No, it was decidedly not Ellen Neal who was responsible for her vague dread of home-coming. The girl, who had an odd dislike of anything vague in her mental processes, pursued the fugitive sensation to its lair with relentless precision.
Was it the poverty of home she feared, then? Surely not, for poverty was a condition quite as much with her elsewhere—rather more with her elsewhere, for among strangers it was impossible to practice those useful little economies of ragged underwear and worn-out shoes which in the privacy of home-life made an occasional extravagance possible. Joan rather looked forward to the time when she no longer need be on dress-parade, so to speak, at every hour of the day.
"If I wear cheap nightgowns, I can buy myself a good hat," was her thought—a thought which may be said to sum up the philosophy of the Darcy family.
And although it seems customary among novelists to gage the refinement of their heroines by the daintiness of their taste in underlinen—no matter if her outer wear be sackcloth and ashes, the lingerie of a true fiction lady is invariably above reproach—one would like to submit that an almost equal refinement may be indicated by the present heroine's determination to make as brave a showing as possible before her world with as little strain as possible upon her father's income....
Was it her mother's absence she feared then—still? Forewarned, Joan resolutely kept back the nervous tears that threatened to rise again at the thought of her mother; and she faced the possibility calmly.
During the summer before, alone with her father and Ellen, Joan had been given plenty of time to get used to her mother's absence. Indeed, it seemed to her suddenly that during the several years previous she had been given time to get used to her mother's absence. It was as if Mary Darcy, knowing that the hand of death was upon her, had deliberately, gradually, withdrawn herself from the child she loved, in order to make the final separation easier.
"That would have been like Mother," said Joan, nodding.
She understood, in that moment of clear vision, why she had been sent away to boarding-school, despite her father's amazed protests—it was unprecedented that Mrs. Darcy should remain so firm in the matter of incurring unnecessary expense. She understood, too, why the narrow, bleak house in Louisville, which was the latest of their many homes, had taken on none of the look of her mother—that intimate, friendly, stay-awhile air which Mary Darcy, with the aid of long practice, managed to produce among the most unlikely surroundings within a few hours of occupancy. True, the old furniture made its faithful reappearance there, part of Joan's earliest recollections—the parlor suite of rosewood with blue velour, the little cottage piano, the great bed in which she, and her mother, and her mother's mother had been born, shorn long ago of its tester to accommodate altered circumstances—all looking a trifle shabbier, a trifle more battered after each adventure with fortune, but still dignified and "good," with the unmistakable mien of gentlefolk in reduced circumstances. For once, however, Mary Darcy had not been able to accomplish her usual miracle with this furniture. Chairs, sofa, tables, stood stiffly wherever the moving-men had chosen to place them, making no attempts to hide the spots on the wall-paper; the thread-bare velvet portières which had separated parlor from hall in every home that Joan remembered had never been altered to fit this one; stranger still, there were no green growing things in the window-sills, nor even in the can-strewn, sooty backyard. Joan could not recall any other home she had lived in without some attempt at a garden, were it only a few geraniums in the window-box.
"Mamma must have been very tired," she thought, soberly; and realized that, far from dreading her mother's absence in that dingy, dreary house, she was almost glad of it. When one is as tired as Mrs. Darcy, rest is the great boon—rest from hopeless hoping, rest from making homes out of patience and courage and a few old sticks of furniture, rest from the anxious sorrow of loving.
Joan was young to understand such things; but at her birth the fairies had given her the cruel gift of seeing out of the eyes of others....