Joan grew up into the family habit of euphonious speech; but, thanks to a certain inheritance from her mother, facts had a way of presenting themselves to her inner vision with a clarity, a brutal frankness of outline, quite unprecedented in the mind of a Darcy.
Her facility in the valuable game of Pretend came from the paternal strain. Richard Darcy was one of those fortunate spirits who move through life to the sound of an invisible drum corps—a procession of one, affably ready for whatever honors Fate chose to thrust upon him. Joan, too, was quite prepared for the best the world had to offer. Nevertheless, unlike her father, she was never unaware of the difference between pretense and reality, nor of the fixed line dividing them. When she lied, it was deliberately, with her eyes wide open.
Just now she chose to step over the dividing line firmly into reality. Perhaps her dinner may have had something to do with it; a diet of chocolates and ham sandwiches not being conducive to glamour of thought, even at eighteen.
Joan wished, soberly, that she were happier at the idea of going home. She wished that she were not haunted by a vague dread of it....
The Convent—with its daily round of prescribed duties and pleasures, its fixed intimates and enemies, its atmosphere of simple piety, its guardian nuns, striving conscientiously for that "detachment from place" which is enjoined upon them, but lavishing all the pent-up mother-passion of their hearts upon the young creatures in their care—Joan, young as she was, visualized the place she had left as a sunny haven, a little quiet eddy in the whirlpool; sheltered, secluded, safe.
She frowned at the adjective. Surely her own home was "safe," too! Surely the vague dread she felt had nothing to do with her father, for instance—her own dear, splendid Dad, so handsome despite his frayed and spotted clothes, with the courtly manner that had won both nuns and girls to awestruck admiration, and that gave him far more distinction than the fathers of other girls who did not wear frayed and spotted clothes. No, it could not be her father she dreaded!
And it was certainly not Ellen Neal, the elderly woman who had followed the Darcy fortunes in their waxing and waning for many a year—part servant, part mentor, always friend; declining to be shaken off even in those crises when Mrs. Darcy "enjoyed doing without servants"; supporting herself during such financial depressions by means of a skilful needle—supporting, Joan sometimes suspected, others than herself. The girl recalled one significant incident of her early childhood; her mother, pale and anxious, arguing at the door with a rude man who declined to leave without something she seemed unable to give him, until Ellen appeared, half running up the street, opening her shopping-bag as she came. And when she had thrust something into the rude man's hands and slammed the door in his face, Mrs. Darcy had turned silently to the servant and kissed her.
Joan's feeling for Ellen was one of the few she had never tried to analyze. It was simply there, like her breath, her eyesight. She could not be said to love her—there was nothing attractive about Ellen Neal; yet her only quarrel with her father (if anything so one-sided could be called a quarrel) was on the subject of Ellen. Once during Joan's previous summer vacation, the Major, who disliked familiarity in servants, had taken occasion to remind Ellen most kindly that his daughter was almost a young lady now and should be spoken to as Miss Joan, no longer as "Joie" or as "Baby." Joan had thoroughly concurred in this opinion; until, happening to glance at Ellen as she left the room, she saw that the servant's compressed lips were trembling. She had cried out unaccountably: "No such thing, Nellen! You're to call me anything you like, always!"—and then she had turned upon her father, scolding, stammering out astonishing reminders, raising her voice, altogether behaving in a manner most unbecoming a gentlewoman and a Darcy—as her father quite obviously forebore to suggest to her. The quarrel had been altogether a most unsatisfactory one. During her tirade the Major had sat with poised carving-knife, regarding his daughter under mildly raised eyebrows. When she had stormed herself out, he remarked quietly, in quotation marks:
"Her voice was ever soft and low,
An excellent thing in woman."
But the matter of "Miss Joan" was, by tacit consent, never resumed between them.