It was the first time Joan had noticed her mother's new little air of weary indifference.
"Ah, but in the South one cannot be cramped for room," replied the Major largely. "There is hospitality to be considered! You must remember that our daughter's début into society will take place from this house, my love. Who knows?—perhaps her wedding!" He pinched Joan's cheek playfully. "How do you like it, Dollykins?"
"Not at all," she replied, too discouraged to be euphonious just then. "It's hideous, and there's a grocer-shop opposite, and Mother'll never sleep with these horrid cars jangling by. Why can't we have a house in one of those pretty green courts, Daddy?"
The Major looked pained. Mary came to the rescue. A few years ago she would have explained bluntly that they could not afford one of the pretty green courts. Now she said with a rallying smile, "What! Not a banal, stupid, uninteresting new bungalow such as one might have in Pittsburgh, or Oshkosh, or Kalamazoo, Michigan! Where's your sense of local color, child? The atmosphere wouldn't be right at all!"
Joan thought that the atmosphere of this neighborhood seemed to be largely compounded of soot and sewer-gas; but she did not say so.
Richard Darcy, brightening, pointed out that while the house indeed faced a grocery-shop (so convenient for Ellen!), its rear was separated only by an alley from the rear of a house which faced upon a very fine avenue indeed; a backyard in which at the moment lingerie of a faint flesh-pink disported lacy ruffles and kicked airy silken limbs upon a clothes line. (Of this lingerie more anon.)
"Evidently," pronounced the Major with an unconscious eye upon it, "a desirable neighborhood in every way."
So the lease was signed, and Ellen Neal and the furniture sent for, and the first month's rent paid in advance; and these feats having been accomplished, Mary Darcy took to her familiar bed and died there, promptly and unobtrusively as was her way, without leaving any inconsiderate doctors' and nurses' bills behind her.
That first summer in Kentucky was a strange time to Joan. It was filled with dim memories of the books she read aloud to her father day after day, in the futile effort to be a companion to him; of long walks she took with him in the cool of the evenings, through streets and parks and suburbs that were as strange to the man who had come back to them, Joan suspected, as to herself; and far more desolate. For the ghost of a boy haunted them; a mischievous, headstrong, innocent lad who had meant no harm to the world, nor to himself, in those days.
Sometimes in the older streets he pointed out to her houses which came near to fulfilling her best hopes of pillared Southern mansions.