Joan and Co.

Joan Fairburne sat before the long cheval mirror while Henriette did up her rich black hair. If Dicky Burnett could have seen her expression at this moment, he would have known—and felt relieved to know—that whatever was the cause of her boredom, it was not he, because he was not about. In fact, the only person she could see—with the exception of Henriette, who did not count—was herself. The logical deduction, then, was that she must have been bored with herself. Yet if this were true it was some development of the last year. Up to six months before she graduated she had been gay enough, and then—something had happened. Perhaps several things had happened.

First of all, she had a sense of being about to be graduated, and somehow that set her to thinking—really thinking. Probably, too, it was the culmination of the work she had been doing and the life she had been leading; for both in her studies and her associates she had been extremely democratic. At the end of the first year she had escaped from the clique which naturally claimed her for their own and had mingled with all sorts of interesting girls—girls from the West, and girls from the country, and girls who were working their way through, and girls who had just barely enough money to squeeze through and who were looking forward to earning their own livelihood afterward. It was for her like getting into a new world, for until then she had lived as though surrounded by a high wall. It was a very ancient wall and a very beautiful wall and a protecting wall, but it was so high no one could see over it. As long, however, as she knew nothing of what lay beyond—except vaguely that the country roundabout was very dangerous land for young girls—she did not mind her seclusion. Indeed, she was even grateful and followed where her elders led as meekly as a young girl should. It was so her mother before her had done, although instead of going to college—for young ladies did not then go to college—she had married John Fairburne, one of the old New York Fairburnes. “And that, my dear,” her mother explained, “has been quite the equivalent of a liberal education.”

But Joan was beginning to see that this sort of education had kept her mother all these years behind the same old wall. The area bounded had, to be sure, been considerably enlarged after her marriage and especially after the birth of her only child, but the barrier remained. The Fairburne world was like a little monarchy, or still more like one of those ancient walled cities one reads of in Roman history.

During her first year at Wellesley, Joan believed that the kingdom extended even as far as there. Several girls of her social set entered with her and they quickly found other girls of similar social sets from Boston and Chicago and St. Louis and San Francisco who, except for slight differences of speech, were alike as peas in a pod.

That summer she returned to New York and Newport and the old crowd she had left. But in her sophomore year Joan met Mildred Devons—a mouse of a girl who had been brought up on a ranch in the West, and who had taught school for three years and served as waitress in a summer hotel in order to save enough to come East for this. There had never been any wall around her life and she had seen many strange things.

It was Joan who introduced herself as the two sat studying on the shores of the lake one June afternoon.

“Aren’t we classmates?” she asked.

“Yes,” Miss Devons answered, with an expression of guarded surprise.

“I think it must be because you study so hard that we’ve never met,” Joan continued.

“I study as hard as I know how,” Miss Devons answered seriously. “Don’t you?”

“I’m afraid not. I don’t think I like to study.”

So the conversation began, and as the days went on, and next year as the months went by, each girl revealed herself a little more fully to the other. And though in all their past, their present, and their future they differed so radically, a curious sort of friendship developed that had its effect upon them both. Somewhere below the surface of things they found a common bond.

When, in her senior year, Miss Devons was taken ill as a result of overstudy and undernourishment, it was Joan who stood by to the end—Joan and a cousin of Mildred from Technology—one Mark Devons. He was a slight, pale-faced young man with eager black eyes and thin lips that came together in a straight line. Joan never met him outside of the infirmary; but there, on either side of the bed, they both did their best to encourage the fragile girl who faded before their eyes.

Joan was with her alone when she died. One evening Mildred reached out her thin hand and sought Joan’s.

“I’m going,” she said quietly. “I haven’t let them tell the folks at home. Will you make it—easy as you can? I guess they—they’ll sort of miss me.”

“Oh, I shall too,” Joan sobbed. “Please—please don’t go!”

Mildred’s eyes brightened, and for a little while she rallied; but not for long.

When this Mark Devons came that night, it was Joan who met him and told him. His face grew dark, as though in challenge of some mysterious enemy.

“It isn’t right!” he exclaimed.

Joan did not understand.

“There are plenty here who aren’t needed,” he broke out. “Why—”

Joan drew back a little. For a second she felt guilty. Impulsively Devons thrust forward his hand.

“Good-bye,” he said simply.

So he went out of her life almost as completely as did Mildred. Yet it was not true that either of them had gone out of her life.

It was her first intimate experience with death, and at the beginning she had been impressed only with the abrupt finality of it. But when she began to write the letters to those back at home—there was a mother and a sister—she found herself writing, not as of one dead, but as of one still living. And all through the rest of this her last year the strongest vital friendship she had, remained still that of Mildred Devons. When finally she graduated, it was as though Mildred graduated with her.

