Part 16 (1/2)
And--John was getting to do that sort of thing quite unnecessarily often--he laughed and bent toward her with every intention of kissing her again.
”Oh, that wasn't what I meant,” she a.s.sured him. Then her mood suddenly changed. ”John, you have what one of Grandfather's anarchist friends called a real from-gold heart. But you don't have to do that unless...”
”Unless what?” demanded John, quite coldly removing all of himself that he could from her half of the seat.
Joy's eyes fixed themselves on the distant scenery--excellent scenery, all autumn reds and yellows.
”I'll tell you the 'unless' tomorrow morning,” she answered him sweetly, but none the less firmly.
”You are playing with me, Joy, I think,” John answered in his most diagnostic tone--the exact tone in which he would have said, ”You have smallpox, Joy, I think.”
”Why, yes,” she answered him demurely. ”We were to, weren't we?”
”You'll have to wait out here a while; I have a case here,” he told her in a voice which held a note of endurance.
She sat quite still, after suppressing a faint impulse to ask him if she should hold the motor. She leaned back and gave herself up to the country sights and sounds and scents, gently ecstatic.
”Oh, Aunt Lucilla!” she was saying inwardly. ”You'd be proud of me!”
Joy was actually playing--he had said so--playing with a man!
CHAPTER SEVEN
A VERY CHARMING GENTLEMAN
”You look lovely,” said Phyllis heartily. She herself was radiant in a rose satin that made her look, as her small son remarked ecstatically, like a valentine. ”Mustn't it be horrid to be a man and always wear the same black clothes?”
”M'yes,” answered Joy absent-mindedly. ”If I look as nice as you do I don't have to worry. But--but will Gail Maddox be very much dressed?”
”She will,” replied Phyllis decisively. ”If I know Gail, she'll look like a Christmas tree. But don't let that weigh on your mind, dear child. n.o.body could look better than you do, if Viola and I did combine two of your frocks into one. Could they, Viola?”
The colored girl, who had been doing the ma.s.ses of Joy's bronze hair while her mistress, kneeling by the dressing-table, put the finis.h.i.+ng touches to some frock-draperies, giggled.
”Well dressed? Why, Miss Joy looks like the vampire in the movie show!”
”Final praise!” sighed Phyllis. ”You never told me I was as well dressed as a vampire, Viola.”
”You couldn't live up to vampiring, nohow, Mrs. Harrington, nor you shouldn't want to, not with that goldy hair of yours,” said Viola reprovingly.
”Virtue is thrust upon me, in other words,” said Phyllis. ”Evidently you have possibilities of crime, Joy!”
They went down, laughing, to where Allan and John were waiting for them, Allan walking the floor in his usual quick, boyish fas.h.i.+on, John sitting at a table reading, by way of economizing time. Being a doctor, he had a way of snapping up odds and ends of time and doing things with them.
He looked up from his paper as Joy's light footsteps pattered down the stairs, and continued to look at her. The green and silver of her gown glittered and flowed around her. Viola had done her hair high, and the wealth of it showed more, even, than when it was down in its accustomed braids. Her surprising black brows and lashes, with the innocence of her blue eyes, and the half-wistful, half-daring expression she had, made her seem a combination of sophistication and childishness such as John had never seen before.
”Shall I do you credit?” she asked him softly over her shoulder, as he held her wrap for her.
Her heart beat hard as she said it. She felt as if she was going into open battle, and she wanted all the heartening she could get.
”Tell me now that you like me better than you do Gail Maddox!” was what she wanted to say. But she knew she couldn't, not without being thought a cat. ”I can't get over finding motors scattered all over everything!” was what she heard herself saying inconsequently instead as they went out. She did not dare give him time to answer her first impulsive question.