The Wishing-Ring Man | Page 2

she quite believed it. No, not quite--but enough to make her a little
shy, and have almost the expression and manner still of a little girl. She
had big, black-lashed, kitten-blue eyes, scarlet lips, and two ropes of
bronze hair that she wanted very badly to put up. It sounds like rather
an exciting personality, but Joy was so young and so shy and so
obedient that she was only like a rather small Blessed Damozel, or
some other not-grown-up Rossetti person. She knew it well, because
she had been told so frequently, and she didn't care about it at all. She
leaned her head against the frame containing Great-Grandfather John
Havenith at twenty, and considered Aunt Lucilla afresh.
"All the people in the history-books!" she said again softly, but none the
less regretfully.
Ordinarily you couldn't ask for a dearer, sweeter child than Joy,
slipping noiselessly up and down the old house in the city, being just as
good as she knew how. She had always been told that she must be good
and obedient and affectionate, and it had never been any trouble to her,
because she was naturally that way. She lived all alone with
Grandfather and Grandmother and Elizabeth the cook, and did just
what Grandfather told her to. So did everybody else. It wasn't that he
was cross, or anything like that. He was more charming than most
people. But he was a Personage; and if you live with a Personage your
own personality gets a bit pushed into the background, without its
being anybody's fault at all.
Joy had been perfectly happy, as far as she knew, until two weeks
before. You can be, you know, if no one tells you you aren't, especially
when you're young.
Grandfather had Afternoons every two weeks, when he sat at the end of
the parlors in a big chair and received his admirers. In his youth he had
looked like Shelley, and he was still tall and slender and clean-shaven,
with straight, abundant white hair, and black brows and lashes like
Joy's. And he had what is called immense personal charm, and loved
his little grand-daughter devotedly. He simply didn't know she was
grown up. For the matter of that, neither did Joy herself until....

You see, it had been very much like life in a fairy-book. She never
remembered anything but the old house and the old people, and
everybody literary coming and going and telling her how wonderful
Grandfather was: and nothing that concerned her very closely, at all.
She scarcely knew how to treat anybody, except respectfully, because
they had always all been so much older than she was. It was like living
in an enchanted tower. Enchanted towers are very pleasant places,
because you can have all sorts of dreams in them. Joy hadn't missed
anything much, till the thing that happened at the reception.
Grandfather, in his frock-coat and stock, his white fluffy hair flying,
had been moving up and down the autographed parlors with his usual
dominant charm. Little gray Grandmother, in her gathered, fichued
black silk, was putting lemon or cream in teacups, as people should
prefer. Joy had been walking up and down by Grandfather, as he liked
to have her on reception days. They dressed her, on these days, in
lovely strange frocks, cut medieval fashion, with the ropes of
bronze-gold hair trailing down either side of her vividly colored,
incongruously dreamy little face. According to the way Joy figured it
out, Grandfather had her dress that way, the better to write poetry about
her. She didn't mind. The truth was, she lived so far inside herself that
she didn't care. It was so much easier to do quickly what you were told,
and then go back to the place where you played by yourself--a fairy
country.
This particular reception day was a damp, heavily hot afternoon in
early September. There weren't many people back in the city yet, but
Grandfather always began his "days" as early as he could. He was fond
of having people around him. And even on this very sticky day people
did come. Only two of them were young.
Joy didn't know any young people. Some day she intended to. In her
dream-world she had friends who were young and gay and lovely and
talked to her, and to whom she talked back gaily; but it never occurred
to her to expect anything like that to really happen right now. The
young men and young girls she sometimes crossed she admired quite
happily and remotely, as if they were people from another planet.

It was so that she watched these two people that were young. She liked
watching them so much that presently she escaped from Grandfather,
and slid behind the window-curtains, to be closer