Grandfather was one of the
last survivors of the old school of American poetry. He was tall and
slender, and very gentle and nice, but he always had things the way
he said he wanted them, and he preferred his autographed friends to
his family portraits.
"It's rather a good thing it's so dark out here, Aunt Lucilla," said
Joy to the smiling Colonial lady in the dark corner above her. "You
mayn't much like being where people can't see you--but think how
you'd feel, up garret!"
Aunt Lucilla Havenith, red of lip, flashing of eye, blue and silver
of gown, laughed on down at her great-grand-niece, who was holding a
surreptitious little red candle up to talk to her. Aunt Lucilla,
from all accounts, had had too excellent a time in her life to mind
a little thing like being put in a back hall afterwards. She had
been a belle from her fifteenth year, eloped with her true-love at
sixteen, and gone on being a belle all the rest of her life, in the
intervals of three husbands and ever so many children. She had
managed everything and everybody she came across gaily all her life;
she had been proposed to by practically the whole Society of the
Cincinnati; and had died at eighty-three, a power and a charmer to
the last.
"I don't think you need to mind dark corners one bit," said Joy,
tipping the candle so that the red wax dribbled down on her slim
fingers. "If Rochambeau and Lafayette and all the rest of the people
in the history-books had made a fuss over _me_--"
Joy sat down on the stairs again, on a cushion.
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