"You won't mind if it's quite personal? They sometimes are."
It seemed to be distinctly personal, as Joan realized after she had got well into it. Mr. Nikolai wrote to thank her for the little picture of the furs and the ringless hand.
The fox who rendered up his life to furnish forth a tippet would cry, "O death, where is thy sting?" if he could see himself now!--By the way, what color have your eyes become? Do they still match my aquamarine, or must it be gray sapphires the next time?
("Dear me," murmured Joan, "perhaps I'd better skip!"
"Not a word!" breathed the Jabberwocks, sitting forward.)
She read manfully on, wondering what had come over her friend to make him so particularly--well, personal was the word. The ringless hand seemed especially to take his fancy. He referred to it several times, and Joan could not well explain these references to her audience. She left them to draw their own conclusions; which they did, with some exchanging of glances.
There was an audible breath after she had finished. Emily Carmichael voiced the Jabberwocks when she asked casually, "Did you say he was young, Joan?"
"Oh, dear, no! Quite old. Forty or fifty, or thereabouts. An uncle-ish sort of person."
"Goodness," murmured somebody. "Fancy having an uncle like that!..."
Joan was asked to meetings of the club again. In fact, she was shortly invited to become a Jabberwock herself, having, without quite realizing why, been promoted from the rank of mere débutante to that of Interesting Person. In this way she came into contact with a phase of Louisville society strange to her father, strange even to the Misses Darcy, expert as they were in the ways of the best people. She learned that lately many little groups such as this club had come into existence, formed of women who had grown tired of more superficial forms of amusement, and had come together in the vague pursuit of something better.
"Do you know, I think we're rather in a transition state nowadays," explained Emily Carmichael. "It's as if we were waiting for something real to happen, marking time. The town's growing up, just as people grow up, and getting tired of childish games--Of course there's always been plenty of intellectual life here, as there is in most old Southern places where people have had leisure for books. We've even produced our share of literature."