On Joan's return from Longmeadow she had found her family already beginning to prepare for what was by far the most ambitious effort undertaken by Effie May as yet: her formal début into society. Joan, rather alarmed, protested. She wished nothing so much at the moment as to be allowed to slip into some inconspicuous corner and recover her lost confidence. She was in no mood for a continuation of an empty social career, particularly under the ægis of her father's wife. Other plans were beginning to formulate vaguely in her head, and she wanted leisure to perfect them. But here for the first time she came into direct contact with the amiable, easy-going, unescapable persistence she had before suspected in her step-mother, and which made her feel as helpless as a caged rabbit; a much indulged and petted rabbit, to be sure, in which it was sheer ingratitude not to love its cage. Effie May used neither argument nor explanation. She simply went her chosen way, and the rest of the household perforce accompanied her. Joan, herself not unaccustomed to pursuing her own path, did not submit without a struggle. The difficulty was to bring the matter out into the open. Effie May had a habit of taking things for granted that made discussion gratuitous. "Father," Joan said determinedly one night at dinner, when the two elders were discussing the details of the impending ball, "why do we give a ball, anyway? It's not as if we were under many obligations to people--rather the contrary. And what's the point of entertaining for me in this wholesale way, when I do not wish to be a débutante?" "Don't _wish_ to be a débutante?" cried the astonished gentleman. "Why, my child, the pollywog might as well decide that it does not wish to be a frog! At a certain age young women of a certain position naturally have to be presented to society. What else is there for them to do?" "Oh, lots of things," said the girl with impatient vagueness. "They can be teachers or librarians, or--stenographers, or journalists--something useful, you know." "Never," said the Major with pained emphasis, "while I am alive and able to support her, shall a daughter of mine step out of that station in life to which it has pleased God to call her! No lady of my family has yet, I thank God, been under the necessity of becoming anything 'useful'--Useful! Absurd!" (Joan had a momentary vision of her frail mother at sewing-machine and housework; the three Misses Darcy struggling to make ends meet by means of paying guests who did not always pay.) "May I ask," continued her father with a dignity that verged upon acerbity, "the reason for this sudden desire on your part to be 'useful'? It is a desire usually confined, I think, to ladies who have ceased to be ornamental," he added, with a gallant inclination in her direction. "Oh, Dad, you know what I mean!" she said rather desperately. "I simply want to be independent."