Poor Joan, her mind at unrest, her first glimpse of the world outside the sheltered garden of her childhood showing her only the chill loneliness of its battling crowds, was not in a mood to insist upon her discoveries.
"It does make me feel rather bitter," she said through her tears. "But I don't want to be."
As she and Nancy were dressing for dinner, she said lightly, but with a strained look in her eyes, "The conquering Bobby Trench will be here by this time to-morrow. Nancy, you are not to go leaving me alone with him."
Nancy looked up at her sharply, but her face was hidden, and she did not see the look in it, the look which hoped for a warm return to their old habit of discussing everything and everybody together.
"I suppose you would like me to take him off your hands so that you can devote yourself to John Spence?" she said.
If Joan was ready to mention names, she was ready too. Her meaning was not so unkind as her words; but how was Joan, ready to smart at a touch, to know that?
She could not speak for a moment. Then she said with a quiver, "I don't want to devote myself to him. He likes you best."
Nancy heard the quiver, and it moved her; but not enough to soothe the soreness she felt against Joan. Joan might be ready now, unwillingly, to accept the fact that John Spence liked Nancy best; but she had stood out against it for a long time, and had not taken the discovery in the way that Nancy was convinced she would have taken it herself, if Joan had been the preferred.
"If he does, it is your fault," she said. "I've not tried to make him. I have only been just the same as I always was; and you have been quite different."
There was nothing in this speech that would have struck Joan as unkind a few months before. But the tension was too great now to bear of the old outspokenness between them. How could Virginia say that Nancy wasn't hard? She only wanted to make friends, but Nancy wanted to quarrel. But she would not be hard in return.