Why Joan? Part 24

"Father," Joan said determinedly one night at dinner, when the two elders were discussing the details of the impending ball, "why do we give a ball, anyway? It's not as if we were under many obligations to people--rather the contrary. And what's the point of entertaining for me in this wholesale way, when I do not wish to be a debutante?"

"Don't _wish_ to be a debutante?" cried the astonished gentleman. "Why, my child, the pollywog might as well decide that it does not wish to be a frog! At a certain age young women of a certain position naturally have to be presented to society. What else is there for them to do?"

"Oh, lots of things," said the girl with impatient vagueness. "They can be teachers or librarians, or--stenographers, or journalists--something useful, you know."

"Never," said the Major with pained emphasis, "while I am alive and able to support her, shall a daughter of mine step out of that station in life to which it has pleased G.o.d to call her! No lady of my family has yet, I thank G.o.d, been under the necessity of becoming anything 'useful'--Useful! Absurd!"

(Joan had a momentary vision of her frail mother at sewing-machine and housework; the three Misses Darcy struggling to make ends meet by means of paying guests who did not always pay.)

"May I ask," continued her father with a dignity that verged upon acerbity, "the reason for this sudden desire on your part to be 'useful'? It is a desire usually confined, I think, to ladies who have ceased to be ornamental," he added, with a gallant inclination in her direction.

"Oh, Dad, you know what I mean!" she said rather desperately. "I simply want to be independent."

"And where can you be more independent than under your father's roof?"

he demanded. "Free to come and go as you choose, free to entertain your friends as you like, to make what purchases you will, to run up accounts at the shops--"

"And without a penny I can call my own!" blurted out Joan.

"As to that," he remarked with a shrug of distaste, "you have merely to come to your father, my child."

"Exactly," said Joan bitterly.

Here Effie May entered the arena, fighting as usual upon the side of her victim. "The girl's right. She ought to have her own allowance--as you were saying only last night, d.i.c.kie."

"Was I?'" murmured the Major. "Yes, yes, so I was! An allowance of--How much did I say, my darling?"

"Two hundred dollars a month," prompted his darling. "Do you think you could manage on that, Joan?"

The girl lifted shamed eyes to her step-mother. She could not bear to look at her father, puffing himself out with conscious pride.

"Very well," she said in a low voice. "I'll be a debutante since you wish it--I'll spend the money and wear the clothes you provide, and eat the food you give me--but understand me! I'm only doing it because I have no choice."

She suddenly turned and ran out of the room. The Major stared after her, blankly.

"What's come over the child? She used to be so sweet-tempered and reasonable, grateful for everything. All this nonsense about independence! What does she mean by it, anyway?"

"She simply means she wants a man of her own, like every blessed mother's daughter of us," explained Effie May comfortably, "and that's what I'm trying to help her to, and it makes her sort of ashamed because she's got to be helped. That's all!... Say, old pet--" she seated herself upon his knee, as was her cosy custom when opportunity offered--"who's this chap Nikolai, anyway, that's always writing to her?

He gives her some pretty good presents. That piece of aquamarine he sent her when she graduated--it's worth a lot of money. Is he rich?"

"He's a very successful writer, I believe."

"Hmm! Old? _Too_ old, I mean?"

"For what?"

"Why, for Joan, old duckie."

"Joan?" repeated the Major vaguely. He had for the moment lost interest in his daughter's affairs. The ex-widow Calloway made rather a luscious armful. He roused himself to the required attention, however. "For Joan?

Why, good gad! the man's old enough to be her father! He was a friend of Mary's."

"Before she married you?"

"Oh, no, afterwards. She picked him up somewhere when Joan was a baby."

"_Oho!_" murmured Effie May with an indescribable expression. "I didn't know Mary was the sort to have friends after she was married!" (It is just possible that the bride was rather fed up on the virtues of her predecessor.) But a sudden stiffening of the arms that enfolded her warned her of rocks ahead, and she finished smoothly, "I thought she was too interested in you to know that any one else existed."

