All the time very grave and still, she took it off, put it on its box,
and laid it on the mantel. Then she went out of doors.
Prosper hurried to the window and saw her walk out to the garden they
had made and begin her work. He was puzzled by her manner, but
presently shrugged the problem of her mood away and went back to his
mail. That night he finished his novel and got it ready for the
publisher.
Again Wen Ho, calm and uncomplaining, was sent out over the hill, and
again the idyll was renewed, and Joan wore the collar and was almost
as happy as before. Only one night she startled Prosper.
"I asked Pierre," she said slowly, after a silence, in her low-pitched
voice, "when he was taking me away home, I asked, 'Where are you
going?' and he said to me, 'Don't you savvy the answer to that
question, Joan?' And, Prosper, I didn't savvy, so he told me and he
looked at me sort of hard and stern, 'We're a-goin' to be married,
Joan.'"
Prosper and Joan were sitting before the fire, Joan on the bearskin at
his feet, he lounging back, long-legged, smoke-veiled, in one of the
lacquered chairs. She had been fingering her collar and she kept on
fingering it as she spoke and staring straight into the flames, but,
at the last, quoting Pierre's words and tone, her voice and face
quivered and she looked at him with eyes of mysterious pain, in them a
sort of uncomprehended anguish.
"Why was that, Prosper?" she asked; "I mean, why did he say it that
way? And what--what does it stand for, marrying or not--?"
Prosper jerked a little in his chair, then said he blasphemously,
"Marriage is the sin against the Holy Ghost. Don't be the conventional
woman, Joan. Isn't this beautiful, this life of ours?"
"Yes." But her eyes of uncomprehended pain were still upon him. So he
put his hand over them and drew her head against his knee. "Yes, but
that other life was--was--before Pierre changed, it was beautiful--"
"Of course. Love is always beautiful. Not even marriage can always
spoil it, though it very often does. Well, Joan," he went on
flippantly, though the tickle of her lashes against his palm somehow
disturbed his flippancy, "I'll go into the subject with you one of
these days, when the weather isn't so beautiful. It's really a matter
of law, property rights, and so forth; a practice variously conducted
in various lands; it's man's most studied insult to woman; it's
recommended as the lesser of two evils by a man who despised woman as
only an Oriental can despise her, Saint Paul by name; it's a thing
civilized women cry for till they get it and then quite bitterly learn
to understand; it's a horrible invention which needn't touch your
beautiful clean soul, dear. Come out and look at the moon."