Joan waited for Prosper on the appointed afternoon. There was a fire
on her hearth and a March snow-squall tapped against the window panes.
The crackle of the logs inside and that eerie, light sound outside
were so associated with Prosper that, even before he came, Joan,
sitting on one side of the hearth, closed her eyes and felt that he
must be opposite to her in his red-lacquered chair, his long legs
stuck out in front, his amused and greedy eyes veiled by a cloud of
cigarette smoke.
Since she had seen him at the theater, she had been suffering from
sleeplessness. At night she would go over and over the details of
their intercourse, seeing them, feeling them, living them in the light
of later knowledge, till the torment was hardly to be borne. Three
days and nights of this inner activity had brought back that sharp
line between her brows and the bitter tightening of her lips.
This afternoon she was white with suspense. Her dread of the impending
interview was like a physical illness. She sat in a high-backed chair,
hands along the arms, head resting back, eyes half-closed, in that
perfect stillness of which the animal and the savage are alone
entirely capable. There were many gifts that Joan had brought from the
seventeen years on Lone River. This grave immobility was one. She was
very carefully dressed in a gown that accentuated her height and
dignity. And she wore a few jewels. She wanted, pitifully enough, to
mark every difference between this Joan and the Joan whom Prosper had
drawn on his sled up the cañon trail. If he expected to force her
back into the position of enchanted leopardess, to see her "lie at his
feet and eat out of his hand," as Morena had once described the plight
of Zona, he would see at a glance that she was no longer so easily
mastered. In fact, sitting there, she looked as proud and perilous as
a young Medea, black-haired with long throat and cold, malevolent
lips. It was only in the eyes--those gray, unhappy, haunted eyes--that
Joan gave away her eternal simplicity of heart. They were unalterably
tender and lonely and hurt. It was the look in them that had prompted
Shorty's description, "She's plumb movin' to me--looks about halfway
between 'You go to hell' and 'You take me in your arms to rest.'"
Prosper was announced, and Joan, keeping her stillness, merely turned
her head toward him as he came into the room.
She saw his rapid observation of the room, of her, even before she
noticed the very apparent change in him. For he, too, was haggard and
utterly serious as she did not remember him. He stood before her fire
and asked her jerkily if she would let him smoke. She said "Yes," and
those were the only words spoken for five unbearable minutes the
seconds of which her heart beat out like a shaky hammer in some worn
machine.