This point of view made Joan feel important, tragic, but desolate.
"I'm hungry," she thought, seriously, and made her way to a restaurant, where once she had gone with Doris while on a wonderful shopping expedition. The place was little changed; it had passed into other hands, but the menu proudly proclaimed the same enticing dishes.
Joan ordered what once had seemed the food of the gods, but to her now it was as chaff.
Across the table, made dim by her misty eyes, she seemed to see Doris smiling fondly, faithfully, at her. Doris's power over people was largely due to that faith she had in them.
"And I will be all you want me to be, Aunt Dorrie!" Joan promised that while she choked down the food. "I feel as if I were in the bear's house," she mused, whimsically. "I'm half afraid that I'll be pounced upon."
And so she paid her bill and went back, via the bus, to Sylvia. She ran up the long flights of stairs and burst in upon Sylvia with the announcement that "nothing would count if you didn't have someone to come home and tell it to." And then she forgot her glooms while they prepared an evening meal more conservative than bacon and eggs.
"Yes, my beloved," Sylvia returned as she plunged a wicked-looking little knife into the heart of a grapefruit: "And that accounts for half the marriages in life." Sylvia was refraining, just then, from telling of her own engagement. She wanted and needed Joan for the present—her secret would keep.
"You funny old Syl," Joan flung back over her shoulder as she drew the curtain over the closet that screened the housekeeping skeletons from the wonderful studio. "We won't have to resort to marriage, anyway. We've solved the eternal question!"
"Exactly! And now give those chops a twist. Thank the Lord, we both love them crisp."
The experiment in a few days had Joan by the throat. So utterly had she thrown herself into it, so almost unbelievably had Doris Fletcher permitted her to do so, that it took on all the attributes of reality and demanded nothing less than obedience to its laws, or surrender to defeat.