"I often think that if dear papa had been able to allow us to be less careful—"; sighed Miss Virginia. "But of course in our day a silk stocking was a silk stocking."
"Indeed it was! Do you remember the lovely pair Aunt Sara Miggs brought from abroad when she made the grand tour? White they were, Joan; and when they began to get a little yellow with washing, she gave them to me; and when I'd had plenty of use out of them, they were dipped pink for Sister Euphie; and by the time Sister Virgie got them they had become black."
"With age?" asked Joan, rather startled.
"Oh, no, dear. With dye."
"Where are the stockings of yester-year?" murmured the girl. "You can't buy good old family standbys like that nowadays, not at any price. Nothing but these miserable sleazy affairs that run if you look at them—the cowards!"
The Darcy ladies exchanged puzzled glances.
"Cowards—stockings?" repeated Miss Iphigenia. "I'm afraid I don't quite see the connection—"
"There isn't any—don't mind me! And really it's quite a distinction to wear cotton ones nowadays," hurriedly said Joan, who hoped sincerely never to possess a cotton stocking again in all her life. And at the same time planned to earn her own living in any honest fashion available, no matter how lowly! Inconsistency was not a fault with which she had the right to twit her fellow Jabberwocks....
But she never quite forgot her destination in the pleasures of the wayside. She did a good deal of quiet investigating, in a desultory way. Teachers, librarians, bookkeepers, stenographers, all came under the head of skilled labor, as she soon discovered, and required a course of training—which Joan's step-mother would have to provide. It put these professions out of the question.
There were various small establishments in Louisville conducted by acquaintances of hers, those "ladies in reduced circumstances" of which every Southern town is full; tea-rooms, hat-shops, lingerie-shops, and the like—a state of affairs which gave Major Darcy acute distress.