Looking down she saw John's eyes blinking up at her through their lashes. His chest showed a red-brown V in the open neck of his sweater. He had been quiet a long time. His voice came up out of his quietness, sudden and queer.
"Keep your head like that one minute—looking down. I want your eyelids…. Now I know."
"What?"
"What you're like. You're like Jeanne d'Arc…. There's a picture—the photo of a stone head, I think—in a helmet, looking down, with big drooped eyelids. If it isn't Jeanne it ought to be. Anyhow it's you…. That's what's been bothering me. I thought it was just because you had black hair bobbed like a fifteen century page. But it isn't that. It's her forehead and her blunt nose, and her innocent, heroic chin. And the thick, beautiful mouth…. And the look—as if she could see behind her eyelids—dreadful things going to happen to her. All the butchery."
"I don't see any dreadful things going to happen to me."
"No. Her sight was second sight; and your sight is memory. You never forget things…. I shall call you Jeanne. You ought to wear armour and a helmet." His voice ceased and began again. "What are you thinking of?"
"I don't know. I don't think much, ever."
She was wondering what he would think if he knew.
She wondered what the farm would be like without him. Would it be what it was last autumn and winter and in the spring before he came? But she had been happy all that time without him, even in the hard, frost-biting winter. When you had gone through that you knew the worst of Barrow Farm. It made your face coarse, though.
Joan of Arc was a peasant. No wonder she was beginning to look like her.
If John went—