"It does not take a great deal of courage," said Joan, flushing, "to continue my mother's friendship with the most brilliant man I know. There even seem to be people who envy me the opportunity."
(This shot told, Mrs. Carmichael having been one of the first and most eager to entertain the visiting celebrity.)
"Doubtless he is brilliant as a writer," she conceded. "That is his profession. But even as a writer (I know nothing of him, of course, otherwise!) do you consider him quite safe, my dear? Those plays, for instance."
"Have you read them?" asked Joan bluntly.
"Why, not yet. I bought them, of course—one does. But one has so little time for reading. I am told, however, that in one of them a child is born practically on the stage. At least the characters converse about it quite openly."
"Shocking of them," murmured Joan. "Those things should be managed by means of asterisks. But it's so hard to find actors who play asterisks acceptably."
Mrs. Carmichael's lorgnon busied itself. "I should be sorry," remarked its owner, "to think that any friend of my daughter's would care to encourage indelicacy, whether in literature or—or in life."
"Dear me, yes!—life is indelicate enough anyway, without our encouragement, isn't it?" murmured Joan.
She felt, perhaps justly, that she had come out of this encounter with the honors of war. But Joan could ill afford to make enemies....
The finish of Nikolai's book postponed itself from week to week. Spring came, and early summer, that most witching of seasons in the middle South, languid with the scent of magnolia-blossoms, gay with the bright parasols and fragile muslins that flutter forth like butterflies at the first touch of sun. With Nikolai to share it, the gray old town regained something of its former glamour for Joan. She had many favorite spots to show him—a quiet tree-arched street of patriarchal mansions in the midst of warehouses, with all the charm and old-world dignity of a London square; a certain secluded nook low on the bank of the slow, yellow river, undiscovered save by an occasional working-girl and her shirt-sleeved "gentleman-friend," with whom Nikolai conversed as pleasantly as with old acquaintances. He had not the Major's elegant distaste for the canaille.