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Page 37
For the time, Joyce found no change in her, for with child-like abandon
she exclaimed over the strange sights. "Oh, Joyce! Snow!" she cried,
when a falling flake brushed her face. "After all these years of
orange-blossoms and summer sun at Christmas, how good it seems to have
real old Santa Claus weather! I can almost see the reindeer and smell
the striped peppermint and pop-corn. And oh, _oh_! look at that
shop-window. It is positively dazzling! And the racket--" she put her
hands over her ears an instant. "I feel that I've never really heard a
loud noise till now."
Joyce laughed indulgently, and stopped with her whenever she wanted to
gaze in at some particularly attractive show window. When they reached
the flat, Mary still kept near her, "tagging after her," as she would
have expressed it in her earlier days, so much like the little sister of
that time, that Joyce still failed to see how much she had changed
during their separation.
"You see it's just like a doll-house," Joyce said as she led them
through the tiny rooms on a tour of inspection. "All except the studio.
We had a partition taken out and two rooms thrown together for that. Now
the company will have to go in there and entertain themselves while I
put the finishing touches to the dinner. The kitchenette will only hold
one at a time."
Betty and Phil obediently went into the studio to renew their
acquaintance of two years before, begun at Eugenia's wedding, and
wandered around the room looking at the various specimen's of Joyce's
handicraft pinned about on the walls. One of the first pauses was before
a sketch of Lloyd, done from memory, a little wash drawing of her. Mary,
standing in the doorway, heard Phil say, "Tell me about her, Miss Betty.
She writes so seldom that I can only imagine her conquests."
For a moment Mary watched him, as he studied the sketch intently. Then
she turned away to the kitchenette to help Joyce, thinking how lovely it
must be to have a handsome man like that bend over your picture so
adoringly, and speak of you in such a fashion.
It was a merry little dinner party, and afterwards it was almost like
old times at the Wigwam, for Phil insisted on helping wipe the dishes,
and was so boyish and jolly with his teasing reminiscences that she
almost forgot her new awe of him. But afterward when they sat around the
woodfire in the studio ("a piece of Henry's much enjoyed extravagance,"
Joyce explained, "and only lighted on gala occasions like this") they
were suddenly all grown up and serious again. Joyce talked about her
work, and the friends she had made among editors and illustrators, and
ambitious workaday people whose acquaintance was both a delight and an
inspiration. It was Henrietta who brought them to the studio, along with
the Persian rugs and the "old masters," and Joyce could never get done
being thankful that she had found such a friend in the beginning of her
career.
Phil told of his work too, and his travels, and in the friendly shadows
cast by the flickering firelight talked intimately of his plans and
ambitions, and what he hoped ultimately to achieve.
Betty confessed shyly some of her hopes and dreams, warranted now, by
the success of several short flights in essay writing and verse, and
then Phil said laughingly, "Do you remember what Mary's dearest wish
used to be? How we roared the day she gravely informed us that it was
her highest ambition to be 'the toast of two continents,' Is it still
that, Mary?"
"No," she answered, laughing with the rest, but blushing furiously. "I
had just been reading the biography of a great Baltimore belle who was
called that, and it appealed to me as the most desirable thing on earth
to be honoured with such a title. But that was away back in the dark
ages. Of course I wouldn't wish such a silly thing now."
"But aren't you going to tell us what _is_ your greatest ambition?"
persisted Phil. "We have all confessed. It isn't fair for you to
withhold your confidence when we've given ours."
Mary shook her head. "I've had my lesson," she declared. "You'll never
have the chance to laugh twice, and this one is such a sky-scraper it
would astonish you."
When she spoke, she was thinking of that moment on the stair, under the
amber window, when through the music she heard the king's call, and was
first awakened to the knowledge that a high destiny awaited her. What it
was to be was still unrevealed to her, but of the voice and the vision
she had no doubt. Whatever it was she was sure it would be higher and
greater than anything any one she knew aspired to. Yet somehow, sitting
there in the friendly shadows, with the firelight shining on the earnest
manly face opposite, she did not care so much about a Joan of Arc career
as she had. It would be glorious, of course, but it might be lonesome.
People on pedestals were shut off from dear delightful intimacies like
this.
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