," she said cheerfully. "She adjusts."
In proof she began to screw Dora down and in to required
proportions, measuring her by Joy, who watched operations with
fascinated eyes.
"I never knew you could sew," she said.
"My father was a country minister," Mrs. Harrington explained,
flinging the green frock, inside out, over the steely shoulders of
Dora, the dress-frame. "I cook very nicely, if I do say it myself,
and till I was seventeen I did every bit of my own sewing."
"And were you married at seventeen?"
"No," Phyllis answered, stopping a moment from her pinnings and
speaking more gravely. "My father died then, and I went to work. I
hadn't time to sew after that--I bought ready-made things. So when I
_was_ married--that was a long seven years afterwards--I did
have such lovely times buying organdies and laces and things and
cutting them out and making them! That was the summer Allan was
getting well."
She stared off at the wall for a moment, as she knelt up against the
green satin. "That was the loveliest summer I ever had--excepting
every one since."
She laughed a little, then prevented herself from further speech by
putting a frieze of pins in her mouth and beginning to do something
with the dress with them, one by one.
"Do you mind cutting into this?" she asked when that row was gone.
"The more the better!" said Joy with enthusiasm.
"It will make a stunning frock, with the silver net draped over the
pale-green satin... M'm. That silver iridescent girdle on the other
dress--the violet--can I have that, too?"
Joy ripped and handed with tremulously eager hands, while Phyllis
swiftly cut away the sleeves of the green dress and slashed a
_décolletage_, and draped the net over it and pinned on the
girdle.
"Try if you can get into that without being scratched," she invited,
lifting the frock gingerly off Dora and dropping it over Joy. Then
she wheeled her around to where she could see her reflection in the
tall pier-glass between the windows.
"Of course, that's rough," she told her; "but what do you think of
it, generally? Are there any changes you want?"
"Oh, not one!" Joy replied ecstatically, regarding the slim little
green and silver figure in the glass.
"It needs to be shorter," meditated Phyllis aloud, and fell to
pinning it up to the proper shortness.
Joy continued to look at it rapturously. It had been a straight,
long gown, and all Phyllis had needed to do was to drape it with the
net ripped from the other dress and shorten and cut it into
fashionableness. It was charming--springlike and becoming, and, best
of all, strictly up to date!
"Don't you think you'll feel equal to being the feature of the
reception in that?" demanded Phyllis. "I certainly should in your
place.... That is, if you have silver slippers."
"I have, and I think I do," said Joy gravely.
"Then I'll hand this over to Viola to put the finishing stitches in.
Look out the window--do you see anything familiar coming up the path?"
Joy, in her pinned finery, looked, then snatched her clothes from
the sofa, where they lay in state, and ran upstairs. John was coming
along the path, and she didn't want him to know about her frock till
it was all done.
She came down a moment later, brown-clad and demure, and looking so
young and harmless that any man would have been sure his tilt with
her, of the night before, was a dream. She greeted him shyly, with
her lashes down.
"Isn't--isn't it a little early for you to be away from your
patients?" she asked.
"My morning office hours are just over, and I'm on my way to make
some calls in the car. Want to come?" he asked.
"Thank you," said Joy. "That is, if you don't think I'd be in the way."
"If I thought you would be I wouldn't have asked you," said Dr.
Hewitt matter-of-factly. "So run along and pin up your hair, child.
I don't want people to think I've been robbing the cradle."
He smiled at her in a brotherly fashion, and Joy began to feel a
little ashamed of herself for trying to tease him, even if he didn't
seem to see it. She liked him so much, apart from any other feeling,
that it was hard to be anything but nice and grateful to him--except
when she thought of Gail Maddox.
"It just takes two hairpins," she informed him, coming over to him
and holding up the ends of her braids. "You wind it round and pin it
behind."
He took the hairpins and the braids, and quite deftly did as she
asked him to.
"Hurry, my dear," he said authoritatively, yet with a certain note
of affection in his voice that made Joy feel very comforted. As she
flew to get her cap her heart gave a queer, pleasant sort of
turn-over. His voice made her feel so belonging.
She sang as she went, and Phyllis and John smiled across at each
other, as over a dear child.
