Again Wen Ho, calm and uncomplaining, was sent out over the hill, and again the idyll was renewed, and Joan wore the collar and was almost as happy as before. Only one night she startled Prosper.
“I asked Pierre,” she said slowly, after a silence, in her low-pitched voice, “when he was taking me away home, I asked, ‘Where are you going?’ and he said to me, ‘Don’t you savvy the answer to that question, Joan?’ And, Prosper, I didn’t savvy, so he told me and he looked at me sort of hard and stern, ‘We’re a-goin’ to be married, Joan.’”
Prosper and Joan were sitting before the fire, Joan on the bearskin at his feet, he lounging back, long-legged, smoke-veiled, in one of the lacquered chairs. She had been fingering her collar and she kept on fingering it as she spoke and staring straight into the flames, but, at the last, quoting Pierre’s words and tone, her voice and face quivered and she looked at him with eyes of mysterious pain, in them a sort of uncomprehended anguish.
“Why was that, Prosper?” she asked; “I mean, why did he say it that way? And what—what does it stand for, marrying or not—?”
Prosper jerked a little in his chair, then said he blasphemously, “Marriage is the sin against the Holy Ghost. Don’t be the conventional woman, Joan. Isn’t this beautiful, this life of ours?”
“Yes.” But her eyes of uncomprehended pain were still upon him. So he put his hand over them and drew her head against his knee. “Yes, but that other life was—was—before Pierre changed, it was beautiful—”
“Of course. Love is always beautiful. Not even marriage can always spoil it, though it very often does. Well, Joan,” he went on flippantly, though the tickle of her lashes against his palm somehow disturbed his flippancy, “I’ll go into the subject with you one of these days, when the weather isn’t so beautiful. It’s really a matter of law, property rights, and so forth; a practice variously conducted in various lands; it’s man’s most studied insult to woman; it’s recommended as the lesser of two evils by a man who despised woman as only an Oriental can despise her, Saint Paul by name; it’s a thing civilized women cry for till they get it and then quite bitterly learn to understand; it’s a horrible invention which needn’t touch your beautiful clean soul, dear. Come out and look at the moon.”
“Listen!” They stood side by side at the door. “Some silly bird thinks that is the dawn. Look at me, Joan!”
She lifted obedient eyes.
“There! That’s better. Don’t get that other look. I can’t bear it. I love you.”