There is also among the craft an unwritten law against the holding up for public inspection those people with whom one has broken bread, so to speak; and as one is apt, in Kentucky, to have broken bread with all one's acquaintance, neighbors, friends and enemies may alike consider themselves safe from the present pen. If any think to recognize themselves in this book, let them recognize themselves quite as readily in the living people about them. For we are, after all, of one substance, varying only with circumstance and the different stages of development. And it is with these things only--with circumstance and the stages of development, with truths rather than facts, with men and women rather than personalities--that this author at least chooses to concern herself. ELEANOR MERCEIN KELLY. WHY JOAN? CHAPTER I Young Joan Darcy leaned back luxuriously upon a cushion offered by the obsequious porter (servants were usually obsequious with Joan, though she was not at all beautiful and rather too shabby to promise much in the way of largesse), watching the world go by with a dreamy, detached, yet oddly observant gaze that missed no detail of the landscape through which she passed and registered it in her subconscious mind for future reference. It was a convenient receptacle, her subconscious mind--a sort of strongbox into which went many things valuable and valueless, to be brought forth when occasion required, quite intact. She tucked away in it now not only the rushing landscape but the various people about her in the Pullman: a dapper person, probably a necktie drummer, who had for some time been discreetly taking notice and whom it was her pleasure to occasionally regard as if he were so much thin air; an elderly lady who beamed wistfully whenever their eyes met, and who, Joan decided, would presently summon up courage to inform her that a little daughter, had she lived, would have been about Joan's age; also another girl, dressed as Joan would have liked to be dressed herself, who cast occasional glances of indifference in her direction, noting, it was to be hoped, the affluent litter of magazines and papers that surrounded our heroine, the fading bouquet tucked into her belt, and the expensive box of chocolates which lay open upon her knee, exposing to the world at large a masculine card on top. Joan discovered within herself a certain impersonal, appreciative antagonism toward strange young women, such as knights may have felt who met for combat upon the jousting field. Envy was the one tribute which most assuaged her vanity.