By way of preparation Joan got out her lip-stick and her powder-puff and did what she could to improve on nature, Betty watching her the while in amused respect.
"I'm glad I don't have to mess my face up with things like that," she commented frankly. "But I suppose when one goes in for a real complexion it's got to be taken care of."
Joan murmured something explanatory about the ravages of a Southern sun; and so entered upon her brief and eventful career as a Kentucky beauty.
CHAPTER XIV
Joan's respect for the sterner sex, never very exaggerated, was not increased by the avidity with which they swallowed, one by one, her inexperienced hook, bait and all. Evidently her fellow-men had very little use for nice, intelligent, modest young girls in comparison with the Brazen Hussie.... For Joan had no illusions about herself, either. She had joined, temporarily it is true, and for what seemed to her legitimate reasons, the order of the Brazen Hussies.
She put into practice as many of her step-mother's precepts as she could recall, and found that they worked astonishingly well. She also cultivated a beauty-manner, modeling herself on a certain Louisville belle whose manœuvers she had observed with interest. She became helplessly sweet and very, very feminine; and she smiled whenever there was an excuse for smiling. It was a new smile she had practised before the mirror; an intimate, confiding, personal affair that crinkled up her long eyes charmingly, and showed at least two thirds of her good white teeth. Eduard Desmond occasionally referred to these teeth as "pearls," though they were hard and sharp and strong as a young squirrel's: Eduard being the sort of person who takes his similes ready-made out of poetry.
Surprisingly enough, considering the sporting nature of the community in which she found herself, Joan heard a good deal of poetry during this visit. The moon happened to be full, and Longmeadow edged upon a river; one of those pleasant, cosy little streams that are designed by an all-wise Providence for canoes to float upon in summer evenings. By day other girls had their innings on golf-links and tennis-court (though even by day our heroine was not idle). But at night with the moon she came into her own. She made her canoe engagements days ahead, not too frequently with Eduard; and she came to the conclusion that just as infants at a certain stage must go through the teething period, so somewhat later they must go with equal painfulness through the poetry period. It gave her quite a motherly feeling toward her admirers; which fortunately she was able to dissemble.
By contrast with the sportsmanlike young women of the community, Joan, in her frills and wide hats and small, beaded, high-heeled slippers, seemed to fill a long-felt want. Her rôle was by no means an uninteresting one. Occasionally in the course of events she got almost, if not quite, kissed; and she became expert in deflecting the course of inconvenient emotion.
"It's suggestion does it," she wrote to her friend Mr. Nikolai. "Given a moon, fluffy ruffles, and the Kentucky-belle tradition—and they seem helpless, poor dears!"