"Oh, John, I'm so glad you chose such a darling!" said Phyllis
warmly, putting her hands on his shoulders, as "A Perfect Day"
floated back to them from above. "You know, Johnny, even the best of
men do marry so--so surprisingly. She might have been--"
"'She might have been a Roosian, or French or Dutch or Proosian,'"
he quoted frivolously. "Well, Phyllis, I'm glad you approve of
my--ah--choice. How long do you think it will take it to get its hat on?"
"Oh, you can laugh," Phyllis answered him, "but I know you're proud
of her, just the same."
"Well, she's creditable," said John unemotionally, but with a little
smile beginning to show at the corners of his mouth.
"I'm ready!" called Joy breathlessly from the top of the stairs, and
ran down tumultuously. "Oh, Phyllis, can't I have some roses to take
to John's sick people--the poor ones? I want them to like me!"
"Help yourself." Phyllis granted promptly.
"Not a bit of it." John contradicted her coolly. "You must teach
them to love you for yourself alone. Come on, kiddie."
He tucked her hand under his arm and hurried her, laughing, down the
drive. Phyllis ran after them with a too-late-remembered motor-veil,
which she managed to convey into the car by the risky method of
tying a stone in it and throwing the stone. It just missed John, and
Joy nearly fell out, turning to wave thanks for it.
John threw his arm around her hastily to hold her in, and so Phyllis
saw them out of sight.
"You needn't do that any more," observed Joy as they sped on.
"There's nobody can see us now."
"That, with most people," observed John amusedly, "would be a reason
for continuing to do it."
"M'm," said Joy in assent, as he removed his arm. "You see," she
went on rather apologetically, "I never was engaged before, not even
this much, and I probably shan't always do it right.... Do you think
I shall?"
"Very well, indeed," answered her trial fiancé dryly. "I have always
heard that when you were engaged to a girl she took the opportunity
to torment you as thoroughly as possible. But I haven't any more
personal experience of the holy bonds of affiancement than you have,
my dear child."
Joy's heart suddenly reproached her for having teased such a kind
person as this at all. She clutched his arm with such impulsive
suddenness that the car almost left the road.
"John, I do want to be good to you! And I want to be as little
trouble as possible! And I want to have you _like_ me . . . and
respect and admire me just the way that--"
"Just what way?" he inquired more gently.
"Never mind what way," Joy told him, coloring hotly. "Only if you'll
please tell me what to do--it's hard to say, but I'll try to explain
what I mean. Haven't you always thought, just a little, when you
hadn't anything else to think of, that sometime there'd be--a girl?"
John Hewitt looked straight before him for a moment, as the car sped
smoothly down a country lane. Then he nodded.
"Yes," he said, and no more. He was not given to talking about his
feelings.
"And you planned her--a little--didn't you?" Joy persisted. "I know
you did--people do. Well... John--couldn't you tell me a little bit
about how _She_ was going to act--so I could act that way? It
would be more comfortable for you, I think. And I--I want to."
For a moment she thought he was not going to answer at all. He
looked down at her silently. Then he spoke, a little abruptly.
"I never planned her in much detail," he said. "She always seemed to
be dressed in blue, or in white, and her hair was parted. She seemed
to be connected with a fireplace," he ended inconsequently, and
laughed a little at himself. "You see, I'm not an imaginative person."
"I only wanted you to let me play I was that girl for this month,"
Joy answered desperately, with her eyes down, speaking very low.
John, who had been staring down at her in a half-puzzled way, looked
as if he was suddenly reassured that she was only a little girl,
after all--not a provoking firefly, but a wistful, unconscious child
who only wanted to do her best to please.
"I want to be good," she said meekly.
"So you are," said John warmly.
"Am I?" she asked softly, looking up at him with wide blue eyes.
And--John was getting to do that sort of thing quite unnecessarily
often--he laughed and bent toward her with every intention of
kissing her again.
"Oh, that wasn't what I meant," she assured him. Then her mood
suddenly changed. "John, you have what one of Grandfather's
anarchist friends called a real from-gold heart. But you don't have
to do that unless..."
"Unless what?" demanded John, quite coldly removing all of himself
that he could from her half of the seat.
Joy's eyes fixed themselves on the distant scenery--excellent
scenery, all autumn reds and yellows.
