Joan, like the others, slept late into the mornings, and had her coffee in bed, or went down to the dining-room for it with a negligée over her nightgown. (Her father had become quite reconciled to negligées, which at first startled him, accustomed as he was to the neat morning ginghams of his Mary.) Sometimes she found him departing reluctantly for the mysterious place he called the Office. Later, people would arrive connected with the rites of the toilet--the hair-dresser, the manicure, the masseuse--a chatty person who performed on Effie May what she called her "facial"; and other things. Cleopatra herself could have devoted no more time to the care of her body than did the ex-Mrs. Calloway. "You've got it to do if you're risin' forty and like to eat," she explained once to Joan, simply. After luncheon, which was brought on a tray--a large tray--to wherever it happened to be convenient, the ladies once more resumed nightgowns, if indeed they had ever discarded them, and napped and read until the sun was low in the sky; when the house like the city woke into animation, and they prepared to fare forth like fireflies to the evening revel. Then there were automobile drives to little beer-gardens, where they ate and drank and sat about among whitewashed tree-trunks, feeling Bohemian; pleasant moonlight excursions up the Ohio in launches, with a picnic provided which consisted largely of thermos-bottles; and the Country Club, always the Country Club. Joan wondered what people had managed to do with themselves in summer before the days of Country Clubs. It was a life that somehow suggested the Orient, women of the harem coming forth at sunset to bask on the roofs of the houses; a placid existence; aimless, perhaps, but pleasant enough. Joan was puzzled to find the harm in it. Yet that harm was there, she knew. The touch of Puritanism in the girl told her that to live from day to day with no duty but pleasure made of pleasure something akin to vice.... And often in the midst of this harem life she remembered almost with passion that out beyond her shuttered windows, beyond the clangor of trolley-cars and the hum and clatter of the dirty streets, was summer--summer, the loveliest of the year's phases; leaf-shadows on wimpling water, lush meadows sparkling with the sunrise dew, green-gold glades of the wood delicious with the smell of warm pine-needles; all the world at fullest bloom, open like the heart of a rose, waiting.