Joan liked to come to this house, not only because Ellen and the familiar home furniture were there, but because it carried her romantic fancy back into the Louisville her father sometimes talked about, the old South with all its lost glamour of gallantry and derring-do. "_Les belles dames du temps jadis_" was a phrase that invariably came to her mind as she entered the graceful, defaced portal. Nearby stood a street-pump where an actress who was one day to make the charm of American women world-famous, used to come each morning to draw water, in her shabby little slippers with a rope of hair over each shoulder--a lovely young Rebekah at the well. Around the corner stood another old mansion, now debased to commercial uses, in front of which the townspeople used to gather daily at a certain hour to watch the languid progress from door to carriage of a beauty so widely heralded that her name and her many love-affairs have become history. Here and there in a neglected fence-corner a ragged rose-bush, or a clump of larkspur bravely in bloom, spoke to a few observers, such as Joan, of gardens which had been the lovely setting of lovely ladies long since dead and dust. Twilight was the hour for that neighborhood. Joan liked to fancy Ellen's house as the darkness fell, with candle-light streaming from the wide-flung windows, and glimpses within of bells in crinoline and beaux in tight wrinkled trousers, dancing a quadrille. Among them moved negro servitors with trays of frosted silver cups, and syllabub (though she had no slightest notion of what syllabub might be), and black cake, and small, pricked, beaten biscuit with ham in their insides. And there would be carriages stopping constantly at the door, to emit more belles and gallants, girls hoop-skirted and beshawled, who ran lightly up the curve of the long staircase, with apologies to the couples they disturbed in passing.... Always the house brought such fancies to Joan, and so clearly that she sometimes wondered whether they were less fancies than race-memories, souvenirs of Darcys who might have lived and made merry there in the halcyon days when the old gray river-town was at its zenith; truly, as it boasted, the Gateway to the South, stopping-place for all travelers on these floating palaces which no longer ply their leisurely journeys down the Ohio and the Mississippi to the Gulf. Once she had questioned her father about it. "No, that's not one of our houses, I think," he replied interestedly. "Though it might have been. Your ancestors were very fond of change, Dollykins--as I am myself. We seem to have lived in half the houses in Louisville, at one time or another. But that one has been shabby and tumbledown ever since I can remember. In my boyhood it was a cheap boarding-house, for actors and people of that sort, I believe. I knew no one who lived there." Joan was disappointed. She would have liked to claim the old mansion as a relative.