"What about drink?" he inquired on a post-card. (They did a good deal of this staccato correspondence, Joan liking to exchange deep thoughts with him, as she expressed it, "while they were hot.")
"Drink," she replied on another, "is the Tie that Loosens!..."
Stefan Nikolai was the only one of her friends with whom she had found courage to discuss her father's marriage. Writing things out to him was almost like writing them out to herself. It served somehow to clear her mind. It is probable that Mr. Nikolai, a student of various phases of the human problem, got a good deal of valuable vicarious experience out of young Joan's letters. Certainly he encouraged them.
It was to him that she confided her discovery that social life is far more pleasing after dinner than before. She was learning to count, as surely as does many an experienced hostess, upon the help of the Tie that Loosens. While she herself had not as yet developed her father's palate for cocktails and fine vintages she appreciated their effect upon her partners—for to her men so far were merely partners.
It was after dinner that Joan's part of the evening began. Then, thanks to the Tie that Loosens, there was no longer need to make banal conversation nor to listen to it, no need to pretend friendly interest in young men to whom she was incurably a stranger, no need of anything but to yield herself to the music and the first pair of arms that offered, and float away into Dreamland.
There was something curiously sensuous to Joan about dancing. It acted like a drug upon her fancy, stimulating, soothing. She was hardly aware of whom she danced with, if he could dance. If he could not, she stopped. This odd impersonality of hers was rather piquant to her partners. Many a youth who was afraid to talk to "that quiet Darcy girl—you never know what she's thinking about!"—was not afraid to dance with her, whenever he got the chance.
At such times Joan had her rare moments of beauty. With flushed face, loosened hair, and wide, dreaming eyes, she was as graceful as one of the three circling maidens in the Primavera—the one who looks wistfully over her shoulder at the oblivious youth. Unfortunately her lot was cast among people who did not think in terms of Botticelli. Her step-mother wondered sometimes whether curling-tongs and perhaps a little rouge would make her look more like other girls....
Sometimes people came to the club who attracted Joan's attention—quieter people than Effie May's friends, more simply dressed, who never seemed to join in the accentuated hilarity after dinner. Once in such a group she recognized the girl who had eyed her aloofly on the train coming home from boarding school. Joan suddenly yearned to do some aloof eyeing on her own account, now that she was no longer shabby but wore a frock as smart as any in the room.
She watched her opportunity, and followed the stranger into the dressing-room with some such truculent idea in view; but was disarmed by the courtesy with which the other made room for her at a mirror, where they powdered their noses side by side in amity. As she was leaving the room, however, she heard the aloof one murmur to a friend: "What a lot of strange people one sees at this club nowadays! I wonder where they all come from? It's getting very mixed."
Joan went white with anger. She struggled with the temptation to explain proudly that she was not a strange person, that her name entitled her to any society she chose to enter, that it was her step-mother who was "mixed," not she....