CHAPTER XXXV
"I guess you've got to have the whole story now, though it ain't a very pretty story to tell a girl," said Effie May wearily. "I don't know as your papa would much want you to hear it, Joan...."
To the girl the whole episode seemed unreal, part of that strange day, with the holiday crowds, the brief, hectic excitement of the races, followed by the pistol-shot that meant the death of a ruined old woman. She could not believe that she, Joan Darcy, convent-bred, the daughter of reserved and fastidious people, could be actually participating in this impossible melodrama.
"What my father would wish hardly matters now, I think," she said, more frigidly than she realized. "Please say what you have to say."
All the way home her step-mother had wept, steadily and hopelessly, with ugly snuffling noises that took away what dignity there might have been in her grief. Joan, always helpless in the face of uncontrolled emotion, made no effort to comfort her. Her impulse of pity had already died into disgust. She could not look at that swollen, grayish face, of whose careful complexion tears made strange havoc.
The woman sighed. "If only you weren't so young!—I suppose you think I'm a bad lot—bad as they make 'em. But I'm not. I never was. Oh, I know I've done things ladies don't do!—but then ladies ain't often asked to do 'em, dearie. You got to remember that."
Joan shrugged, and resigned herself to hear what she was to hear.
"I guess you know I wasn't born a lady, nor raised like one, though I've tried.... Well, never mind that!—Pa had a little cash-and-carry grocer store over to Indianapolis, and we lived upstairs, all of us in two rooms.... It was the dirt I couldn't stand, and the crowding. It ain't right for a whole lot of children to live like that, all mixed in so! The others didn't seem to mind, but I was always sort of nice in my ways. Maybe because I was born before Mom took to the coke."
"The what?"
"Coke—dope, you know. It was the only thing that seemed to keep her going, poor Mom! and I'm glad she had it."