To come back to Foxhollow Corners was razing the mountain of delight that had been mounting higher and higher ever since she had left Foxhollow Corners. The girls were all so uninteresting. After Jerry’s plangency, they only contributed to the flatness of things. All they did was to embroider or go to the movies, or walk down town to see what was going on, under cover of a sundae. And those of the men who were not away all the year at college, had been put in their place by Tom as “a buncha fruits.”
And above all, there was nothing to do—absolutely nothing to do if you didn’t do it with the other girls. Joy played ragtime on the scandalized grand piano, and thought over Jerry’s words. . . . Life with Jerry, and studying singing from a real teacher! It was a thought with which to toy. Of course, when it came right down to it, she could not go. Jerry and Sarah were too different—the New Englander in her cried out against their careless ways, and shrank from the thought of being uprooted from her native soil. And when the New Englander would give way to the French strain that was her mother’s ancestors, and her blood danced in her veins at the thought of liberation from Foxhollow Corners—there was always the chilling consideration of what her father would have to say on the subject. He regarded her as something that could be put away or taken out at leisure—and for him to find that she was outside the limits he had given her, might prove revolutionary.
And then one morning at breakfast while she was fidgeting over her prunes, her father himself threw the bomb of revolution across the table:
“Joy, my child, I have been made executor of a will.”
Joy looked up vaguely from her prunestones.
“An old friend who may, or may not, have known that it would be inconvenient for me to go to California at this time. Yes, the estate is in California—I shall have to leave the first of the month.”
“How long will you be gone?” Joy asked, and a little fever of excitement began to burn within her.
“I’m sure I cannot prophesy—these affairs are sometimes indefinite in the extreme.” He frowned over his soft-boiled egg, and the fever within her quickened, as she began to vision the possibilities of this departure.
“Were you—were you thinking of taking me with you?” she asked, with no desire warming her voice.
“It would not be particularly desirable. I know that fathers do take their daughters unchaperoned upon trips with them, but I should prefer not to have you with me. I may have to be travelling constantly”—he heaved a sigh—“and I would not know where or with whom to leave you. Yet that question faces me here as well. I could not leave you alone in this house. And there are no relations nearer than your New York cousins.”