The Darcys too, were spending rather a quiet summer. Now that they had no débutante daughter in prospect, their names figured leas prominently in the social column. With his growing avoirdupois, the Major appeared to be abandoning the one-step in favor of the easy-chair, which was to be found in greater perfection at home than at the Country Club. If his bride regretted this lapse into settledness, she showed no signs of it. Her avoirdupois, also, was getting rather out of hand, despite constant attention to massage and sporadic attempts at dieting.
"It ain't how much I eat, seems like—it's what I eat," she said once plaintively to Joan. "Everything tasty turns to flesh on me; and God knows, I hate a poor table!"
But Joan realized that it was not entirely physical inhibitions which were retiring the Darcys from the social arena. Her step-mother had delicacy enough to understand that her place was not among Joan's acquaintance, now that the girl had discovered her history. Joan liked her the better for it. She was punctiliously careful to invite Effie May to her house at frequent intervals, and always accepted such invitations as the other offered in return. The Major, never observant, was quite unaware that the relations between his wife and daughter had suffered any change. As he once remarked impersonally, "You and my wife would naturally find very little in common, excellent creature though she is. Why should you, indeed? Your antecedents, your early environment, have been entirely different. And as one grows older, those are the things that really matter," he added, with a complacency that sat rather oddly upon him in the circumstances—On the whole, Joan began to feel distinctly sorry for her step-mother.
The older people came sometimes to take her for long automobile drives into the State; expeditions which Joan enjoyed thoroughly. Her father's imperturbable good manners and Effie May's amiability made them excellent traveling-companions, proof against all hazards of the road; tire trouble, bad going, even delayed and poor meals. And they both treated Joan with a new consideration, oddly wistful on the woman's part, to which she responded gratefully.
It shamed her somehow to see how kind the world was to her nowadays; as if, in following the line of least resistance, she had done something very commendable indeed.
CHAPTER XLI
These long automobile rides familiarized her as nothing else could not only with the State but with her father. She came to understand and share his peculiar, proprietary interest in the lovely Kentucky countryside. He pointed out to her its beauties of wood and hill and pasture like the owner of some vast estate exhibiting it to visitors, with a frank and pardonable pride. It is a habit of mind not unusual to the native of certain localities—notably Virginia and Maryland and Kentucky; but in her wandering, unimportant old father it seemed to Joan a little piteous, as if he had sunk his small identity into that of his great State, content to make its history his history, its glory his.
"Here," he would say reverently, "is the spot where we made our final victorious stand against the Indians. Sacred ground, my daughter!" Or—"This is the place where our women went down to the spring for water, risking their lives, bless their hearts! because the men could not be spared from the defense of the stockade. You should thank God that you are a Kentucky woman!" He sometimes forgot in his enthusiasm that she had not been, so to speak, born to the purple—though that fact, as he once explained to her, was merely an accident, due to a certain miscalculation of dates.
Joan came to realize in this new intimacy with her father that his futility was owing in large part to circumstances over which he had no control: notably the times in which he lived. He had been born a little too late or perhaps a little too early. There is no need for men of his type in the piping times of peace; but had his prime chanced to occur during some convulsed period of the world's history, it is conceivable that Richard Darcy might have rendered a great account of himself. He was a born leader of men, with unfortunately little opportunity to exercise his talent. During the only war that came within his range of vision (our late unpleasantness with Spain), he had chanced to be involved with certain trusting friends in a financial situation so acute that the affairs of the nation had been obliged to stand aside until he extricated himself; by which time, to his lasting regret, the war was over.