"I'll tell you the 'unless' tomorrow morning," she answered him
sweetly, but none the less firmly.
"You are playing with me, Joy, I think," John answered in his most
diagnostic tone--the exact tone in which he would have said, "You
have smallpox, Joy, I think."
"Why, yes," she answered him demurely. "We were to, weren't we?"
"You'll have to wait out here a while; I have a case here," he told
her in a voice which held a note of endurance.
She sat quite still, after suppressing a faint impulse to ask him if
she should hold the motor. She leaned back and gave herself up to
the country sights and sounds and scents, gently ecstatic.
"Oh, Aunt Lucilla!" she was saying inwardly. "You'd be proud of me!"
Joy was actually playing--he had said so--playing with a man!
CHAPTER SEVEN
A VERY CHARMING GENTLEMAN
"You look lovely," said Phyllis heartily. She herself was radiant in
a rose satin that made her look, as her small son remarked
ecstatically, like a valentine. "Mustn't it be horrid to be a man
and always wear the same black clothes?"
"M'yes," answered Joy absent-mindedly. "If I look as nice as you do
I don't have to worry. But--but will Gail Maddox be very much
dressed?"
"She will," replied Phyllis decisively. "If I know Gail, she'll look
like a Christmas tree. But don't let that weigh on your mind, dear
child. Nobody could look better than you do, if Viola and I did
combine two of your frocks into one. Could they, Viola?"
The colored girl, who had been doing the masses of Joy's bronze hair
while her mistress, kneeling by the dressing-table, put the
finishing touches to some frock-draperies, giggled.
"Well dressed? Why, Miss Joy looks like the vampire in the movie show!"
"Final praise!" sighed Phyllis. "You never told me I was as well
dressed as a vampire, Viola."
"You couldn't live up to vampiring, nohow, Mrs. Harrington, nor you
shouldn't want to, not with that goldy hair of yours," said Viola
reprovingly.
"Virtue is thrust upon me, in other words," said Phyllis. "Evidently
you have possibilities of crime, Joy!"
They went down, laughing, to where Allan and John were waiting for
them, Allan walking the floor in his usual quick, boyish fashion,
John sitting at a table reading, by way of economizing time. Being a
doctor, he had a way of snapping up odds and ends of time and doing
things with them.
He looked up from his paper as Joy's light footsteps pattered down
the stairs, and continued to look at her. The green and silver of
her gown glittered and flowed around her. Viola had done her hair
high, and the wealth of it showed more, even, than when it was down
in its accustomed braids. Her surprising black brows and lashes,
with the innocence of her blue eyes, and the half-wistful,
half-daring expression she had, made her seem a combination of
sophistication and childishness such as John had never seen before.
"Shall I do you credit?" she asked him softly over her shoulder, as
he held her wrap for her.
Her heart beat hard as she said it. She felt as if she was going
into open battle, and she wanted all the heartening she could get.
"Tell me now that you like me better than you do Gail Maddox!" was
what she wanted to say. But she knew she couldn't, not without being
thought a cat. "I can't get over finding motors scattered all over
everything!" was what she heard herself saying inconsequently
instead as they went out. She did not dare give him time to answer
her first impulsive question.
But he answered it just the same.
"You do me great credit, my dear. I never knew you were quite so
beautiful." He said it gravely, but none the less sincerely. "It's
very pleasant to remember that I have property rights to such a
charming person."
Property rights! Joy's heart gave a little warm jump. If he could
say that--if he could even seem to forget that she was only rented,
so to speak...
Before she thought she had reached up and caught his hand in a warm,
furtive grasp for a moment. She took it away again directly, but it
had comforted her to touch him. He was so strong and so _there_....
Also, Viola's words comforted her; if she looked like a vampire, why,
maybe, with the aid of the wishing ring and Aunt Lucilla's ghost,
she could live up to it. Having her hair done as high and her dress
cut as low as anybody's also gave her courage. Altogether it was,
if not a perfectly self-assured, at least a very poised-looking
little figure that came smiling into Mrs. Hewitt's embrace from
the motor, with her lover close behind her, like a bodyguard.
"You little angel! You look perfect!" said her mother-in-law-elect
rapturously. "And you match my lavender grandeur perfectly. That's a
sweet frock, Phyllis. Hurry down, girls, you want to have a little
time to rest before you have to stand up for years and receive."
