And then one morning at breakfast while she was fidgeting over her prunes, her father himself threw the bomb of revolution across the table:
“Joy, my child, I have been made executor of a will.”
Joy looked up vaguely from her prunestones.
“An old friend who may, or may not, have known that it would be inconvenient for me to go to California at this time. Yes, the estate is in California—I shall have to leave the first of the month.”
“How long will you be gone?” Joy asked, and a little fever of excitement began to burn within her.
“I’m sure I cannot prophesy—these affairs are sometimes indefinite in the extreme.” He frowned over his soft-boiled egg, and the fever within her quickened, as she began to vision the possibilities of this departure.
“Were you—were you thinking of taking me with you?” she asked, with no desire warming her voice.
“It would not be particularly desirable. I know that fathers do take their daughters unchaperoned upon trips with them, but I should prefer not to have you with me. I may have to be travelling constantly”—he heaved a sigh—“and I would not know where or with whom to leave you. Yet that question faces me here as well. I could not leave you alone in this house. And there are no relations nearer than your New York cousins.”
Joy’s blood was pounding. The New Englander in her rejoiced that she was not to be torn from her own shores to Pacific sea lines; and the gay little French strain sang that here was her chance that might never be heaped so invitingly before her again! She opened her mouth to speak, but the prunestones in front of her balked the phrase trembling upon her lips. They looked so solid—so unchanging. How could she taste the savour of opportunity, surrounded by prunestones?
And while she hesitated—a little whistle of ragtime in the street outside caught her ear and tickled it. It was only a few bars of syncopated lure—but it dislodged the speech trembling in her throat.
“Father—I don’t see why I—why I couldn’t go to Boston and study music for a little while. You know I have had no one since Miss Bessie—and I do think it would be nice to polish off my singing with some real Boston teachers—don’t you? I could just go down when you went away—and then decide what to do, when you came back.”