She felt for the moment absolutely numb. She was like a person who has been shot, without having time to ascertain where. All the pride in her gathered to meet this blow without flinching. People must not suspect—they must not suspect.
She went on chatting, laughing, jesting.... He had gone away for good! Without a word to her, he had gone away. He had known last night that he was going, and that he would not come back. She, Joan Darcy, had been jilted. She, too proud to live on a stranger's bounty, had offered herself, unasked, to a man who did not want her!...
Somebody begged her to sing, and brought a guitar. Hers was a slight voice, uncultivated, but with something about it, as about Joan, that attracted attention. People listened to her. She had that curious élan, that sense of being borne on some outside power, that comes to certain natures from the response of an audience.
Joan touched heights that evening. To some brains, suffering is an incomparable stimulant. Even Betty, with the remembrance of certain wild orgies at school, when quiet Joan Darcy had amazed nuns and girls alike by a sudden transfiguration, had never gaged to the full her friend's possibilities. She sang for them daringly whatever came into her head, negro catches, rollicking Irish lilts, wicked little songs of the streets and alleys. Under Betty's urgings, she exhibited a talent for mimicry which had occasionally reduced the good Sisters almost to apoplexy.
She showed them her father during a political campaign, addressing his constituency under the handicap of a cold in the head. One could see the Major's urbane periods, his mellifluous hand, his tossing topknot—She showed them the Mother Superior, called in to quell a dormitory riot, endeavoring while dodging pillows to maintain proper religious "detachment from place." As an encore she gave them Eduard Desmond, conducting a sunset à deux, with assistance from the poets—a bit of recklessness that brought shouts of joy from the audience, and produced in Mrs. Rossiter's mocking eye something like respect.
"Joie, how dared you!" cried Betty, breathless with laughter, as she went upstairs with her arm about her friend. "It was Uncle Neddy to his very hands; that way he has of touching people inadvertently, as if it were quite by accident. You ought to have seen May Rossiter's face!"
"I did," said Joan grimly.—Something of the sustaining force had begun to leave her, and all she asked of life for the moment was to be left alone.
But Betty was too delighted with her friend's triumph to be easily quenched. "It was like old times!" she cried. "Dear old times at school, when there weren't any men about to spoil things, and the nuns let go and had a good time like anybody!... Nobody here'll ever think of you again as just a flirt and a man-grabber! Why, do you know what that man who came in with Mrs. Jameson said? (He's a clever person, a professor or something.) He said to Mother, 'Mrs. Desmond, that girl's got a touch of genius!'"
"Genius for what—making believe? Much good it does me," said Joan bitterly.... Would the other never go?
Betty hugged her. "And to think we were afraid you'd take Uncle Neddy seriously! Oh, if he could only have seen you!—Jo, I know why you were in such wild spirits to-night. I'm not going to ask any questions, because Mother made me promise not to. But you can't deny there is a sort of coincidence between the fact that you spent the evening up the river with him, and that to-day he's gone!—now can you?"