She turned with a childish look of astonishment. “Yes, Pierre.”
He stood up with one of his lithe, swift movements, all in one rippling piece. “By God, you’re not, though!” said he, strode over to her, snatched the volume from her, threw it back into its place, and pointed her to her chair.
“You set down an’ give heed to me fer a change, Joan Carver,” he said, his smoke-colored eyes smouldering. “I didn’t fetch you up here to read parsons’ books an’ waste oil. I fetched you up here—to—” He stopped, choked with a sudden, enormous hurt tenderness and sat down and fell to smoking and staring, hot-eyed, into the fire.
And Joan sat silent in her place, puzzled, wistful, wounded, her idle hands folded, looking at him for a while, then absently before her, and he knew that her mind was busy again with the preacher feller’s books. If he had known better how to explain his heart, if she had known how to show him the impersonal eagerness of her awakening mind—! But, savage and silent, they sat there, loving each other, hurt, but locked each into his own impenetrable life.
After that, Joan changed the hours of her study and neglected housework and sagebrush-grubbing, but, nonetheless, were Pierre’s evenings spoiled. Perfection of intercourse is the most perishable of all life’s commodities. Now, when he talked, he could not escape the consciousness of having constrained his audience; she could not escape her knowledge of his jealousy, the remembrance of his mysterious outbreak, the irrepressible tug of the story she was reading. So it went on till snow came and they were shut in, man and wife, with only each other to watch, a tremendous test of good-fellowship. This searching intimacy came at a bad time, just after Holliwell’s third visit when he had brought a fresh supply of books.
“There’s poetry this time,” he said. “Get Pierre to read it aloud to you.”
The suggestion was met by a rude laugh from Pierre.
“I wouldn’t be wastin’ my time,” he jeered.
It was the first rift in his courtesy. Holliwell looked up in sharp surprise. He saw a flash of the truth, a little wriggle of the green serpent in Pierre’s eyes before they fell. He flushed and glanced at Joan. She stood by the table in the circle of lamplight, looking over the new books, but in her eagerness there was less simplicity. She wore an almost timorous air, accepted his remarks in silence, shot doubtful looks at Pierre before she answered questions, was an entirely different Joan. Now Holliwell was angry and he stiffened toward his host and hostess, dropped all his talk about the books and smoked haughtily. He was young and over-sensitive, no more master of himself in this instance than Pierre and Joan. But before he left after supper, refusing a bed, though Pierre conquered his dislike sufficiently to urge it, Holliwell had a moment with Joan. It was very touching. He would tell about it afterwards, but, for a long time, he could not bear to remember it.
She tried to return his books, coming with her arms full of them and lifting up eyes that were almost tragic with renunciation.