Romantic visions danced through the girl's head of stately pillared mansions, of faithful negro servitors, of fascinating belles and gallants on horseback (her mental language became quite stilted and ante bellum to suit the picture), riding to hounds through meadows as blue as the skies above.
"Though I don't suppose there's much bluegrass right around Louisville, is there, Daddy?" she demanded, with the passion for truth that was in her.
"Plenty of it, Dollykins, plenty of it—though of course Louisville is not really in the bluegrass region, you remember. It belongs to the beargrass district." (Joan nodded. Thanks to her father's powers of reminiscence, she was well up on her Kentucky.) "Still, it isn't like one of these soulless Northern cities, which regard land as so much waste space on which to build monstrosities!" He glanced out truculently upon the streets of Chicago, which had managed in some way to incur the Major's displeasure. "No, no, there's plenty of bluegrass about the old town still, plenty of space, plenty of room to breathe. And how my old friends will take you to their hearts and love you! None of this blighting Northern indifference to everything except the chink of money. Money—bah!—It is God's country down there, my child—gentleman's country."
This was not anti-climax on the Major's part. He visualized God at His best as a superior sort of Christian gentleman, who, had America been discovered at the time, would doubtless have chosen the Southern portion of it for the scene of His nativity.
Of course the girl's anticipations of "God's country" were too glowing not to foredoom her to disappointment. The bluegrass itself was a flat failure; mere meadows of ordinary green, above which hung in seedtime a purplish tinge, like smoke from burning leaves. Louisville, too, did not quite meet the rosy expectations of a young person rather experienced in cities.
They were received at the station, not by a deputation of the old friends who were to take them to their hearts and love them, but merely by a cousin, one of three Misses Darcy who had paid lengthy southern visits to the various places Joan had hitherto called home. By this lady they were conducted volubly in street-cars (Joan had hoped for a long-tailed carriage-pair) to an ancestral mansion which had loomed large in the Major's reminiscences, but which, as he himself admitted, appeared to have shrunk strangely, after the way of houses one has known in early youth. It was one of a row of duplicate tall marble fronts, stained and yellowed, unpleasantly suggestive to Joan's too-vivid imagination of neglected front teeth.
From this shelter the Darcys soon departed. The cousins, while most cordial, were under the necessity of letting their spare chambers to paying guests, under which category their Cousin Richard could not with any certainty be classed.
Joan recalled vividly the family search for a house that suited both her father's taste and her mother's pocket-book. The streets had seemed to her gray, endless cañons, from whose pavements the heat arose and eddied in dizzying waves. From within dark doorways women in dressing-sacks, waving palm-leaf fans, gazed out at them languidly. Block after block they traversed of houses that seemed as afraid of differing from each other as men in evening dress; again they came to neighborhoods where each dwelling stood at a bias angle from the street, as if hoping to achieve an impossible privacy by turning a cold shoulder upon its neighbor. And everywhere they huddled together as close as possible, presenting a solid front of masonry to repel invasion. Where was the space her father had boasted, the room to breathe?
Joan had gazed longingly down certain vistas of tree-lined avenues, lined with pleasant mansions; or into compact green courts where there were smaller homes, with gardens. But these the elders passed without inquiry. They were as quick as house-agents at guessing rents.
At last an abode was found that seemed to the Major suitable upon all counts. Mrs. Darcy, gazing up at its tall, narrow brick front, said with a slight sigh, "Isn't there a good deal of it to keep clean, dear?"