She saw quite clearly that she had been in danger of this. There was something curiously enervating about the atmosphere of her step-mother's house, a _laissez-faire_ that was almost--the girl sought for the word and decided upon "lascivious." Luxury, ease, pleasure--these were the ends for which her step-mother strove--or rather accomplished without undue striving, an ability to which the girl gave full due. She knew that it must take more than mere money to keep so elaborate a household running without apparent effort. The servants were efficient and unobtrusive, the accounts scrupulously kept, every nook and cranny clean and in order. Even Ellen Neal, who knew whereof she spoke, admitted that the ex-Mrs. Calloway was a housekeeper of parts. But... Joan tried conscientiously to fathom the meaning of her "but." She decided that the house was too like its mistress--over-bathed, over-perfumed and dressed and manicured--to be quite nice. The windows were too fluffy with lace, the drawing-room too pretty and satiny, the library too red. ("Why is it," she had written to Stefan Nikolai, "that people who never open a book invariably have a red library?") A fantastic thought came to her. She wondered whether those strange houses which are sometimes whispered of even among convent girls, those palaces of horror where women's bodies are bought and sold, might not perhaps resemble this home to which her father had brought her ... Then she smiled at herself. Vulgar, her step-mother might be; hopelessly underbred; doubtless in some previous manifestations a shop-girl, a dressmaker; possibly one of those anomalous beings known in race-towns as "race-horse women." But she was unmistakably respectable. There was not a picture on her walls, nor a novel on the shelves of the red library, which was not, as she herself once remarked to Joan complacently, "perfectly refined." The girl recalled her evident uneasiness when sometimes at the dinner-table the talk had waxed a little too free. She did her step-mother the justice to believe her a quite decent woman. Perhaps the curious sense of enervation was due only to the heat of midsummer in a Southern city. Now and then the elder Darcys spoke vaguely of going away, only to decide that it was too much trouble. It was easier to stay where they were. In a Kentucky July, one follows the line of least resistance.