"It isn't half as much fun as being the kind of girl everybody
else is. I hate wearing moving-picture clothes" [not even in her
excitement could Joy bring herself to say "movies"] "and I hate
never knowing girls and men my own age, and I hate having poems
written to me worse than anything at _all_!"
Poor Mrs. Harmsworth-Jones! She hadn't done a thing. Her own girls
went to fashionable schools and attended sub-deb dances by the score
until they came out, which they did at eighteen each like clockwork.
She couldn't have been expected to see to it for somebody else's
girl, too. Her getting the full blast of it was a quite fortuitous
affair, and Joy always felt, looking back afterwards on her
explosion, that it had been hard on the lady--who was frightened by
it to the point of silence. It must have been very much as if the
sedate full-length of Mr. Shakspere, over in the corner and _not_
autographed, had opened its mouth and begun to recite limericks.
"Why--why!" she said; and that was all she was capable of saying for
the moment. Joy, terrified herself at her deed, turned and fled.
What happened between Mrs. Jones and Grandfather she never knew, and
never asked. She never halted in her flight till she was safe in her
own little eyrie upstairs.
There she stopped before her dresser mirror, and looked at the
flushed, breathless girl in the glass.
"I wonder," Joy said aloud, "what really is the difference between
me and other people?"
She stared into the glass to see if she couldn't find out, leaning
her hands down on the dresser-top.
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