Whenever Joan went to see them—which was rather often nowadays, for her late experience had had the not unusual effect of softening her comprehension, while it hardened her surfaces—they greeted her with eager gossip, such as: "I see the little Jones girl is to be married at last!" or, "The paper doesn't mention your name at the Smiths' cotillion last night.... Surely you were there?"
In their eyes she was evidently a most romantic figure, the embodiment of gaiety and youth and of all they had hoped but somehow failed to be. They exclaimed with quite personal delight over her frocks, her pretty underthings, her dainty shoes, the silver-fox furs Stefan Nikolai had sent her from Siberia.
"You're going to be one of the belles of the winter!" prophesied Miss Virginia raptly. "I can tell from the way the paper speaks of you already! 'Miss Darcy, the fascinating daughter of Major and Mrs. Richard Throckmorton Darcy, lately returned from the East'—etc. Clothes do help so much," she added wistfully. "I sometimes think that if dear papa had been able to manage better dresses for us—" She left her remark unfinished, a conversational characteristic of all the Darcy ladies.
"You must remember that dear papa had three of us to provide for, whereas Cousin Richard has only one," reminded Miss Iphigenia loyally. "Besides, you were too pretty to need anything but the simplest white muslins, Virgie. Fine dresses would not have been half as becoming."
"What nonsense, Genie!" blushed her sister. "I'm sure you didn't need clothes any more than I did, with all your beautiful hair."
Joan's evil imagination pictured her Cousin Iphigenia frequenting the polite world clad, like the Lady Godiva, chiefly in hair, and she chuckled; but at the same time she kissed both ladies impulsively.
This was one of the things that brought her to the dingy house so frequently; the atmosphere of affectionate appreciation that warmed it. In her father's family—and it was one of the Darcys' undoubted charms—all geese were swans, and they put not only their own but each other's best foot foremost with a touching unanimity. The three sisters regarded each other as paragons, exceeded in degree only by their first cousin Richard, who, in addition to being a Darcy, was likewise a man, and by their first-cousin-once-removed Joan, who in addition to being a Darcy was young. As to their cousin Richard's new wife—the name she had assumed in marriage banished before birth any qualms they might have felt as to her inborn qualifications for the polite world. A Darcy could naturally do no wrong.
One of the things Joan liked best in Effie May was her consistent kindness to these rather tiresome and unimportant spinsters. "Buying them!" she had thought at first. But after all why should any one trouble to buy them? Hers was not entirely a material kindness, either. She consulted them faithfully in social matters, even in household matters (though the Misses Darcy were not notable housekeepers). She and the Major and the limousine accompanied them occasionally to church, the only form of social dissipation in which they still indulged. Altogether she exhibited in dealing with them a tact which in anybody else Joan would have attributed to good breeding.
One morning, when the girl stopped in to make her cousins a visit, the opening door revealed an unusual amount of chatter coming down from the floor above; soft, pretty chatter (like her father, the Darcy ladies had charming voices), mingled with the steady hum of a sewing-machine.
"What's up, Susy?" she asked the languid colored slattern who let her in.