Why Joan?

The funeral did great credit to the Misses Darcys' experience in such affairs. A crowded, beflowered church bore witness to the fact that Darcy was still a name to be reckoned w...

The two rooms in which Ellen Neal had established herself were on the second floor of a house that had gone some decades since into a state of senile decrepitude. But such was t...

In the heat of the following afternoon, while Effie May dozed unaware beneath an electric fan, with a box of chocolates convenient to her drowsy hand, Joan slipped out of the ho...

Richard Darcy was accepting the change that had come into his life much as he had accepted others of a less fortunate trend. He had become at last what Nature had always intende...

Friends of Mary Darcy, in the distant days before they forgot to discuss her surprising marriage with a promoter from who knows where, were wont to say, "At least he makes a dev...

There is a certain period of the year when all its widely scattered children home to Kentucky as surely as bluebirds home to the hollow stumps in March. It is the season of the...

It was owing to this fortuitous train journey that one night, some weeks later, Mr. Archibald Blair found himself moving in what he considered very high society indeed. In the y...

His luck did not confine itself to social matters. One day the president of the firm, a Mr. Moore, greatly admired in the office because of his hauteur with employees, sent for...

These long automobile rides familiarized her as nothing else could not only with the State but with her father. She came to understand and share his peculiar, proprietary intere...

Through the dim corridors, the silent halls Of Yesterday, the nuns move, whispering Their rosary. Without, a robin calls A drowsy blessing to his little mate, For it is late, An...

Into the busy abstraction of Joan's Paris life came presently one of her step-mother's rare letters. It was a round, childish, yet curiously firm scrawl written on lavender pape...

Young Joan Darcy leaned back luxuriously upon a cushion offered by the obsequious porter (servants were usually obsequious with Joan, though she was not at all beautiful and rat...

It was long before Joan recovered from the dazed sensation her father's little surprise had produced in her mind. Perhaps she never did quite recover from it. Something died wit...

Morning did not bring the word from Eduard Desmond that Joan told herself must surely come; the explanation, the excuse, no matter how bald, which she might go through the form...

Social life, in a small American city that prides itself upon traditions of social life, may be as absorbing, if not as profitable, as that in any of the world's great capitals-...

For the modern woman there lies, fortunately, a life between the two extremes of domesticity and frivolity, both of which Joan had tried and found wanting. Or rather she had not...

But Effie May's amiability was proof even against this trying episode. She said to Joan, the day after the ball, when they were talking things over in unusual intimacy, "By the...

The Darcys' social career appeared to be well launched. Each Saturday night found them at the Country Club, and no longer dining in loneliness. Effie May speedily collected abou...

"I guess you've got to have the whole story now, though it ain't a very pretty story to tell a girl," said Effie May wearily. "I don't know as your papa would much want you to h...

It proved exciting not only to Joan. Some years earlier the arrival of so distinguished a visitor unadvertised and unpressagented would have caused little more than a ripple, ex...

Joan and Archibald were married two weeks later, very quietly, before only her family, resisting all the Major's importunities to make an occasion of it. Nor would the girl acce...

There had naturally been some discussion at the Convent as to the most desirable setting for proposals, the consensus of opinion being in favor of Miss Alcott's little water-sce...

People who know life only on its surfaces were apt to pronounce Joan Blair a rather hard young person. She would herself have admitted to a certain hardness, secretly aware, how...

Joan's respect for the sterner sex, never very exaggerated, was not increased by the avidity with which they swallowed, one by one, her inexperienced hook, bait and all. Evident...

The idea that Betty and her mother were eyeing her somewhat askance troubled Joan not a little. In her heart of hearts she preferred women to men, and believed their friendship...

Joan was not the judge of human nature she fancied herself if she believed that a disparity in age would render gossip innocuous. The disparity was not as apparent as she believ...

Later, as she lay propped up in her snug little berth (far the pleasantest part of the journey to Joan), with her shade up for fear of missing anything of the mysterious night t...

Miss Carmichael presently invited Joan to a meeting of an organization which she had occasionally referred to as "The Jabberwocks" though it had been christened by a more imposi...

