"Do they? How amusing!"
"Not for him, poor beast." And both young women laughed.
"He is wild to have the announcement made at once."
"In the papers, do you mean?"
"Yes, The Times and Morning Post, of course, and two local ones. He suggests the Stourmouth and Marychurch Chronicle and the Barryport Gazette. I should have thought the Courier ranked higher, but he says it's not nearly so widely read as the Chronicle. Then we ought to put it in a Yorkshire paper as well, I think."
"How awfully thrilling!"
At first to Joanna, at the open window above, still laboring with the aftermath of her gloomy outbreaks of passion, this conversation had been but as a chirping of birds or squeaking of bats. Such slipshod telegraphic chatterings between the two young ladies, obnoxious alike to her taste and scholarship, were her daily portion. Joanna had scornfully trained herself to ignore them. She could not prevent their assailing her ears; but she could, and as a rule did, successfully prevent their reaching her understanding.
To-night, however, strained and on edge as she was, her will proved incapable of prolonged effort, and indifference was unsustainable. Gradually the manner of the speakers and significance of that which they said mastered her unwilling attention. Surprise followed on surprise. She knew how the two friends talked in her presence. Was this how they talked in her absence, disclosing—especially in the case of her sister—an attitude of mind, let alone definite purposes and actions, of which she had been in total ignorance? And—to carry the question a step farther—did this connote corresponding ignorance on her part in other directions? Was she, Joanna, living in worlds very much unrealized, where all manner of things of primary importance remained unknown to or misinterpreted by her?
The thought opened up vistas packed with agitation and alarm. Self-defense admits few scruples; and it appeared to poor Joanna just then that every man's hand was against her. Living in the midst of deceptions, what weapon except deceit—and in this case deceit was tacit only—remained to her? Her sense of honor, and along with it the self-respect in which the roots of honor are set, went overboard. Instead of leaving the window and refusing to hear more, Joanna stayed. A morbid desire to know, to learn all that which was being kept from her, to get at the truth of these lives lived so close to her own, to get at the truth of their opinion of her, seized upon her.
She took the moist handkerchief off her forehead, and, slipping noiselessly out of her chair, knelt upon the rug laid along the inner side of the window-sill, craning her neck forward so that no word of the conversation might escape her.