Both spoke in low tones, as if the spirit of Mary Darcy might be lingering near enough to overhear. "I ain't so sure about that," mused Ellen. "I ain't so sure! Your ma always set great store on havin' the Major comfortable--'Ellen,' she said to me that last day, when we knew what was comin'--'Ellen, be sure to keep him _comfortable_ here at home, so he won't be lookin' for it somewheres else.' There's worse things can happen to a widow-man than gettin' married again." "Oh, but if I'd been here to look after him myself!" wailed Joan. "If you had only told me what was happening! I might have come back and stopped it!" "About as much chance as stopping a fire-hydrant that's blown the top off. You're a smart child, Joan, always was; but you don't stand a show against that woman your pa's married--nor I wouldn't want you to," she added cryptically. "You wasn't raised that way.--Anyhow it wasn't none of my business. And just remember this, child, it's none of yours. It's none of yours!" After she had gone, a sense of something heartening and bracing remained with Joan; and as she brushed out her straight, heavy hair with new silver-backed brushes which bore her own initials, a typical Ellenism recurred to her: "There's nothing that makes a person contented with the place she's in like knowing she can go somewheres else if she's a mind to." "At least," she thought suddenly, "I'm independent of father. Mother left her property to me--I can get it whenever I ask for it.... And now I understand why!" Mary Darcy had been a very far-sighted woman. CHAPTER VII It was long before Joan recovered from the dazed sensation her father's little surprise had produced in her mind. Perhaps she never did quite recover from it. Something died within her; a naïf belief in the wisdom of her elders, the ultimate rightness of existing things, which once gone never returns again. If it is true that we live in experience rather than in years, Joan came to her majority over night. It was her father's attitude which amazed her most. Had he seemed in the least apologetic, in the least ashamed or embarrassed by the quality of the woman he had put into her mother's place, she would have been ready to pity and console and help him make the best of a grave mistake. But the Major's attitude was that of the cat which has not only eaten the canary, but digested it and found it extremely beneficial to the system. Far from seeming apologetic, he appeared rather proud of his performance. There was something almost pathetic in his content with his new prosperity, with the ease and luxury of the establishment of which he found himself head. Joan sometimes thought, with a scornful sort of pity, "How Dad must have _hated_ to be poor!" Certainly he took to wealth, to which he had always professed himself indifferent, with an alacrity which surprised his daughter.