"You've got it to do if you're risin' forty and like to eat," she explained once to Joan, simply.
After luncheon, which was brought on a tray—a large tray—to wherever it happened to be convenient, the ladies once more resumed nightgowns, if indeed they had ever discarded them, and napped and read until the sun was low in the sky; when the house like the city woke into animation, and they prepared to fare forth like fireflies to the evening revel. Then there were automobile drives to little beer-gardens, where they ate and drank and sat about among whitewashed tree-trunks, feeling Bohemian; pleasant moonlight excursions up the Ohio in launches, with a picnic provided which consisted largely of thermos-bottles; and the Country Club, always the Country Club. Joan wondered what people had managed to do with themselves in summer before the days of Country Clubs.
It was a life that somehow suggested the Orient, women of the harem coming forth at sunset to bask on the roofs of the houses; a placid existence; aimless, perhaps, but pleasant enough. Joan was puzzled to find the harm in it. Yet that harm was there, she knew. The touch of Puritanism in the girl told her that to live from day to day with no duty but pleasure made of pleasure something akin to vice.... And often in the midst of this harem life she remembered almost with passion that out beyond her shuttered windows, beyond the clangor of trolley-cars and the hum and clatter of the dirty streets, was summer—summer, the loveliest of the year's phases; leaf-shadows on wimpling water, lush meadows sparkling with the sunrise dew, green-gold glades of the wood delicious with the smell of warm pine-needles; all the world at fullest bloom, open like the heart of a rose, waiting.
It was a sort of nostalgia that took her then for the country she had never known, not Country Club country, nor the conscious, well-kept wildness of the parks which give the old river town its only claim to beauty—but simple wood and meadow and field, where homely folk live close to the soil they till, concerned with crops and the breeding season. It was this country her father had meant when he bragged about Kentucky. It is this country which, deep down under the surface things, means home to all people of Saxon blood, no matter how far astray they wander....
And as she lay there, as if her wistful thoughts had conjured it into being, came a whisper of song from the leaves of the magnolia tree just outside her window; a murmur that died away, and began again, and rose and soared, melody on wings, above the clang of a trolley-car and the honk of passing motors. It was a mocking-bird, that voice of the Southern summer, singing in the glare of the arc-lamps, mistaking it perhaps for moonlight.
Joan tiptoed to the window and listened, an aching lump in her throat. It was her first mocking-bird; she had not known they sang at night.
"You lovely thing!" she whispered to it. "What are you doing in this place?... And what am I?"
Then and there she made her plans to get away.
The thought frightened her a little. She had, despite the ups and downs of her father's fortunes, led hitherto a very sheltered life. Fortunately there was her mother's money, hers whenever she chose to ask for it. She would not be quite penniless. But where to go?
She thought first of the Misses Darcy, her father's cousins, who had been most affectionate and kind, particularly since her father's remarriage. Sometimes she wondered whether this was because they sympathized with her, or (with a touch of her new cynicism) because they did not. Effie May had been very generous to the Misses Darcy, remarking once that she knew what it was to be poor herself. They came frequently to dine at her lavish table; they appeared occasionally in chic black costumes, as good as new, which Joan recognized as having served to mourn the late Mr. Calloway; the limousine was often at their disposal; and a limousine with a liveried chauffeur was a touch of distinction hitherto lacking to the Darcy fortunes, even at their palmiest.