she laughed. "No, it can't be that. I'm no 'man's woman!'--I'm done with that forever! They're welcome to every beau in town for all of me, and I _never_ flirt with other people's property. I'm really the ideal companion nowadays--no family complete without me.... Of course I see a lot of girls around at parties, and they're friendly enough, even make rather a fuss over me. But--that's all! Somehow we don't seem to be playing the same game."

"Ish ga bibble," murmured Archie, consolingly if cryptically. "What do _you_ care, when you've got 'em all nailed to the mast? But I know just what you mean, Miss Darcy. Used to feel sort of that way myself when I went with Miss Gracie or Miss Ella, or any of them from the office.

Before I knew your sort."

"So you think," said Joan, amused, "it's the sort that's wrong, not me?"

"Nothing wrong with _you_!" he declared, with a comforting finality.

Being a person with whom sympathy was always active rather than pa.s.sive, however, he took her case earnestly under consideration; with rather surprising results.

Some days later--it was one of the still February mornings that come to Kentucky as an earnest that spring is on the way, with cardinals fluting from the evergreens and a rusty bluebird or two on the lookout for summer quarters--Joan was called to the telephone to speak to no less a personage than Miss Emily Carmichael.

"I hear you've been riding all winter, Miss Darcy," she said. "I'm so sorry not to have known it before, so that we might have gone out together. So much pleasanter than riding with a groom, don't you think!"

Joan agreed that it would have been.

"Why shouldn't we make up for lost time at once--this morning, for instance? Shall I come by for you at eleven o'clock? Very well."

Joan hung up the telephone, mortified by her own pusillanimous behavior.

Here was a golden opportunity to snub the girl who had found her "mixed," and instead of doing so she had meekly consented to be patronized. But at the word her head went up with something of the Major's dignity. Miss Carmichael would find it rather difficult to patronize Miss Darcy!

Miss Carmichael, however, seemed to have no intention of trying. She exclaimed with delight over the pretty Peggy, sleek as satin despite her winter coat, and dancing with pleasure to be out once more in equine society. (With the first approach of winter, the cla.s.s in equestrianism had disbanded).

"Mr. Blair was telling me the other day about your father's wonderful Christmas present to you," she said. "It must be pleasant to be able to afford a real saddle-horse! My good old Dobbin has to pull Mother's station-wagon, too, you know, which is bad for his gaits. It's _horrid_ to have only one horse in the stables!"

"You speak as if you were poverty-stricken," smiled Joan, thinking of the great Carmichael house, with its walled court and double galleries and outbuildings sufficient to house a retinue of servants.

"Oh, we are," sighed the other. "Absolutely! Why, do you know, I've never been to Europe in my life?"

Joan wondered what this girl would think of real poverty, which yearned in terms, not of trips to Europe, but of new shoes and unattainable spring bonnets!--And then she happened to notice, standing at the curb as they pa.s.sed, a girl of about her age with a shawl over her head, a baby on one arm and a child dragging at the other, gazing listlessly at the fortunate ones who had time to be young.

Joan hastily abandoned comparisons.

"If you've only one horse, what does your groom ride?" she asked, having been rather impressed by the mention of a groom.

"A bicycle," smiled Emily. "Of course he's not a real groom, only our houseboy, Joe. It's terribly mortifying to his pride. 'Miss Em'ly, s'posin' we was to meet some one what knows us?' is his constant plea; so I ride in out-of-the-way roads to spare his feelings. If we do meet acquaintances, he drops far behind and pretends he isn't with me. When old Dob feels his oats, poor Joe has a fearful time keeping up. I hear him panting and gasping behind me, 'Woa thar, woa thar, Dobbin! Gawd sakes, Miss Em'ly, don' you know a bicycle wa'n't never _meant_ to gallop?'"

Joan was both astonished and amused. She could not fit the picture into her conception of the Carmichael elegance. "_I_ shouldn't bother with a groom at all," she murmured.

"Of course you wouldn't! But you see I've got old-fashioned parents who can't imagine a young girl being able to go about alone in safety. They suspect a bandit of lurking behind every bush for the purpose of carrying off their precious Emily. So far no bandit has had the courage to attempt it!" she sighed. "Do you know, what I envy you most is your independence?"

"My independence? But that's just what I wish I had!" cried Joan, and presently found herself confiding in this stranger something that she had hitherto kept to herself--her determination to earn her own living.

The other girl listened with sympathy, too well-bred to ask questions, but quick to understand.

"It doesn't seem fair," she sighed. "We girls haven't a chance at all.

If you were a boy you would have been prepared in some way, of course.

In our family, for instance, my brother Johnny, who isn't half as intelligent as I am (and that's not bragging, either), was put most unwillingly through college, and given three extra years at law, and sent around the world--all to prepare him for a career of horse-racing and wild oats generally. He's a dear, you know, but he must have his little wild oats.... And what did I get? Two years of an Eastern finishing school, where I learned to dress better than we can afford, to sing and play a little, and to speak French with a fair accent! I wasn't even prepared for--the thing that's expected of us," she added, flushing. "I've never cooked a meal nor made a bed in my life, Mother proceeding on the theory that if you learn how to do such things you'll have to do them--No fear! No sensible, practical, poor young man would ever have the courage to ask such a useless thing as me to share his humble lot!"

