She felt her way weakly to the second large chair and sat down facing him across the hearth. The Chinaman’s shadow, thrown strongly by the lamp, ran to and fro between and across them. It was a strange scene truly, and Prosper felt with exhilaration all its strangeness. This was no Darby and Joan fireside; a wizard with his enchanted leopardess, rather. He was half-afraid of Joan and of himself.
“It’s right beautiful,” said Joan, “an’ right strange to me. I never seen anything like it before. That”—her eyes followed Wen Ho’s departure half-fearfully—“that man and all.”
Prosper laughed delightedly, stretching up his arms in full enjoyment of her splendid ignorance. “The Chinaman? Does he look so strange to you?”
“Is that what he is? I—I didn’t know.” She smiled rather sadly and ashamedly. “I’m awful ignorant, Mr. Gael. I just can read an’ I’ve only read two books.” She flushed and her pupils grew large.
Prosper saw that this matter of reading trod closely on her pain.
“Yes, he’s a Chinaman from San Francisco. You know where that is.”
“Yes, sir. I’ve heard talk of it—out on the Pacific Coast, a big city.”
“Full of bad yellow men and a few good ones of whom let’s hope Wen Ho is one. And full of bric-à-brac like all these things that surprise you so. Do you like bright colors, Joan?”
She pondered in the unself-conscious and unhurried fashion of the West, stroking the yellow, spotted skin that lay over the black arm of her chair and letting her eyes flit like butterflies in a garden on a zigzag journey to one after another of the flowers of color in the room.
“Well, sir,” she said, “I c’d take to ’em better if they was more one at a time. I mean”—she pushed up the braid a little from wrinkling brows—“jest blue is awful pretty an’ jest green. They’re sort of cool, an’ yeller, that’s sure fine. You’d like to take it in your hands. Red is most too much like feelin’ things. I dunno, it most hurts an’ yet it warms you up, too. If I hed to live here—”