Nobody used the back
stairs, fine curly ones that they were, and Joy's cushion, which she
had put there on purpose to be mournful on a fortnight before, was
untouched since last time.
Joy Havenith was nineteen, but you never would have known it. She
had been told so often by her grandparents that she was only a child
yet, that 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.
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