The discovery of her dependence upon her step-mother marked an end to one period of Joan's existence: the apathetic period. Heretofore she had allowed their daily life, their am...

One thing almost reconciled her to the distasteful idea of entering further into the social world under the wing of her step-mother, and that was the gratification, the artless...

There is little to be said here about Joan's experiences in France. The story of those is better told in her own remarkable letters, which began shortly to appear in certain mag...

At that moment there was the sound of a latch-key in the door and Archie came in; a weary, cheerful Archie, not quite so dapper as of old, but rather the better for that, perhaps.

At one moment her course seemed clear beyond the question of a doubt. It was unthinkable that her father should continue to recognize as his wife--her mother's successor!--a wom...

In their weekly chats over her tea-table (from which the Major early excused himself, possibly under wifely suggestion), Joan got into the way of being quite confidential with A...

All during her homeward journey Joan had the feeling that she was waking slowly from a long dream; such a dream as ether gives, more vivid than reality itself but impossible of...

Misses Darcy were wont to call the polite world, a general conspiracy of silence on the subject of honeymoons. The theory is allowed to go unchallenged that a honeymoon is invar...

Joan, already exhilarated by a foretaste of independence, and enjoying to the full what Turgenev calls "that carelessness, that deuce-take-it air which comes out so naturally in...

It was well into the middle of a fine blue and gold morning when Joan awoke, to find her coffee cold on the tray beside her bed. She had slept through even the entrance of the m...

Always afterwards, in thinking of that nightmare time, Joan remembered with a stab of remorse that when he held out his arms to her she had not gone to them--He did not make the...

Relations between them might have ended then and there, for Joan was not in the habit of casting her pearls before swine, and the confidence was rather crushed out of Archibald...

Their next meeting occurred at the Carmichael house at dinner. Emily, with the approach of the Easter season, had one day announced her intention of giving a dinner in Joan's ho...

Joan was alone at last in such a bed as she had never occupied in her life, even in her most luxurious games of Pretend. To her inexperience the sheets felt as if made of softes...

Joan, coming home from a late committee-meeting one afternoon, realized with a sort of pang, as she turned into the court where she lived, that Indian summer had come and almost...

Not only the older girls, but more than one of the nuns, made some excuse to come into Joan's little room when she was dressing that Saturday evening. The rumor had gone forth t...

On Joan's return from Longmeadow she had found her family already beginning to prepare for what was by far the most ambitious effort undertaken by Effie May as yet: her formal d...

Two days later he came to see her, with a good deal of court-plaster about his face, and limping on a sprained ankle; and found Joan in bed with a wrenched shoulder, otherwise u...

There were those, notably among the Jabberwocks, who felt that in availing herself of the age-old solution of handing her burdens over to a man to bear, Joan had rather hauled d...

Joan, in yielding to family pressure temporarily, had by no means given up the idea of what she had learned recently to call her economic independence--a subject discussed frequ...

But if she could not offer Archie the tenderness he craved, she gave him at least all the other assistance in her power. Her executive ability stood them both in good stead.

Her father took a satisfaction in Joan's house and husband and general condition of modest prosperity which surprised and rather touched the girl. It was as if he found in her w...

A familiar, relentless voice penetrated Joan's consciousness at last, and she screwed her swollen eyelids down tighter and even managed a reproving snore, wondering whether the...

The storm which burst in August, 1914, had the effect of blotting out smaller storms into nothingness. It brought in its wake different things to different natures: to some appr...

The career of Lizzie (whose surname may perhaps be guessed by the intelligent reader) was short, and her end untimely; but even so she served her part in the inscrutable purpose...

The fellow-traveler who had incurred Miss Darcy's displeasure by a too-active sympathy was much pleased, being of a sentimental turn of mind, to witness a family reunion which p...

These were at their best vague plans. Only one thing was definite about them. They were to include no more make-believe. Whatever came hereafter, Joan intended to be herself. Th...

It was in April that Archie Blair conceived the happy idea of purchasing an automobile, thus combining business with pleasure most practically; a modest secondhand affair of thr...

Joan herself, like other self-reliant people, sometimes made promises which she was unable to keep. She had made such a one to her father. Despite her best efforts, the fact and...