She focused an unsparing vision upon her father. Already there were changes apparent in him, signs of deterioration not entirely physical. His features seemed slightly blurred from their fine chiseling, there was a relaxed look about the lips and chin, about the very poise of his figure. He had lost a little of that indefinable something which gave him distinction, even in the days when the women of his family tried in vain to keep him pressed and unspotted. Prosperity was not going to be good for Richard Darcy.
Joan pronounced ruthless judgment upon her father:
"He's done for!"
And, as Ellen had warned her, it was none of her business.... What then was her business? Clearly, to keep from being "done for" herself.
She saw quite clearly that she had been in danger of this. There was something curiously enervating about the atmosphere of her step-mother's house, a laissez-faire that was almost—the girl sought for the word and decided upon "lascivious." Luxury, ease, pleasure—these were the ends for which her step-mother strove—or rather accomplished without undue striving, an ability to which the girl gave full due. She knew that it must take more than mere money to keep so elaborate a household running without apparent effort. The servants were efficient and unobtrusive, the accounts scrupulously kept, every nook and cranny clean and in order. Even Ellen Neal, who knew whereof she spoke, admitted that the ex-Mrs. Calloway was a housekeeper of parts. But...
Joan tried conscientiously to fathom the meaning of her "but." She decided that the house was too like its mistress—over-bathed, over-perfumed and dressed and manicured—to be quite nice. The windows were too fluffy with lace, the drawing-room too pretty and satiny, the library too red. ("Why is it," she had written to Stefan Nikolai, "that people who never open a book invariably have a red library?")
A fantastic thought came to her. She wondered whether those strange houses which are sometimes whispered of even among convent girls, those palaces of horror where women's bodies are bought and sold, might not perhaps resemble this home to which her father had brought her ...
Then she smiled at herself. Vulgar, her step-mother might be; hopelessly underbred; doubtless in some previous manifestations a shop-girl, a dressmaker; possibly one of those anomalous beings known in race-towns as "race-horse women." But she was unmistakably respectable. There was not a picture on her walls, nor a novel on the shelves of the red library, which was not, as she herself once remarked to Joan complacently, "perfectly refined." The girl recalled her evident uneasiness when sometimes at the dinner-table the talk had waxed a little too free. She did her step-mother the justice to believe her a quite decent woman.
Perhaps the curious sense of enervation was due only to the heat of midsummer in a Southern city. Now and then the elder Darcys spoke vaguely of going away, only to decide that it was too much trouble. It was easier to stay where they were. In a Kentucky July, one follows the line of least resistance.
Joan, like the others, slept late into the mornings, and had her coffee in bed, or went down to the dining-room for it with a negligée over her nightgown. (Her father had become quite reconciled to negligées, which at first startled him, accustomed as he was to the neat morning ginghams of his Mary.) Sometimes she found him departing reluctantly for the mysterious place he called the Office. Later, people would arrive connected with the rites of the toilet—the hair-dresser, the manicure, the masseuse—a chatty person who performed on Effie May what she called her "facial"; and other things. Cleopatra herself could have devoted no more time to the care of her body than did the ex-Mrs. Calloway.