The breeze was rising, drawing sharp criss-cross furrows on the water, and I noticed how it ruffled the woman's hair; her hair was like her eyes, a warm red-brown.
"What is Sturgeon Cove?" she asked. "Is it a bay,—a larger one than we have passed?"
I took a rough map from my wallet and handed it to her. "Much larger, you see," I said. "It almost bisects the peninsula. Only the Sturgeon portage, about a mile long, separates it from the lake of the Illinois. We must be near it now."
She gave but a look at the map, then glanced at the cloud-streaked west and at the shore.
"Try to make it. Try to reach Sturgeon Cove," she urged.
I was thinking of something else, so I answered her only by a shake of the head. Perhaps that angered her. At all events she smote her palms together with a short, soft little clap, such as I use when I call my dog.
"I do not wish to land here," she said, throwing back her head at me quite as she had done when I thought her a boy. "I wish to go on. Why not?"
I motioned Pierre to the shore. "Because you would get wet," I answered stoically.
She flushed as redly as if I had hurt her. "And if I did?" she cried. "Better discomfort than this constant humiliation. Monsieur, I refuse to be made a burden of in this fashion. It is not fair. You made your plans to reach a certain point, and you would go on, rain or otherwise, if it were not for me. For me, for me, for me! I am sick of the sound of the words in my own brain. I am sick of the excuse. Each added sacrifice you make for me weighs me like lead. It binds me. I cannot endure the obligation. Believe me, monsieur."
I had no choice but to believe her. Yet she stopped with a gasp of the breath, as if she had said too much, or perhaps too little,—as if she were dissatisfied. Well, I had but scant desire to reply. I should have liked to walk away, and rebelled in my heart at our forced nearness in the canoe. My feeling was not new. When I had thought her a man she had antagonized me in spite of my interest; as a maid she had troubled me, and now as my wife I found that she had already power to wound. Still, with all my inner heat, I could look as it were in a mirror and understand her unhappiness and vexation. She was trying to act towards me with a man's fairness and detachment, but each move that I made showed that I considered her solely as a woman and therefore an encumbrance. Let her act with whatever bravery and wisdom she might, her sex still enmeshed us like a silken trap. We could not escape it. And it was a fetter. Mask it as courteously as I would, the fact remained that it was undoubtedly a fetter. I felt a certain compassion for her and her forced dependence, and said to myself that I would hide my own soreness. But her words had bitten, and I am not a patient man.