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.
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