Sometimes she had word from there--not often, for Ellen Neal was no letter-writer, and even Emily Carmichael's loyalty had been strained by Joan's unexplained desertion of her husband in his trouble. Once her cousin Miss Iphigenia Darcy wrote, and from her letter Joan gathered some impression of the effect of her sudden departure from Louisville. In my day girls were taught that their first duty was to the _Home_, married or not. But I daresay this is a very old-fashioned notion, and with all those poor, unfortunate French needing help--Sister Euphie and Sister Virgie and I have frequently discussed offering our services. It is strange to have a war going on without any Darcys in it! (You haven't the _name_, you see, although a _true Darcy_ in every other particular.) However, it does not seem the place for _unmarried_ ladies just now, with so many men lying about in the hospitals not fully clothed, and those unfortunate Belgian victims (you know what I mean)! As I tell everybody, "Advanced young matrons like Joan are the ones really needed over there." But you know how narrow people are, my dear! I sometimes think our city is growing a little _provincial_. Joan smiled and sighed over this communication; and then forgot it. From Archie she had no word, except an occasional line or two with the money-order that came regularly on the first of each month, and was as regularly returned. The magazine connections Stefan Nikolai had made for her provided what money she needed, and she had not yet sufficiently forgiven Archie to be willing to accept anything from him. At first she wrote to him, not so much from any sense of duty, as from pity. She did not forget what had passed between them, she made no attempt to ignore the fact that he had failed her utterly in every way. But she no longer had time to brood upon her own affairs. In the vortex of life where she now found herself, personal troubles seemed somehow to disappear into the common whole. Constant association with others' sorrow developed her quality of sympathy to an almost painful extent; and though she knew that Ellen Neal was making Archie comfortable enough in the old rooms on Poplar Street, his loneliness, his humble acquiescence in disgrace, hurt like a bruise on her heart. So she wrote to him, impersonally but kindly. Since he so rarely replied, however, her letters gradually ceased. Evidently Archie, like many others, found it difficult to forgive where he had wronged. Joan shrugged--a little gesture she had learned from Nikolai--and dismissed her husband as much as possible from her mind.