"By no means," smiled Richard Darcy, mollified. "On the contrary, she took an interest in many people whom I found tiresome in the extreme.

Her lame ducks, I called them. Mr. Nikolai was one of those."

"Why lame?"

"Well, at the time we first knew him it seems the girl he was engaged to had just thrown him over because she found out that he was a Jew."

Effie May gave a little squeal of horror, "A Jew! Well, I don't blame her for shying at the altar! Of all the men I've known in my day, I never _did_ go with any Jew!"

"I confess I have something of the same prejudice myself," admitted the Major, "Jews and the canile.... But Mary was different, somehow. Not democratic exactly--she was one of the most fastidious women I have ever known. But people were simply people to her, particularly if they were in trouble. She and Nikolai became great friends. And of course since then he had grown to be quite a distinguished person, Jew or no Jew."

"I shouldn't have thought you'd have wanted him round the house, though!" mused Effie May, as though Mr. Nikolai's Judaism might have been contagious.

"Oh, well, he was so devoted to the child, and so grateful, and in fact made himself useful in so many ways," explained Richard Darcy with a slight blush, "that I had not the heart to object to his presence.

Besides, as he is not robust, and has no progeny of his own, I thought that in time perhaps Joan--You see?"

"I see! Of course Jew money is as good as any money, especially when the Jew's dead." She nodded thoughtfully. "But it puts him out of the question as a husband for Joan."

"My darling, he has never been _in_ the question as a husband for Joan!

What an idea! Was it so happy in its own little nest that it wants to find nesties for all the other little birdies!" cooed the bridegroom, impatiently drawing her down into his arms again.

"Um-m-m!" responded the bride, yielding without undue reluctance.

And so Joan found them as she came remorsefully downstairs some time later, two mature love-birds perched upon a single twig, as it were, oblivious of time and the grins of pa.s.sing servants; and she turned away hastily to shut out the horrid sight.

CHAPTER XXII

One thing almost reconciled her to the distasteful idea of entering further into the social world under the wing of her step-mother, and that was the gratification, the artless delight, taken by her father's cousins in the idea of a.s.sisting at a Galt House Ball, almost in the capacity of hostesses. There was something piteous to the girl, though humiliating, about the three little spinsters' unflagging interest in the amus.e.m.e.nts of people who had forgotten, if they ever knew of, the Misses Darcys' existence. Despite their long retirement from what they called "the polite world," these ladies were inveterate students of the social column, and const.i.tuted in themselves a complete local edition of "Who's Who."

Whenever Joan went to see them--which was rather often nowadays, for her late experience had had the not unusual effect of softening her comprehension, while it hardened her surfaces--they greeted her with eager gossip, such as: "I see the little Jones girl is to be married at last!" or, "The paper doesn't mention your name at the Smiths' cotillion last night.... Surely you were there?"

In their eyes she was evidently a most romantic figure, the embodiment of gaiety and youth and of all they had hoped but somehow failed to be.

They exclaimed with quite personal delight over her frocks, her pretty underthings, her dainty shoes, the silver-fox furs Stefan Nikolai had sent her from Siberia.

"You're going to be one of the belles of the winter!" prophesied Miss Virginia raptly. "I can tell from the way the paper speaks of you already! 'Miss Darcy, the fascinating daughter of Major and Mrs. Richard Throckmorton Darcy, lately returned from the East'--etc. Clothes do help so much," she added wistfully. "I sometimes think that if dear papa had been able to manage better dresses for us--" She left her remark unfinished, a conversational characteristic of all the Darcy ladies.

"You must remember that dear papa had three of us to provide for, whereas Cousin Richard has only one," reminded Miss Iphigenia loyally.

"Besides, you were too pretty to need anything but the simplest white muslins, Virgie. Fine dresses would not have been half as becoming."