"Why did it happen? What was the meaning of it?" she asked dully, sitting on the side of her bed, with her shoe in her hand. A few hours ago she had loved Jason; now she loved him no longer. All that had drawn her to him seemed now to drive her away; all that had been desire had turned into loathing; all that was glowing with flame was now burned out to cinders. There were women, she knew, who could love even when they hated; but she was not one of these. The vein of iron in her nature would never bend, would never break, would never melt completely in any furnace. "He is weak and a coward," she thought. "How could I love a coward?" Yes, how could she love a coward? And, strangely enough, when she despised him most bitterly, she thought not of the wrong he had done her, not of his treachery and his betrayal of her love, but of the way he had looked in the moonlight, with his chalk-white face, his jerking muscles, and his arm waving with the gestures of an evangelist.
Well, it was all over now. Everything was over but the immediate trouble that she must face. Memories, impressions, undeveloped sensations that led to nothing, swarmed upon her from the hidden crevices of her being. The Old Stage Road. The way it branched at the burned cabin. The blasted oak with the Gospel sign on it. The clink of the mare's shoes. The benign faces of Dan and Beersheba as they looked back at her under bunches of indigo. Work. Never anything but work. Her mother's voice nagging, always nagging. Coral strands and palm trees and naked black babies. What was the meaning of it? Jason as he looked last night. Weak, whining, apologetic, blaming everything and everybody except himself. His hair plastered in damp streaks on his forehead. His eyes, red and blinking, as if he had wept. His hands that were never still; nervous hands, without a firm grip on anything. How she hated him. What had she ever seen in him to love? Cinders. Nothing left of it but cinders. Not so much as a spark. Life. That was what it meant. Then, suddenly, the way he used to look. His eyes when he smiled, crinkling at the corners. His straight eyebrows brooding like a storm over his brown-black eyes. The feeling of his hand on her arm. His charm. Yes, his charm that she had forgotten. Like a breath of air, or a subtle fragrance, she felt his charm stealing back through her senses, as if minute waves of aromatic incense were blowing over her nerves. Though she hated him, could so slight a thing as the memory of his smile awake the familiar vibrations? Though her mind had broken away from him, was her body still held a prisoner? And would his power come back always, without warning of its approach, like the aching of a tooth that one has touched in a sensitive spot? A few minutes ago she was deadened into the emotional stupor she called peace. Now, because of a single external image, because of so trivial a recollection as the way his eyebrows drew down over his eyes, all the agony of life was beginning again.
She thrust her foot into the shoe and stood up, flinging back her head as she went to the mirror to shake out her hair. The stubborn resolution, which was the controlling motive in her character, shot through her like a bolt. "Well, there's no use thinking," she said aloud. "I've got to go through with it." While she combed her hair back from her forehead, and twisted it into its usual compact knot on her head, she gazed wonderingly at her face in the mirror. After all she had suffered it seemed strange to her that her face had not withered and her hair turned white in a night. But there was scarcely a perceptible change in her appearance. The line of her hair was still dark and waving; her eyes were still clear and blue; the velvety colour still flowed beneath the few golden freckles on her cheeks. Only there was something in her eyes that had not been there until yesterday. She knew life now, she reflected, and that showed in her eyes.
Fastening her dress as she left the room, she hurried downstairs and into the kitchen where her mother was already busy about breakfast.
"What do you want me to do, Ma?"
"Everything's 'most ready. You can call your father and the boys and then pour out the coffee."
"Why didn't you wake me?"
"You're always tired Monday morning, so I thought I'd let you sleep. I don't see how it is. Sermons rest me. Why didn't you bring your wet things down to the kitchen last night?"
"I was so tired I forgot." Would her mother never stop nagging? Would there never be any quiet?
She called the men to breakfast, poured out their coffee, and helped her mother serve the cornbread and bacon. Then she sat down and ate slowly and deliberately, forcing herself to swallow, as she had forced herself to take gruel when she had had measles. The agony had died down; she felt bruised and sore as if she had been beaten; but the intensity of the pain had settled into a hard substance like lead in her breast. There was not a ripple of emotion surrounding this island of bitterness into which her love had resolved; there was only a vast sea of indifference. The torture would return, she supposed. She was accustomed now to the fact that it came and went, without reason, like one of her mother's attacks of neuralgia; but, for the moment, at least, her nerves had ceased their intolerable vibration.