A hard problem indeed for one who, in many ways, was still only a child herself.
CHAPTER X
IN JOYCE'S STUDIO
It was a wild, blustery day in March, two months after Mary's interrupted visit at the ranch. Joyce Ware, sitting before the glowing wood fire in the studio, high up on the top floor of a New York apartment house, had never known such a lonesome Sunday. The winds that rattled the casements and sent alternate dashes of rain and snow against the panes had kept her house-bound all day.
Usually she was glad to have one of these shut-in days, after a busy week, when she could sit and do nothing with a clear conscience. Every moan of the wind in the chimney and every glimpse of the snow-whitened roofs below her windows, emphasized the luxurious comfort of the big room. She had had a hard week, trying to crowd into it some special orders for Easter cards. A year ago she would not have added them to her regular work, but now she was afraid to turn anything away which might help to swell the size of the check she must send home every month. If the days were not long enough to do the tasks she set for herself at a comfortable pace, she simply worked harder—feverishly, if need be, to finish them.
She had been practically alone the entire day, for the two members of the household who were at home were staying in their own rooms. Lucy Boyd had a cold, and her devoted little aunt was nursing her with the care of the traditional hen for its one chicken. Mrs. Boyd had not allowed Lucy to leave her room even for her Sunday dinner, but had carried it in to her with her own on a tray. As Miss Henrietta Robbins was spending the week-end in the country, Joyce did not take the trouble to set the table for herself, but ate her own dinner in the little kitchenette.
Afterward, to make the day as different as possible from the six others in the week, in which she sat at her easel from morning till night in a long-sleeved gingham apron, she went into her room and put on a dress of her own designing, soft and trailing and of a warm wine-red. Pushing a great sleepy-hollow chair close enough to the hearth for the tips of her slippers to rest on the shining brass fender-rail, she settled herself among the cushions with a book which she had long been trying to find time to read.
The story, like the bleak outdoor world, seemed to accentuate her sense of shelter and comfort, but at the same time it somehow emphasized her loneliness. Now and then, when her eyes grew tired, she paused for a moment to look around her. There were several things which gave her keen pleasure every time her attention was called to them, which she felt ought to be enough of themselves to dispel her vague depression: the odor of growing mignonette, the sunny yellow of the pot of daffodils on the black teakwood table, the gleam of firelight on the brasses, and the warm shadows it cast on the trailing folds of her wine-red dress.