“Of course, you can’t believe half you hear, anyway. But they do say that she.... No, I’m not going to.... I never was one to tell nasty stories about people, Joan.”
Joan could not say anything to save her life. She had to get away from Agnes, and she managed it as quickly as she could. She was profoundly troubled, profoundly unhappy. She had not realized how much Wint meant to her. The things which Agnes intimated made her physically sick with unhappiness at their very possibility. She finished her errands as quickly as she could, and hurried home. On the way, she passed Agnes and Jack Routt together, and they spoke to her, and she responded, holding her voice steady. She was miserably hurt and unhappy.
At home, she shut herself in her room to think. There was a picture of Wint on her bureau, a snapshot she had taken two or three years before. Wint had changed since then. The pictured face was boyish and round and good-natured; Wint’s face now had a strength which this boy in the picture lacked. Wint was a man now, for good or ill.
She had, suddenly, a surge of loyal certainly that it was for good, and not for ill, that Wint was become a man. There was an infinite fund of natural loyalty in Joan; she had been prodded by Agnes into a panic of doubt, but when she was alone, this panic passed. A slow fire of anger at Agnes began to burn in her; anger because Agnes had meant to injure Wint, not because Agnes had hurt her. In Wint’s behalf she took up arms; she considered Agnes; she questioned the girl’s motives, she went over and over the incident, trying to read a meaning into it.
There is an instinctive wisdom in woman which passes anything in man. In that long day alone, thinking and wondering and questioning, Joan came very near hitting upon the whole truth of the matter. Nearer than she knew. She came so near that before Wint appeared that evening—he had arranged, a day or two before, to come and see her—she had begun to hate Jack Routt.
She did not know why this was so. She had never particularly liked Jack Routt; yet he had always been cheerful, an amiable companion, a good fellow. Also, he was Wint’s friend, and Joan was loyal to Wint’s friends as she was to Wint. But—All that day, she had thought, again and again, of Jack’s eyes when she saw him with Agnes. She told herself there had been something hidden in them, something she could not define, something meanly triumphant. She mistrusted him; and before Wint came to her, she hated Routt. And feared him.
Nevertheless, she and Wint talked of matters perfectly commonplace for most of that evening together. They were apt to talk of commonplace things in these days; because safety lay in the commonplace. There was a strange balance of emotions between Wint and Joan. A little thing might have tipped it either way. At times, Wint wished to bring matters to an issue; he wished to cry out to Joan that he loved her. But he was restrained by a desperate fear that she was not ready to hear him say this. He was afraid she would cast him out once more. And—he could not bear the thought of that. It was something to be able to see her, talk with her, be near her. He dared not risk losing this much.
Thus they talked of ordinary matters, till Wint got up to go at last. Joan went out on the porch with him; he stopped, on one of the steps, a little below her. He had said good-by before Joan found courage. She asked, then:
“Wint! Will you let me?... There’s something I want to ask you.”
He was surprised; his heart began to pound in his throat. “To ask me?” he repeated. “Why—all right, Joan. What is it?”