Sarah wheeled with an incredibly swift motion, and looked first to one girl, then to the other. Then she spoke. “Oh—indeed!” she drawled; and the echo of her voice lingered forever in the air. II In a house that was a mass of Mid-Victorian odds and ends, retrospection of the dizzy whirl of Prom was unsettling. Nailed-down carpets, red velvet furniture with lace tidies, antimacassars and ponderous what-nots, cast a veil over jazz, jazzy flirtation, and jazzy routine of life—the sort of veil that enhances while deadening the sharpness of what it is thrown over. Time seemed to have halted some sixteen years ago in the Nelson household and rested with stationary breath among the old family portraits, with the death of Joy’s mother—a lovely, radiant mother, so everyone said, who would have been a sympathetic and understanding companion to her daughter during her girlhood. Outside his business, which was very successful, Mr. Nelson lived in the gallant days of ’80’s and ’90’s, when the ordered world shone with smug serenity. He sat in his study and read back into Victorian times every evening. Joy had early learned to regard him as a figure remotely and theoretically pleasant, like Oliver Wendell Holmes or William James—a figure to be acknowledged and respected, but with whom she had little in common. The only really beautiful thing in the house that time could not turn bizarre, was the grand piano that Joy’s mother had left behind. It stood in one corner of the high-ceilinged, wax-floored parlour, and Joy had played on it and sung with it ever since she had been so small that she had to be lifted on to the stool and held there while her baby fingers struck the loving keys and she crooned strange, tuneless accompaniments. Her mother had been a singer who had forgotten her voice when she met George Nelson . . . and Joy had been told that she was the latest of generations of wonderful voices. They rang in her mind and soul at times—hauntingly sweet, sweetly insistent. She was the heir of all the ages! All the beauty of their dead song was merged into her—what was she going to do with these riches? But when the voices became too insistent, Joy had always drawn back. She was queerly ashamed of “having a voice.” In Foxhollow Corners, people who did that sort of thing too much “got boring.” She wanted to be a real girl, to do the things real girls did, and to have a Prince Charming waiting at the end of the golden trail of girlhood.