She had opportunity to notice, too, for the first time in action, Richard Darcy's chief and perhaps sole equipment for the unequal battle of life; his talent for making friends. Not for keeping them--that is a separate art, calling for certain efforts, certain reticences, above all certain abstentions of which Richard Darcy was temperamentally incapable. But in the art of creating admiring and useful acquaintances out of raw material he had few equals, even among his own profession. Mary Darcy had kept herself and her child for the most part aloof from these easily acquired friends of her husband, though they were invariably quite presentable--(as has been hinted, the Major had no use whatever for what he called "the canile"). Possibly this was owing to some odd Puritan scruples on Mary's part about combining business with pleasure.... But now that business had no longer to be combined with pleasure, Richard Darcy was free to exercise to the full his gift for being agreeable, without afterthought. It was perhaps fortunate that his new wife had made few friends of her own, a fact which left him unhampered in the matter of what he called quite seriously "resuming his position." Joan found that he was no longer forgotten in the city of his youth. The older residents had already been made aware by means of engraved and crested announcements that Richard Throckmorton Darcy had returned to their midst for the purpose of wedding one Effie May Smith Calloway, and that the bridal pair would be at home after a certain date at a very good address on Elmtree Street. Whither quite a respectable number of them hastened, if only out of curiosity, to leave cards. What they found was an extremely affable, leisurely, and prosperous-looking host, an establishment which appeared able and willing to maintain those traditions of Southern hospitality which have latterly fallen somewhat into disuse, and a rather silent young girl whose manner atoned for the perhaps excessive cordiality of her step-mother. Some of the callers did not come again, even under pressure; but on the whole Joan realized that the old friends in whom she had almost ceased to believe were about to take the Darcy family belatedly to their bosoms, indifferent to the substitution of a Mrs. Calloway for her mother. It was the girl's first experience of the omnipotence of money; an experience which if it comes young enough will make a cynic out of a congenital optimist, which Joan was not.