("What," wondered bewildered Joan, "is the man talking about? It sounds like a medical almanac!")
But as there was usually some method in Mr. Nikolai's tangents, she read on. At the end of the last page he enlightened her, and disposed of the affair with Eduard Desmond in two sentences.
"By this time you will be recuperating from your first love-attack. Severe, doubtless, but so much the better. More phagocytes!"
It was his only reference to her revelations with regard to Eduard Desmond. Evidently to the scientific mind love in its various manifestations was merely a form of mal-ease to which humanity is subject.
Joan sincerely hoped that enough of the phagocytes had been released by the innoculation to render her immune from further attack forever.
CHAPTER XXIV
Social life, in a small American city that prides itself upon traditions of social life, may be as absorbing, if not as profitable, as that in any of the world's great capitals—perhaps more absorbing. For while it is possible in Paris, Rome, London, New York, to disappear at will out of the current and no questions asked, such a procedure would be as impracticable in one of the self-sufficient societies of our South or East as for a diving duck to remain ad libitum in the bottom of the duck-pond. He may remain, to be sure, even until he drowns; but his corpse need not expect a welcome when it returns to the surface, nor will there be any attempts to resuscitate him. It behooves a socially-inclined duck to hug the company of his fellows.
Joan was caught up presently into a whirl of little events which effectually precluded introspection and even thought. Dance followed dance; there were teas, luncheons, dinners—above all Bridge, which was just beginning to oust euchre from a society that must have its gambling, even if the stakes be merely cut-glass fern dishes. The time was not yet, in the South at least, when gentlewomen appeared at card parties purse in hand; but certain hostesses, notably our Effie May, soon learned to offer prizes that made attention to the game worth while. Mrs. Darcy's Bridges were invariably successful.
There began to appear, even among the freshest of the débutantes, an expression described by Joan to her friend Nikolai as the Bridge Face—an eager, grim look of do-or-die, which Joan did not find becoming. (Perhaps this was because she herself never learned to play the game, except with her hands.)