With Jem looking at her with his glowing, drooping eyes, there would be no reason for rage and shame. She confessed the temper to him and told of her terror of it; he confessed to her his fondness for high play, and they held each other’s hands, not with sentimental, youthful lightness, but with the strong clasp of sworn comrades, and promised on honor that they would stand by each other every hour of their lives against their worst selves.
They would have kept the pact. Neither was a slight or dishonest creature. The phase of life through which they passed is not a new one, but it is not often so nearly an omnipotent power as was their three-months’ dream.
It lasted only that length of time; then came the end of the world. Joan did not look fresh in her second season, and before it was over, men were rather afraid of her. Because she was so young, the freshness returned to her cheek, but it never came back to her eyes.
What exactly had happened, or what she thought of it, was impossible to know. She had delicate, black brows, and between them appeared two delicate, fierce lines. Her eyes were of a purplish-gray, “the color of thunder,” a snubbed admirer had once said. Between their black lashes they were more deeply thunder-colored. Her life with her mother was a thing not to be spoken of. To the desperate girl’s agony of rebellion against the horror of fate, Lady Mallowe’s taunts and beratings were devilish. There was a certain boudoir in the house in Hill Street where the two went through scenes which in their cruelty would have done credit to the Middle Ages.
“We fight,” Joan said with a short, horrible laugh one morning—“we fight like cats and dogs. No, like two cats. A cat-and-dog fight is more quickly over.”
The evening after she met Jem, when she went to her room in Hill Street for the night, she prayed because she suddenly did believe. Since there was Jem in the world, there must be the Other somewhere.
“I want to be made good,” she said. “I have been bad all my life. I was a bad child, I have been a bad girl; but now I must be good.”
On the night after the tragic card-party she went to her room and kneeled down in a new spirit. She knelt with throat strained and her fierce young face thrown back and upward.
Her hands were clenched to fists, and flung out and shaken at the ceiling. She said things so awful that her own blood shuddered as she uttered them. But she could not, in her mad helplessness, make them awful enough. She flung herself on the carpet at last, her arms outstretched like a creature crucified face downward.
Several years had passed since that night, and no living being knew what she carried in her soul. If she had a soul, she said to herself, it was black—black. But she had none. Neither had Jem had one; when the earth and stones had fallen upon him it had been the end, as it would have been if he had been a beetle.