"What's more," cried Miss Iphigenia, inspired, "I mean to bring our Susy to hear you the next time you make a speech, Joan. Yes, I do! If they try to keep her out, we shall say she is there as our maid. If we are all to be allowed to vote about things, colored and white alike, it's time for the colored women to be taught how!"—Which Joan justly regarded as a signal victory.
But at the same time she chuckled inwardly over the mental vision of an audience of colored lady voters, swaying to and fro with occasional unctuous shouts of, "Bress us, dat's so! Um, yas, my Lawd! Come down, come down and gadder us sinners into de fold!"
Occasionally, in the pursuance of her various public successes, Joan was thrown into contact with people whom she classified under the heading of Intelligentzia. There were plenty of these in Louisville, thinkers and students and writers, a growing number of names which were rather better known away from the city than in it. But of these Joan fought a little shy. She cared more for books than for the making of them, had no wish to peep behind the scenes for fear of losing her illusions. She got the impression, too, that professional thinkers and writers were so busy observing and interpreting the life about them as to have somehow lost human touch with it. And Joan was nothing if not a humanist. She had a youthful horror of being classified among the bas bleux.
"Men do so hate a bluestocking," she said once pensively to her friend Emily.
"Men? Well, what of that? Yours doesn't!—and you don't want anybody else's men, do you?"
"None that I have seen so far," admitted Joan. "But you never can tell. They say it's in the dangerous thirties that we really begin to sit up and take notice—Anyway, I shall never be married and settled enough to relish the idea of men running away from me as if I were something catching!"
So she continued to avoid, rather than to cultivate, the company of the Intelligentzia, thereby denying herself her birthright.
And at twenty-five, a leading citizeness of her community, with engagements so thick on her calendar that there was barely time for an occasional meal at home, she woke every morning with the thought, "If something doesn't happen to-day, I shall scream!"