“Wigs and Davy just went up to leave a note saying we’d come back—come on—we’re going down the Cape somewhere for luncheon and somewhere else for dinner and somewhere else to dance!”
Joy did not have time to write her father that day—and only barely time the following noon. She found herself started on a round of gaiety which she had never pictured in her most riotous moments, a routine such as she had never dreamed existed outside of fiction—with Jerry and Sarah it was just one youth after another, with an abundance over and to spare, although this abundance was never spared. Continually they streaked around, always making up new things to do, with an airy disregard of selection of hours by day or night. The men who made all this possible were nearly all college boys but not nearly all Harvard. There were New Haven men who “ran up,” and Joy was constantly meeting men from the smaller colleges who had met Jerry and Sarah at house-parties and never failed to call them up when they were in town. There was also another, smaller class, non-college men who seemed to be “men about town.” Joy did not like them as well as the college youths. They lacked the humour for the most part that the college boys possessed to superfluity, and their idea of a good time travelled along fixed and set lines.
Joy welcomed everything with an eager excitement that wore her out more than the steep hours that were taken for granted by Jerry and Sarah. She had been sleeping in Foxhollow Corners all her life—storing up her energy for youth’s playtime; playtime which might never have come if her father had not taken the initiative; playtime which might never have come if somebody had not whistled ragtime on the street. If she was white and tired, she applied Sarah’s rouge with a liberal hand and drank a “prescription” of Sarah’s from the cellarette in the club-room. Jerry objected to these “prescriptions,” but since she drank more than either of them, her word did not carry much weight. Jerry drank as she smoked; thirstily, and in long pulls, like a man who needed it, while Sarah drank and smoked daintily, as a girl does to be devilish.
When finally the answer to her hurried morning’s scrawl came from California, she was thrown into a guilty joy. Evidently her father had not read her letter with care. She had scribbled somewhat incoherently, it was true, of her change in address to the “rooms of two older girls” whom she had met before—but she had honestly not intended that he should misinterpret, or to scrawl so hastily that he would overlook the salient points in the matter. But the fact remained that he had merely made a note of her changed address, as if she had been placed in another Students’ Annex, and then proceeded to the business of the letter, which came to the information that complications would postpone his return for possibly a month longer. Adjuring her to let him know constantly of her health and progress, he was her affectionate father.
There was no seesawing of decisions, no teetering from one course to another when she read that letter. Beneath her relief she might feel guilty, but it was the triumphant guilt as of the stout lady who takes chocolate while sighing “I ought not to take this!” She would stay—for a month longer. And then—then she would see!
Strangely enough, Packy did not appear for a long time after that first day. He called up promptly, and as Jerry had expressed it, “reneged” on his invitation to the ball game. He had invited a girl, Class Day, and it seems, he explained, that one had to take one’s Class Day girl to the game. “Perhaps it’s just as well, though,” he said, “because when I see you, I want to see you, and not necessarily in a howling mob where I might forget and pound you in the frenzy of the moment. I’d much rather pound my Class Day girl!”
When Joy told Jerry, she turned up her snub nose. “I thought he’d give you a rain-check on that. It’s their Commencement game, you see—families thick all round—maybe he got faint at the thought.”
“What do you mean?” Joy had demanded.
Jerry shrugged her shoulders and took another cigarette. “Merely that never in all my intercollegiate activity, have I been asked to a Commencement, or any affair where all the proud families have come to gaze on their angel sons—and neither has Sal—and he probably thought you followed suit!”
Nevertheless, in spite of Packy’s “rain-check,” hardly a day passed without some reminder from him whether it was more flowers or tickets to some show, with always a scrawly note enclosed. Sarah waxed acidulous at these times, but Jerry remained amused.