Maud Upper was the first girl of her own age that Joan had ever seen.
Joan went in terror of her and Maud knew this and enjoyed her
ascendancy over an untamed creature twice her size. There was the
crack of a lion-tamer's whip in the tone of her instructions. That was
after a day or two. At first Maud had been horribly afraid of Joan. "A
wild thing like her, livin' off there in the hills with that man, why,
ma, there's no tellin' what she might be doin' to me."
"She won't hurt ye," laughed Mrs. Upper, who had lived in the wilds
herself, having been a frontierman's wife before the days even of this
frontier town and having married the hotel-keeper as a second venture.
She knew that civilization--this rude place being civilization to
Joan--would cow the girl and she knew that Maud's self-assertive
buoyancy would frighten the soul of her. Maud was large-hipped,
high-bosomed, with a small, round waist much compressed. She carried
her head, with its waved brown hair, very high, and shot blue glances
down along a short, broad nose. Her mouth was thin and determined, her
color high. She had a curiously shallow, weak voice that sounded
breathless. She taught Joan impatiently and laughed loudly but not
unkindly at her ways.
"Gee, she's awkward, ain't she?" she would say to the men; "trail like
a bull moose!"
The men grinned, but their eyes followed Joan's movements. As a matter
of fact, she was not awkward. Through her clumsy clothes, the
heaviness of her early youth, in spite of all the fetters of her
ignorance, her wonderful long bones and her wonderful strength
asserted themselves. And she never hurried. At first this apparent
sluggishness infuriated Maud. "Get a gait on ye, Joan Carver!" she
would scream above the din of the rough meals, but soon she found that
Joan's slow movements accomplished a tremendous amount of work in an
amazingly short time. There was no pause in the girl's activity. She
poured out her strength as a python pours his, noiselessly, evenly,
steadily, no haste, no waste. And the men's eyes brooded upon her.
If Joan had stayed long at Mrs. Upper's, she would have begun
inevitably to model herself on Maud, who was, in her eyes, a marvelous
thing of beauty. But, just a week after her arrival, there came to the
inn Pierre Landis and for Joan began the strange and terrible history
of love.
In the lives of most women, of the vast majority, the clatter and
clash of housewifery prelude and postlude the spring song of their
years. And the rattle of dishes, of busy knives and forks, the quick
tapping of Maud's attendant feet, the sound of young and ravenous jaws
at work: these sounds were in Joan's bewildered ears, and the sights
which they accompanied in her bewildered eyes, just before she heard
Pierre's voice, just before she saw his face.