It was the girl's first experience of the omnipotence of money; an experience which if it comes young enough will make a cynic out of a congenital optimist, which Joan was not.
To do the new Mrs. Darcy justice, she was an adaptable and, in her way, a tactful creature who had already in her admiration of the Major and his daughter, learned to modify her speech and behavior rather touchingly. And her frank delight with what she called "breaking into society," may have been rather disarming to society; or to such portion of it as found its way to the imposing house on Elmtree Street. She was extremely cordial to her guests, urging them to come often, to have more iced tea and cake, to take candy home to the children, to try the Major's cigars and whisky, for which he had an undoubted palate. If the women looked at her a little askance, the men were loud in her praises, and obeyed her urgings to come often.
Effie May, encouraged, began shortly to seek new worlds to conquer.
"Well, what next?" she demanded one night at dinner, after an afternoon of callers, stifling a wide pink yawn with the palm of a much beringed hand. "Your old families are all very well, Dickie boy, refined and classy and all that—but, my God, they ain't exciting! Now are they? Isn't there anybody in Louisville born since the Civil War?"
"If there is, I'm afraid I don't know it," admitted the Major, smiling indulgently. "You see the people who were young when I left are young no longer."
"So we've noticed," murmured his bride, making a companionable grimace at Joan. "But we don't want to spend the rest of our lives in the baldhead row, do we, girlie? You've got to find us something under sixty to pal around with, Hubby mine, that's all there is to it. See?"
One of her step-mother's most unbearable traits, to Joan, was her habit of calling the Major absurd comic-supplement pet names. But his dignity seemed not to suffer from it. In fact he expanded visibly under the treatment, like a dog whose ears are being tickled.
"Your commands are law, my angel," he said. "Just how would you suggest that I go about it?"
Effie May ruminated, while the two Darcys watched her—with, however, somewhat varying expressions. The Major appeared to be admiring, indeed gloating over, the appearance she made at the head of her bountifully appointed table, in a dress not niggardly in its display of her bountifully appointed charms. His eye followed appreciatively the curve of her plump arm as it disappeared into enveloping laces.
Joan, on the other hand, watched her step-mother warily. There was something about the woman she could not fathom, for all her surface simplicity. She felt, beneath the other's careless, easy good-nature, a certain force, a driving power, in the grip of which she and her father were mere helpless puppets. Effie May would use them always for her own ends—whatever those ends might be. Why had she chosen to saddle herself, free and rich and independent as she was, with an impoverished gentleman and his grown-up daughter? Certainly at that age, thought Joan (Effie May was in the neighborhood of forty), people could not possibly fall in love! No, there was something mysterious about her step-mother....