She stopped fanning herself, and looked out into the hot darkness, smiling, a certain luster upon her smooth skin and a fullness about her bosom and her lips. Her voice took on richer tones when she spoke.
"I want to marry, and I mean to marry. I am nine and twenty, and I'm tired of not knowing exactly what marriage is. So I'm not going to wait, and hawk myself and my fortune about on the chance of a smarter match. I have decided to be sensible and make the best of what I have—namely, Challoner. I don't pretend he is perfect. I take him as he stands. After all, he is only just forty and he is in excellent health. I care about that, for I dislike sickly people, especially men. They're always horridly selfish and fanciful. Either they oughtn't to marry at all or ought to marry hospital nurses.—Then Challoner is making a good income. We've talked quite frankly over the money question. And then—then—"
For the first time she showed signs of slight embarrassment, laughing a little, pursing up her lips and fanning herself again lightly.
"Then," she repeated, "he is desperately in love with me, and I enjoy that. I want more of it. It interests and amuses me. It is exciting to find one can twist a great, hard-headed fellow like Challoner round one's little finger; make him go hot and cold, grow nervous and all of a tremor just by a word or a look. He is like so much dough in my hands. I can shape him as I like. There's nothing he wouldn't do to please me. Oh! yes, he is desperately in love with me!"
This drawing back of the interposing screen and exhibition of the Smyrthwaite tradition and system, stripped to the skin, stripped, indeed, to an almost primordial nothingness, had been richly distressing to poor Joanna. For was not she intrinsically the product and exponent of the said tradition and system? Did it not stand for the loom upon which the whole pattern of her character and conduct was woven? In thus stripping the system, she was painfully conscious that Margaret stripped her also to a like miserable nakedness and nothingness. For, admitting the laws which she had been brought up to reverence, and to obey which she had trained herself with such unsparing diligence, were nugatory, what remained to her for guidance or inspiration? Admitting her strenuously acquired mental attitude and habit to be but senseless posturing, as of dancing dogs, how deplorably she had wasted herself upon that which profiteth not! If the formative processes of her education and culture represented nothing better than laborious subscription to exploded fallacy, must she not make a return, with all possible speed, upon whatever remnant of unalloyed instinct and spontaneous purpose might still be left in her? But how to make such a return? How to reform, to recreate, her attitude and outlook?
These questions assailed Joanna, bewildering alike in their multiplicity and intricacy. The wheels of her over-taxed brain whizzed and whirred. For the curse of the system-ridden, of the pedant, of the doctrinaire, is loss of clear-seeing simplicity, of initiative, of that power of direct and unaided action which is the reward of simplicity. Stripped of encompassing precept and precedent, deprived of sustaining prejudice, Joanna found herself naked and helpless indeed. She ran wildly in search of fresh precept and precedent in which to clothe herself. And found them, after a fashion normal and natural enough had they happened to be grounded in fact instead of in most pitiful illusion.
For as, distressedly watching her sister's rather cynical exposure of the family tradition, she asked herself—in face of the said exposure—what to her, personally, remained, she answered that Adrian Savage remained. And thereupon proceeded with all the intensity and pent-up passion of her morbidly introspective nature to fling herself upon the thought of that delightful young man and his matrimonial intentions. Hounding out doubts, furiously repressing misgivings, she grappled herself to belief in Adrian with hooks of iron, chained herself to it with links of steel, drank from the well of splendid promise which it offered to the verge of inebriety. In him she hailed her savior. Adrian would make good the wasted years. Adrian would teach her where she had been mistaken, and where her intelligence had gone astray. Adrian would instruct and counsel her, would supply her with a rule of living at once just and distinguished. Adrian would be gentle to her errors—had he not shown himself so already on more than one occasion?—would be sympathetic, playful and charming even in merited rebuke. She heard his voice once again. Saw him, in his habit as he lived, gallant, courteous, eager yet debonair; and seeing, her poor heart spilled itself upon the ground like water at his conquering feet.
Joanna could sit still no longer. Her agitation was too vital, too overmastering. She left the chair by the window and began to roam to and fro, her hands plucking at the pleatings of her dress, her pale, prominent eyes staring fixedly, her lips parted, her expression rapt.
"'Because thou art more noble and like a king,'" she quoted, silently, turning to the sonnets from the Portuguese for adequate expression of her emotion. "'Thou canst prevail against my fears and fling thy purple round me.'"
The consequence of all of which was that she paid scant attention to the concluding portion of her sister's comprehensive argument in favor of her projected espousal of Joseph Challoner, and only awoke from the state of trance induced by her access of Adrian-worship when the repetition of Margaret's assertion of the violent character of Challoner's affection and the slightly ambiguous laugh following that assertion struck her ear. Then she turned upon the speaker with the righteous wrath of one who hears sacred words put to unworthy uses.