One of the things Joan liked best in Effie May was her consistent kindness to these rather tiresome and unimportant spinsters. "Buying them!" she had thought at first. But after all why should any one trouble to buy them? Hers was not entirely a material kindness, either. She consulted them faithfully in social matters, even in household matters (though the Misses Darcy were not notable housekeepers). She and the Major and the limousine accompanied them occasionally to church, the only form of social dissipation in which they still indulged. Altogether she exhibited in dealing with them a tact which in anybody else Joan would have attributed to good breeding. One morning, when the girl stopped in to make her cousins a visit, the opening door revealed an unusual amount of chatter coming down from the floor above; soft, pretty chatter (like her father, the Darcy ladies had charming voices), mingled with the steady hum of a sewing-machine. "What's up, Susy?" she asked the languid colored slattern who let her in. "De ladies is gittin' ready fo' de ball, I'specks, Miss Joan, fittin' on dey new dresses." "New dresses? A ball?" repeated the surprised Joan, who did not connect these activities with her own début, scheduled to take place a month or so later. "I must investigate!" and ignoring Susy's best efforts to toll her into the parlor, she pursued the chatter to its source. She avoided that parlor whenever possible, having earlier exhausted its charms. It was a rather dismal chamber, with shutters always closed against a too-revealing sunlight. Innumerable small tables and a double mantel-shelf were crowded with articles of _vertu_ in the shape of hand-painted vases, and ginger-jars, and marble hands. On the walls, concealing as much as possible of the original decoration, hung specimens of all the artistic aspirations of the Darcy family and friends; "Yards of Pansies," still-life studies of a fan in interesting juxtaposition to a coal-scuttle, and the like. Concealment seemed to be the motif of the decoration-scheme. The fireplace was concealed by moribund cat-tails, the former usefulness of a spinning-wheel was concealed by gilt paint, the function of the lamp was concealed, if not permanently impaired, by a ruffled blue silk petticoat reminiscent for the best of reasons of a certain blue silk party-dress that had once done yeoman's service in the family. The elegance of their parlor enabled Joan's cousins to ask several dollars more a month for their rooms than did any other house in the square; but Joan, who, had inherited from the maternal side a strain of practicality, positively ached in her joints at the thought of the hours it must take to thoroughly sweep and dust it--if indeed it ever were thoroughly swept and dusted. She poked her head around a door that stood ajar on the third floor: "May I come in?"