Joan read this over and over, incredulously—The cruelty of it, the sheer, epicurean viciousness, appalled her. She said to herself, like the man in Hedda Gabler, "But people don't do such things!"
Evidently they did, and escaped unscathed. She clenched her hands helplessly. Oh, to be able to tell her father! A rush of primitive feeling came over her, almost of blood-lust. She wanted vengeance on the man who had surfeited himself with her innocence, her youth, it seemed to poor Joan her very soul—and had made amends by sending her a box of candy! The candy seemed somehow a worse insult than the jewel he had given her. It mocked her with its triviality. Bon-bons in return for—what?
With a groan she swept the offering off the table on to the floor; and treading confections underfoot at every step, she fled across her room to the shelter of her bed, where she flung herself face downward.
Why? Why? was the despairing cry of her spirit. How had he dared to treat her so lightly? What had she done?
The answer was not far to seek. With a shudder she remembered her careful study of the rôle she had chosen to play, her considered coquetries and sophistications, even her dressing, the display of silken ankles, of bared arm, her modest décolletage—all weapons she had employed not quite in ignorance. Precocious instinct and the comments of her step-mother had taught her much. She had deliberately, and for her own ends, joined the order of the Brazen Hussies—With this result!
Joan faced her lesson squarely. But she felt sick, degraded, literally soiled. This was the sort of thing that happened to girls who "fell."
She had, for all her reading, a quite hazy idea of what "falling" meant. For a frantic moment (it must be remembered that Joan's education had been conducted by religious ladies who paste decent tissue-paper skirts over offending illustrations in the physiology books)—she struggled with a nightmare horror that she had perhaps "fallen" herself, that such a degradation of the spirit might even have physical results....
"No, no, no!" gasped Joan, "not when I hate him so! It's impossible!"
For if, according to a rather touching convent theory, it is love alone which calls children into being, surely hate must have the opposite effect?
Joan had not pursued this line of mental research to her usual lengths. Certain things, it appeared, such as miracles and the power of prayer and all phenomena embraced under the generic title of Love, were better taken entirely on trust.