But Joan realized that it was not entirely physical inhibitions which were retiring the Darcys from the social arena. Her step-mother had delicacy enough to understand that her place was not among Joan's acquaintance, now that the girl had discovered her history. Joan liked her the better for it. She was punctiliously careful to invite Effie May to her house at frequent intervals, and always accepted such invitations as the other offered in return. The Major, never observant, was quite unaware that the relations between his wife and daughter had suffered any change. As he once remarked impersonally, "You and my wife would naturally find very little in common, excellent creature though she is. Why should you, indeed? Your antecedents, your early environment, have been entirely different. And as one grows older, those are the things that really matter," he added, with a complacency that sat rather oddly upon him in the circumstances--On the whole, Joan began to feel distinctly sorry for her step-mother. The older people came sometimes to take her for long automobile drives into the State; expeditions which Joan enjoyed thoroughly. Her father's imperturbable good manners and Effie May's amiability made them excellent traveling-companions, proof against all hazards of the road; tire trouble, bad going, even delayed and poor meals. And they both treated Joan with a new consideration, oddly wistful on the woman's part, to which she responded gratefully. It shamed her somehow to see how kind the world was to her nowadays; as if, in following the line of least resistance, she had done something very commendable indeed. CHAPTER XLI These long automobile rides familiarized her as nothing else could not only with the State but with her father. She came to understand and share his peculiar, proprietary interest in the lovely Kentucky countryside. He pointed out to her its beauties of wood and hill and pasture like the owner of some vast estate exhibiting it to visitors, with a frank and pardonable pride. It is a habit of mind not unusual to the native of certain localities--notably Virginia and Maryland and Kentucky; but in her wandering, unimportant old father it seemed to Joan a little piteous, as if he had sunk his small identity into that of his great State, content to make its history his history, its glory his. "Here," he would say reverently, "is the spot where we made our final victorious stand against the Indians. Sacred ground, my daughter!" Or--"This is the place where our women went down to the spring for water, risking their lives, bless their hearts! because the men could not be spared from the defense of the stockade. You should thank God that you are a Kentucky woman!" He sometimes forgot in his enthusiasm that she had not been, so to speak, born to the purple--though that fact, as he once explained to her, was merely an accident, due to a certain miscalculation of dates.