It was early still when they came down from the dressing-rooms, and
no guests had arrived yet. So they settled themselves in the
dining-room, informally, to wait and visit a little.
"One has _no_ chance for fun with an earnest-minded son," Mrs.
Hewitt complained amiably. "This is the first doings of any sort I
have ever had that John was even remotely connected with. A nice
little daughter that would dance and flirt and turn the house upside
down--that was what I was entitled to--and I got a brilliant young
physician who specializes on the _os innominata_, or something
equally thrilling! I sometimes wonder how he ever found time to
annex you, Joy!"
Joy colored. It was a random shaft, but it caught her breath.
Then--"He didn't," she said gallantly. "I simply rubbed my ring and
wished for him, and he came."
"I'll be bound he didn't come hard," said her _enfant terrible_
of a prospective mother-in-law placidly. "Johnny, keep away from
those cakes! They're for much, much later, and for your guests, not
the likes of you!"
"They are excellent. We need moral support in our ordeal," returned
her son, sauntering up, with his usual dignity unimpaired by a plate
of fancy cakes in each hand. "Never mind your cruel mother-in-law,
Joy. Take a lot--take two!"
"I will, anyway," interposed Allan placidly, reaching a long,
unexpected brown hand over his friend's shoulder and securing three.
"Phyllis and I need as much moral support as anybody."
"Phyllis is the only one who is minding her manners," Mrs. Hewitt
observed with a firmness that she patently didn't mean in the least.
"Phyllis, my dear, go get some of the sandwiches. We may as well
lunch thoroughly. We have heaps of time before the 'gesses' get
here, anyway."
They were all playing like a lot of children. Phyllis, flushed and
laughing, raided the kitchen with her husband and came back with
more kinds of sandwiches than Joy had known existed. They sat about
on cushions on the floor, because the chairs had been taken out for
dancing later, and the floor waxed. Joy laughed with the rest, and
lunched sumptuously on the cakes the guests ought to have had, and
thought for the thousandth time what an ideal mother-in-law was hers
at the moment, and how many of the people in the world were the
realest of real folks, and how much like Christmas every-day life
was getting to be...
"I see you are eating up everything before the really deserving poor
arrive," said a slow, coolly amused voice behind Joy, who sat with
her back to the entrance.
Joy did not need Mrs. Hewitt's equally calm "Good-evening, Gail.
Since when have you been deserving?" to know who had entered.
"Came to help you receive," stated Gail further, still indolently,
bringing herself further into the circle as she spoke, where Joy
could see her. "I brought a stray cousin along--sex, male. I knew you
wouldn't care--men are a godsend in New England towns. Here he is."
The cousin in question was evidently motioned to, for he appeared in
the range of Joy's vision with a charming certainty of welcome, and
the two merged themselves with the circle without more ceremony.
They had evidently made their way to the dressing-rooms before
coming to hunt for the family.
While Gail introduced her cousin a little more thoroughly, Joy gave
her a furtive, but still more thorough, inspection. She seemed
twenty-five or six. She was very slim, with lines like a boy more
than a girl; sallow, with large, steady blue-gray eyes and heavy
lashes, and lips that were so full that they were sullen-looking
when her face was still. She was not unusually pretty--indeed, by
Phyllis' rose-and-golden beauty she looked dingy--but she had
something arresting about her, and the carriage and manner of a girl
who is insolently certain that whatever she says or does is perfect
because she does it. She had on a straight blue chiffon frock, cut
unusually low: so low that it was continually slipping off one thin
shoulder. Allan confided to Joy afterward that Gail's shoulder-straps
worried him to madness.
Joy watched Miss Maddox with fascinated eyes. "I'm so _young_!"
she thought forlornly, "and all the rest of them are so dreadfully
grown-up!"
She felt as if Gail Maddox, with her brilliant, careless sentences,
and her half-insolent confidence, owned everybody there much more
than _she_ did: and she felt little and underdressed and outclassed
to a point where even Gail might pity her, and probably did.... And
if there is a more abjectly awful feeling than that the Other Girl
pities you, nobody has discovered it yet.... Gail might even know how
much of a pretender she was. If John--but no. John wasn't like that.
