"At school I had too many chums, and here I haven't any," she complained. "I really don't know why!"
"Maybe they're sort of jealous," was his suggestion.
"Why, Archie! You're getting positively subtle with your compliments," she laughed. "No, it can't be that. I'm no 'man's woman!'—I'm done with that forever! They're welcome to every beau in town for all of me, and I never flirt with other people's property. I'm really the ideal companion nowadays—no family complete without me.... Of course I see a lot of girls around at parties, and they're friendly enough, even make rather a fuss over me. But—that's all! Somehow we don't seem to be playing the same game."
"Ish ga bibble," murmured Archie, consolingly if cryptically. "What do you care, when you've got 'em all nailed to the mast? But I know just what you mean, Miss Darcy. Used to feel sort of that way myself when I went with Miss Gracie or Miss Ella, or any of them from the office. Before I knew your sort."
"So you think," said Joan, amused, "it's the sort that's wrong, not me?"
"Nothing wrong with you!" he declared, with a comforting finality.
Being a person with whom sympathy was always active rather than passive, however, he took her case earnestly under consideration; with rather surprising results.
Some days later—it was one of the still February mornings that come to Kentucky as an earnest that spring is on the way, with cardinals fluting from the evergreens and a rusty bluebird or two on the lookout for summer quarters—Joan was called to the telephone to speak to no less a personage than Miss Emily Carmichael.
"I hear you've been riding all winter, Miss Darcy," she said. "I'm so sorry not to have known it before, so that we might have gone out together. So much pleasanter than riding with a groom, don't you think!"
Joan agreed that it would have been.