It was not for a long time that Joy discovered the regular pay of a model to be fifty cents an hour, and the sum total of her gray costume to have been—it was late for summer styles, so they were marked down—fifty-three dollars and ninety cents. But Mrs. Morrow had said to Mr. Morrow, who usually saw things as she did, even before she explained them:
"Alton Havenith would never let that dear little thing have anything as modish as those clothes. He'd keep her for a living illustration to his poem-books till he died. And we're making a lot on that Sagawinna Courthouse thing.... And we haven't any daughter."
And Mr. Morrow, remembering a seven-year-old with blue eyes and yellow hair, who had never grown old enough to ask for French-heeled shoes and picture hats, said only, "That's what I thought, too."
Joy, blissfully ignorant that she had been given a good deal of a present, kissed them both ecstatically on receiving a long, large pasteboard box, and almost ran home. She was so eager, indeed, to get upstairs and try on her finery that she quite upset a Neo-Celtic poet who had come to see if Grandfather would write an article about him, and was standing on the doorstep on one foot in a dreamy manner. He was rather small, and so not difficult to fall over. She did not stop to see if he was injured; she merely recovered herself, grasped her precious boxes more closely and sped on upstairs, thinking how pleasant it was that she was no relation to him. To have even fine poetry written about you was bad enough; it must be much worse if the poetry was bad, too.
When she opened her box she found that Mrs. Morrow had seen and bought something else for her; a golden-brown wool jersey sweater suit, with a little brown cap to match.
"Oh, how lovely! I can wear them all day, and the gray things all night—all evening, I mean," Joy exulted. "And maybe I'll never have to put on the picture dresses at all!"
She went to sleep that night with the brown suit laid out in its box across the foot of her bed, below her feet, and the gray chiffon hat, with its golden yellow roses, on a chair by her, where she could touch it if she woke in the night and thought she had dreamed it. She said her prayers almost into it; she was so obliged to the Lord for the hat and the frocks, and the man who had talked to her in the dark, that she felt as if she ought to take the hat, at least, and show it to God while she was praying.
They had been in Maine long enough for Joy to discover what a cottage inn really was. It appeared that the inn itself lived in the middle, as a sort of parent; and all around it sprang up small cottages, where you and yours could dwell, and never associate with anybody you didn't want to, except at mealtime, or lingering about a little afterwards, or at dances. And if you were unusually exclusive (also unusually rich), they took you over your meals, and you never saw anybody at all. Joy was exceedingly glad that Grandfather was only comfortably off, because she liked, best of all the day's round, the little times before and after dinner when she could sit on the porch and watch people, and decide whom she was going to like most, and whom she was going to be most like.
She wore her brown woolen frock all day long the first day, changing to the gray silk in the evening—the dear gray silk, all little glints of embroidery and little falls of chiffon!—and the gray hat with it. She was waiting for her grandparents to ask her where she got it, but they were so occupied with getting themselves settled, and seeing that their place and hers at table were sufficiently far from the noisier crowds of people not to be a strain on Grandfather's nerves and Joy's, that nothing was said. As a matter of fact, Grandfather thought Grandmother had bought it for her, and Grandmother thought Grandfather had; so each said pretty things about it to the other, without coming straight out, as their courteous custom with each other was; and the secret was still Joy's.