It was Mildred, with her fine ideals of the future, her eagerness to make herself worth while, who whispered to her when on those long June evenings Joan walked by herself at twilight with a sense of new things stirring within. It was Mildred who whispered that a graduation was not an ending but a beginning. Of what, she did not say; of what, Joan herself did not know. But when one came to full womanhood surely it must mean the beginning of something more than anything she then saw ahead of her.

With this idea she had come back home, and for a little while had tried to make her mother understand and her father understand—looking hopefully first to one and then to the other for a solution. The former merely patted her upon the back and said:

“You’re a Fairburne, my dear.”

The latter had only smiled.

“You’ll find plenty to do soon,” he assured her.

She had passed that summer, as usual, in Newport; and no one there helped to explain her to herself. When she came back in the fall, one thing had followed another so inevitably that she had found little time to think at all. But now she was beginning to steady herself a little and so to think once more.

The high wall was now like a prison wall. Wherever she went, whatever she did, she could always reach out and touch the four sides of it. That was true of her home; it was true of the limousine which took her from place to place; it was true of each destination. Always the doors were guarded and always some one with credentials stood ready to meet her. She was shot from one to another like a cash box in a pneumatic tube. Sometimes she peered through the plate glass of her car, as she sat by her mother’s side or by Dicky’s side, at the crowds in the street with an hysterical desire to open the door, jump out, and lose herself among them.

Yes, it was equally true when she was by Dicky’s side. She had thought at first she was going to find a friend in Dicky. She had liked him as a clean young boy while he was at college, and she had liked him last summer as she had sailed the open sea with him now and then. At the beginning of the teas and dances and bridge parties this fall she had been glad to have him with her. But of late he had become a little bit tiresome. There was no variety to Dicky. As she saw him one day, so he was the next. That was inevitable, because he himself had nothing from outside of interest to bring to her. His eyes saw only what her eyes saw. They met the same people at the same places and did the same things. It was worse for him than for her. Once or twice she had searched for something deeper in him, but she was quite sure now there was nothing deeper. He was a little more wholesome than the others and that was all. She did not particularly blame him for being so negative, because to do that would have been to blame herself equally. And he was very nice. Too nice. He treated her as though she were some fragile thing to be kept in cotton wool. It was this which made her smile even at the moment she was bored. If Dicky Burnett could have had the privilege of reading her thoughts as she thought sometimes in her white bed while staring at the ceiling, he would have been surprised.

In the dark, with all the details of her room obliterated; in the dark, with all the costumes for her silly part out of sight; in the dark, with Henriette and even her mother and father in the background; in the dark, with the world very quiet all about her—it was another Joan who lived in the big stone house. Her room had always been a cloistered place to her, and at night it seemed even more cloistered. With her hair down and her body free, she felt like one released—like one allowed to be for a little while just herself. It was then she broke her bounds and wandered at large. Dicky might have found it significant that never at these times was he in her thoughts.

Henriette finished her hair and stepped back with an approving look. Mademoiselle was very beautiful, but never as beautiful as she might be were she gayer. It is a light heart that makes eyes bright and brings color to the cheeks. Mon Dieu! if she herself had the opportunities Mademoiselle Fairburne enjoyed—

There was a gown to be donned next—a wonderful gown designed by an artist. Yet Mademoiselle stood like a doll and showed as little interest. It was so, too, of the hat—a dashing bit of daintiness.

At three o’clock Dicky Burnett called for her, looking very spruce in his English cut-away and top hat. It may have been her fancy, but he appeared even a little more solicitous than usual about her comfort. It was a blustering, stormy day, with the snow coming slantwise in gusts. He suggested that perhaps it was too raw for her to venture out—when venturing out meant only venturing from the door of the house to the door of the limousine and then to the covered approach to Delmonico’s. She recalled some of those descriptions Mildred had given her of Western winters.

“Dicky,” she said, “I wish we were going to walk.”

“Walk!” exclaimed Dicky, with an unconscious glance at her short silk skirt.

“Don’t worry,” she smiled. “We won’t.”

He had tried to hold an umbrella above her as she came down the steps; but, in a spirit of rebellion, she strode ahead of him. And all the rest of the afternoon some demon of perverseness possessed her. For a wonder, she chose to dance, and danced not only with Dicky, who was a good dancer, but with Hollister, whom she did not particularly like, and with Diblee, whom Dicky did not particularly like. While the mood to dance was upon her she danced with every one who offered himself as a partner, and there were few who were not glad of the opportunity. Then, when she had had enough, she refused to dance with any one, but sat, with flushed cheeks, like a petulant princess, not deigning even to talk with Dicky.

Once again her mood changed, and she astonished him with her gayety; but on the instant he tried to join her in it, she sat back in silence.

He had never seen her like this. It was as though he were trying to follow two or three Joans. And yet he had a feeling that always the steady dark eyes of the real Joan dominated the others. Then, too, if she stung him, she also roused him.

Dicky’s mouth became firmer than usual before that afternoon was over. If he were given half a chance—