Occasionally Joan's mother, before she overcame the blunter speech of the North, had offended the family taste with plain statements about prices and possibilities. Joan, observant from her cradle, drew her own conclusions from the expression of wincing deprecation these faux pas produced upon her father's face, or upon that of the cousin or aunt or what-not in the way of Darcy relation that was usually visiting them. "Mamma," she had asked once in the murmured intimacy that preceded sleepy time, "isn't money a very nice fing?" "A very nice thing indeed, babykins," answered the lady with a faint sigh. "Then why mustn't us never speak about it?" It was not the only one of her daughter's questions that the harassed woman had been obliged to parry with what skill lay at her command. Honesty always came more easily to Mary Darcy than subterfuge. Joan grew up into the family habit of euphonious speech; but, thanks to a certain inheritance from her mother, facts had a way of presenting themselves to her inner vision with a clarity, a brutal frankness of outline, quite unprecedented in the mind of a Darcy. Her facility in the valuable game of Pretend came from the paternal strain. Richard Darcy was one of those fortunate spirits who move through life to the sound of an invisible drum corps--a procession of one, affably ready for whatever honors Fate chose to thrust upon him. Joan, too, was quite prepared for the best the world had to offer. Nevertheless, unlike her father, she was never unaware of the difference between pretense and reality, nor of the fixed line dividing them. When she lied, it was deliberately, with her eyes wide open. Just now she chose to step over the dividing line firmly into reality. Perhaps her dinner may have had something to do with it; a diet of chocolates and ham sandwiches not being conducive to glamour of thought, even at eighteen. Joan wished, soberly, that she were happier at the idea of going home. She wished that she were not haunted by a vague dread of it.... The Convent--with its daily round of prescribed duties and pleasures, its fixed intimates and enemies, its atmosphere of simple piety, its guardian nuns, striving conscientiously for that "detachment from place" which is enjoined upon them, but lavishing all the pent-up mother-passion of their hearts upon the young creatures in their care--Joan, young as she was, visualized the place she had left as a sunny haven, a little quiet eddy in the whirlpool; sheltered, secluded, safe. She frowned at the adjective. Surely her own home was "safe," too! Surely the vague dread she felt had nothing to do with her father, for instance--her own dear, splendid Dad, so handsome despite his frayed and spotted clothes, with the courtly manner that had won both nuns and girls to awestruck admiration, and that gave him far more distinction than the fathers of other girls who did not wear frayed and spotted clothes. No, it could not be her father she dreaded!