He was--"fantastically honorable," she had heard Phyllis call it.
John hadn't told--he wouldn't tell if his own happiness depended
on it.... And Joy let her thoughts stray off into a maze of wondering
as to whether she would rather have her self-respect saved by not
having Gail know, or whether, if it would break John's heart to be
separated forever from Gail, she oughtn't to tell him to tell.
Gail, lounging in a low chair she had dragged across the waxed floor
in the face of all outcries, with one electric-blue-shod foot
stretched out before her, looked exactly the person you'd care least
to have know anything they could scorn you about. She could scorn so
well and so convincingly, Joy felt, listening to her. There wouldn't
be a thing left of you when she got through.
"I feel as alone as Robinson Crusoe," thought Joy forlornly.
She rose restlessly and picked up the tray which had borne their
illegal sandwiches, with the idea of carrying it and herself out of
sight. She wanted a minute to brace herself in.
As she did it, Allan rose, too, unexpectedly, as he did most things.
"Here, I'll take some of those," he offered, and helped her carry
the debris out.
They set down their burdens on a pantry table, whence three
scandalized maids whisked them somewhere else again, gazing the
while reproachfully at the invaders.
"I haven't any use for that girl," stated Allan plainly, as they
went back. "Don't let her fuss you, Joy."
Joy looked gratefully up at him. The whole world, then, didn't
prefer Gail Maddox to her!
"She makes me feel exactly like a small dog that has stolen a bone and
got caught," Joy acknowledged directly, with a little shamefaced laugh.
"She'll do her best in that line," responded Allan, who seemed to
have no great affection for the lady. "Don't let her bother you.
He's your bone--hang on to him. In short, sic 'em!"
They both laughed, and Joy came back with her bronze head high and
an access of fresh courage. She sat down this time between John and
the cousin, whose name she had not heard. But she began talking hard
to him. Occasionally she tossed John, fenced in beside her, a
cheerful word. He seemed perfectly satisfied at first, but the
cousin did not. He wanted Joy all to himself, it appeared, and a
fiancé more or less seemed to have no bearing on the case, as far as
he was concerned.
Presently John woke up to this fact and began the effort to
repossess himself of his lawful property. Joy cast a mischievous
glance at Allan, sitting on the arm of his wife's chair (chairs had
become the order of the day), and Allan grinned happily, by some
means telegraphing the situation to Phyllis. Every one was happy
except John, and perhaps Gail, who presently eyed the three and used
her usual weapon of lazy frankness.
"It makes me furious to see both of you making violent love to Joy
Havenith," she said indolently. "Clarence, go start the victrola, my
good man. This must be put a stop to."
Clarence lifted himself from the floor by Joy, but he calmly took
her hand along with him, and raised her, too.
"She's going to christen the floor with me," he informed his cousin.
"Come on, Miss Joy!"
The isolation that ordinarily doth hedge an engaged girl, where men
are concerned, seemed to trouble Clarence not at all. He was, by the
way, in spite of the fact that he would some day be too stout, one
of the best-looking men who ever lived. He had a good deal of his
cousin's lazy assurance--in him it sometimes verged on impudence,
but never beyond the getting-away-with point--and a heavenly smile.
His other name was, unbelievably, Rutherford, which almost took the
curse off the Clarence, as he said, but not quite. And if he had
gone into the movies he would have made millions, beyond a doubt.
He drew Joy across the floor with him, in her green-and-silver
draperies, and began to wind the victrola, which had been tucked
into a nook where Mrs. Hewitt had vainly hoped it would be quite
hidden. There was to be an orchestra afterwards for the authorized
dancing.
Clarence put on "Poor Butterfly," and encircling Joy proceeded to
dance away with her.
"But I don't know how to dance," she gasped as she felt herself
being drawn smoothly across the floor.
"That doesn't matter, Sorcerette, dear," said Clarence blandly.
"Just let go--be clay in the hands of the potter. I'll do the
dancing for two. Hear me?"
Joy did as she was told, and--marvel of marvels!--found herself
following him easily. She was really dancing!
"But why did you call me that?" she demanded, like a child, as she
got her breath. To her apprehensive mind the name sounded as if Gail
had not only learned her dark secret but had passed it on to her
dear Cousin Clarence.