Joan, in yielding to family pressure temporarily, had by no means given up the idea of what she had learned recently to call her economic independence—a subject discussed frequently, if not very fruitfully, by her friends the Jabberwocks, who preached rather more radically than they practiced.

"You see," as they explained when reproached by Joan with inconsistency, "we believe in that sort of thing, of course! but it isn't as if we really needed it." (Which was likewise the Jabberwockian attitude toward suffrage.)

Joan, however, not only believed in economic independence, but needed it—as she reminded herself at gradually increasing intervals. She was in danger, and knew it, of going over to Mammon. She had found it far easier than she expected to live along from moment to moment, accepting life as it came, enjoying the surface without questioning the depths. The habit of mere material luxury is an insidious thing that fastens upon one unaware; and Joan had all her father's taste for the good things of life.

She had begun to form many little extravagant ways, such, for instance, as wearing silk stockings under her heaviest shoes, using a towel only once before casting it aside, having her hair shampooed down town when she was perfectly able to do it herself in her own bathroom. Not very reckless extravagances, perhaps, from the point of view of her new friends; but the sort of thing which the Misses Darcy observed with something like awe.

"I often think that if dear papa had been able to allow us to be less careful—"; sighed Miss Virginia. "But of course in our day a silk stocking was a silk stocking."

"Indeed it was! Do you remember the lovely pair Aunt Sara Miggs brought from abroad when she made the grand tour? White they were, Joan; and when they began to get a little yellow with washing, she gave them to me; and when I'd had plenty of use out of them, they were dipped pink for Sister Euphie; and by the time Sister Virgie got them they had become black."

"With age?" asked Joan, rather startled.

"Oh, no, dear. With dye."

"Where are the stockings of yester-year?" murmured the girl. "You can't buy good old family standbys like that nowadays, not at any price. Nothing but these miserable sleazy affairs that run if you look at them—the cowards!"

The Darcy ladies exchanged puzzled glances.

"Cowards—stockings?" repeated Miss Iphigenia. "I'm afraid I don't quite see the connection—"

"There isn't any—don't mind me! And really it's quite a distinction to wear cotton ones nowadays," hurriedly said Joan, who hoped sincerely never to possess a cotton stocking again in all her life. And at the same time planned to earn her own living in any honest fashion available, no matter how lowly! Inconsistency was not a fault with which she had the right to twit her fellow Jabberwocks....

But she never quite forgot her destination in the pleasures of the wayside. She did a good deal of quiet investigating, in a desultory way. Teachers, librarians, bookkeepers, stenographers, all came under the head of skilled labor, as she soon discovered, and required a course of training—which Joan's step-mother would have to provide. It put these professions out of the question.

There were various small establishments in Louisville conducted by acquaintances of hers, those "ladies in reduced circumstances" of which every Southern town is full; tea-rooms, hat-shops, lingerie-shops, and the like—a state of affairs which gave Major Darcy acute distress.

"Imagine the daughters of my old friend Colonel Dinwiddie selling bibelots to any vulgarian who has the effrontery to purchase them! What can their brothers be thinking of?" he would groan. "Of course you will be careful never to enter the shop, my dears! The poor ladies shall not be embarrassed by having to wait on my wife and daughter, at least."

But aside from her father's peculiar but not unique point of view, these ventures required capital; which again put them out of the question.

She heard now and then of certain well-paid positions in connection with social service of various sorts; but these again seemed to require a special training, or a special aptitude, which Joan did not believe herself to possess. The very words "social service" had to her a chilling, impersonal, busybodyish sound, almost as ugly as "philanthropy." She was not of those to whom a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. "Charity" sounded to her Christian, and warm, and friendly; but she dreaded to offer "philanthropy," or "social service" to the unfortunate almost as much as she would have dreaded to receive such things. She decided that her metier was not good works.

Clerks in stores, she learned, do not for the most part earn a living wage. They are expected evidently to live at home, or to supplement their salary in some other fashion (just how Joan was not sure, but she entertained uneasy suspicions). By the time they become expert—heads of departments, buyers, chief milliners, etc.,—they are of course more than economically independent. But in the meanwhile....

It was the meanwhile that troubled Joan. When she broke with her family, she intended to do so with a magnificent completeness.

Only two alternatives seemed open to her inexperience; the stage and journalism. She weighed them one against the other without being able to come to a decision. Joan was rather fond of making her own decisions, and had all the impatience of her nineteen years with mature advice. But at length she consulted Stefan Nikolai.

"Please write me by return mail," (she commanded), "which you think would offer me the most advantageous career, the stage or journalism."

He obeyed on a post-card marked Christiania (his postmarks were frequently the only indication of his whereabouts):

"I should suggest the usual course in matrimony as a preliminary to any career."

Joan stamped her foot over this banality. It was something she might have expected from a man of her father's generation, but hardly from Stefan Nikolai. Particularly when he knew about Eduard, and must certainly realize that her interest in man as a sex was over!

Useful she still found them as dancing partners, to be sure, as providers of candy and flowers and theaters, even to a certain extent as companions, since one cannot very well sit about after nightfall conversing with women, if only for appearance' sake. One or two she might admit to her friendship, provided they remain sufficiently "in their place," like Archie Blair. But as lovers, husbands! Never again. Fortunately, sufficient phagocytes had been released to take care of that.

Hers was an attitude of mind which if generally entertained would, she realized, mitigate against the welfare of the race; but judging from the people about her, it would never be generally entertained—particularly in Kentucky, and in Springtime.

It is a season when matters of pairing off that may have hung fire throughout the winter are apt to come rapidly to a climax. Each Sunday paper brings forth its batch of Spring engagements; and Joan herself was under the pleasing necessity of chilling off two of her admirers in quick succession. One was a youth of the fireside-companion type, who innocently fancied that there might be room for one more under the hospitable Darcy roof. The other was the blond young man who had been Joan's first partner, and who, having danced her successfully through the season, saw no reason why he should not dance her successfully through life.

They met with small mercy at her hands. "Off with his head!" murmured Joan cheerily to herself on each occasion, thinking of a certain evening under a beech-tree by the light of the gibbous moon....

These two unfortunates were not the only ones in her life who were to suffer vicarious atonement for the sins of Eduard Desmond (and obscurely of Richard Darcy as well).