Joan looked at her curiously. She was a tall, rather statuesque type, as so many Kentucky women are; not beautiful, but with a splendid figure, a gallant poise of the head, an air of race and elegance that a.s.sociated oddly with the idea of cooking and bedmaking.

"You'll simply have to choose the sort of husband that hasn't a humble lot," Joan suggested.

"Choose?" the other shrugged. "Where am I to find him? Not in this part of the world, evidently. You see I've been out several years, my dear.

And Mother's far too well-bred to take me about husband hunting, even if she were able to afford it--No, no, I shall simply subside gracefully into old maidhood, as so many of us do nowadays. Haven't you noticed the numbers of old maids about here--charming, cultivated women who have waited too long for a possible partner to come and discover them?

Filling their lives with Bridge and charity and committee work! Useful, I suppose, and contented enough, but--It isn't what one dreams of! Mere _pis aller_.... And I don't see how the ballot's going to help, do you?"

"Except by changing the fashion in female education," mused Joan.

"Meanwhile we've just got to help ourselves. Pull ourselves up by our own boot-straps."

"And we haven't even got the boot-straps!" laughed the other, ruefully....

This was not the last of their rides together. The unexpected understanding of this girl, whose lot in life Joan had long secretly envied, broke down the artificial barriers between them, and paved the way for a real and lasting friendship. Between them they settled many problems of the universe, while Dobbin and Pegasus respectively trotted and singlefooted about the parks or along a road where the Ohio swept, swollen with the winter's snows, almost on a level with them, overlooked by splendid cliffs where the city's rich have been wise enough to build homes that would do credit to the chateau country of France.

Sometimes Emily took her into one of these houses for a cup of tea, occasions which filled Effie May with a candid gratification; for hitherto the Carmichael circle had remained impregnable to her siege.

"It certainly was a good idea of yours, getting the child that horse!"

she commented to her husband. "There's something genteel about a riding-horse--more so than a limousine, though I'm sure I can't see why.

Heaven knows it's cheaper! But even that old plug the Carmichael girl rides has a kind of air about it."

"Horses," replied the Major sententiously, "are the only aristocrats left in the modern world."

Effie May presently suggested to Archie that he purchase himself a horse and try riding, since he was so fond of exercise. But Archie put the tempting idea away from him. What time had he for the diversions of the idle? Business before pleasure! He had recently, and for reasons that were a little vague in his own mind, decided to become rich.

Joan was so preoccupied with her new friendship that she had rather neglected the boxing matches of late, which presently languished. The Major missed the stimulating presence of a young feminine audience. So that Archie spent no more glorious half-hours over a tea-table.

But he did not complain. It was something to know that he had presented his lady with the thing her heart most craved. He could, had he so chosen, have tagged the unconscious Miss Carmichael with a card such as sometimes came to Joan in modest boxes of flowers, bearing the inscription: "From a Friend."

CHAPTER XXVIII

Miss Carmichael presently invited Joan to a meeting of an organization which she had occasionally referred to as "The Jabberwocks" though it had been christened by a more imposing name; a group of girls and young married women who met fortnightly for the apparent purpose of talking all at once about anything that came into their heads. And as a great deal came into their heads, the bewildered guest decided that its present name was aptly chosen. However, though the talk, disconnected and inconclusive, came out for the most part "at that same door wherein it went," it was to Joan like hearing a native tongue spoken in a foreign land. She listened eagerly. Ideas came up for discussion, books, plays, music, even politics, had a turn; instead of the usual, "Who is asked to So-and-so's dinner?" and "What are you going to wear at such-and-such an affair?" which she had begun to consider the chronic conversation of her s.e.x and age.

Yet the Jabberwocks were by no means bluestockings (a cla.s.s of persons which Joan held in some dread). They frequently were invited to So-and-so's dinner, and usually managed to appear extremely well-clad at such-and-such an affair; and the pa.s.sion they evinced for bon-bons and weak tea would alone have protected them from the charge of over-seriousness.

Joan, after politely maintaining silence till she could bear it no more, presently burst into a certain discussion with an apt quotation on the subject from Stefan Nikolai. She was unprepared for the respectful silence that greeted her remark.

"You say," murmured somebody, "that Stefan Nikolai told you that? You know him, then, Miss Darcy?"

"Oh, yes. Very well indeed."

"How perfectly wonderful!" sighed the Jabberwocks.

"You see," explained Emily, "we've been studying him all winter. Oh, if we'd only known about you earlier!"

Joan laughed. It had not occurred to her that her friend was a person people met in solemn conclave to "study." (Why it should be that personal acquaintance with a celebrity invariably dims his l.u.s.ter to the affectionate eye is a puzzle which may be left to the psychologists.)