"Look here, Joan," she said once, abruptly. "When I spoke like I done about marriage being the best thing for a girl, I meant marriage with love, child—marriage with love. Like your mamma's."
The simile was unfortunate. The eye that Joan believed to be her brain twinkled mockingly. "Do you mean to insinuate that marriage and love are not always synonymous? Why, Mrs. Neal, you put so many strange ideas into my young head lately! Seriously," she added, seeing that the other's anxious gravity did not relax, "I don't believe it would be hard to pump up a little love in return for—lots of it, say, and a place of your own in the world, and independence."
"Where there's love there ain't apt to be much independence, I've noticed," remarked the other.
"All the more reason to do without love, then!" cried Joan, with triumphant logic.
But she hugged Ellen remorsefully, glad that the good woman could only guess at what was going on at the moment in her nursling's brain.
Her step-mother's casual advice and her own inner musings had resulted in one firm determination. If she missed romance, experience, all the real things of life, it would not be for lack of meeting them halfway. She would be no longer a passive agent. She would be bold and reckless—even if necessary a little Fast; though how to go about being Fast was somewhat of a puzzle to Mary's daughter.
"If people want to say things, or squeeze my hand, or anything like that," she told herself rather vaguely, "I must remember not to hold back and be standoffish.... How do I know what I like unless I try?"
But while the noun on her tongue was plural and indefinite, the noun on her mind was single and masculine and very definite indeed. It behooved Mr. Desmond to look to himself.