This particular reception day was a damp, heavily hot afternoon in
early September. There weren't many people back in the city yet, but
Grandfather always began his "days" as early as he could. He was
fond of having people around him. And even on this very sticky day
people did come. Only two of them were young.

Joy didn't know any young people. Some day she intended to. In her
dream-world she had friends who were young and gay and lovely and
talked to her, and to whom she talked back gaily; but it never
occurred to her to expect anything like that to really happen right
now. The young men and young girls she sometimes crossed she admired
quite happily and remotely, as if they were people from another planet.

It was so that she watched these two people that were young. She
liked watching them so much that presently she escaped from Grandfather,
and slid behind the window-curtains, to be closer to them.

"They feel so lovely and happy," said Joy, warming her little hands
at their happiness.

They were lovers; anybody could see that. And they weren't poets or
anything of the sort; you could see that, too. _She_ was in a
little trim white pongee street suit, with a close little hat above
a little rosy, powdered, cheerful face. _He_ had rather heavy
shoulders and a shock of carefully brushed straight light hair, and
looked about one year out of Harvard. They didn't at all belong with
the middle-aged roomful. As a matter of fact, _her_ mother knew
Mrs. Havenith a little, and so they had dashed in here to save her
suit from the rain. They were sitting and smiling at each other