"No. But something else does, and I don't know just what. Oh, Effie May, what's the matter with me, anyway?" she burst out. "Sometimes I think I'm not a human person at all, but just a big inflated Ego, floating around like an observation balloon, taking notes!" "Well, well, is that so?" murmured her step-mother, who had her doubts as to what an Ego might be. "I expect what you need for that floaty feeling, dearie, is a good dose of calomel--" and she hurried away to prepare it. CHAPTER XXXIV There is a certain period of the year when all its widely scattered children home to Kentucky as surely as bluebirds home to the hollow stumps in March. It is the season of the May race meet. All her life Joan had heard of the Kentucky Derby, and she looked forward to it with almost as much eagerness as her father. Derby Day means more to the Kentuckian than the running event that has become classic. It means the reunion in street and club and hotel-lobby of neighbors from the various towns of a State where neighborliness is cultivated to the point of a fine art; of men who have been boys together; of friends whose ways have drifted far apart (for your Kentuckian is a great wanderer), and who have years to make up over the clinking glasses. During the spring race meet, Louisville ceases to be merely Louisville, and becomes Kentucky, the great old mother-home that leaves its stamp upon its children even into the third and fourth generation. There is a good deal of sentiment about the Derby, a good deal of tradition; and there is as well a certain spirit of carefree, sporting, joyous _bonhomie_ whose like is not to be found perhaps on any other race-course in the world. Joan, who loved crowds, got much pleasure out of the streets at this time. She took appreciative note of self-conscious belles from up-State, in picture-hats and peek-a-boo blouses, with a predilection for wearing long-stemmed roses pinned to their belts. She noted the young farmers who accompanied them, big-shouldered, square-chinned, clear-eyed, crimson with the sun--a sturdy, virile type, clumsy in their country-made clothes, but with well-stuffed wallets bulging their hip pockets. There is no poverty in the farming regions of Kentucky. She learned to recognize the professional racing people, men in loud-checked clothes talking an incomprehensible jargon; shabby touts offering confidential tips to anybody who would listen; women wearing diamonds as large as peas, overdressed, coarse-voiced, not easily distinguishable from their sisters of the underworld, except that their men accompanied them openly.