"But they don't do it better. They're as messy an' uncomfortable as
they can be when there ain't no woman to look after 'em."
"Not if they get good pay for keeping themselves and other people
tidy. Look at Wen Ho."
"Oh," said Joan, "that ain't properly a man."
Prosper laughed out again. It was good to be able to laugh.
"I've known plenty of real white men who could cook and wash better
than any woman."
"But--but what is a woman's work?"
Prosper remained thoughtful for a while, his head thrown back a
little, looking at her through his eyelashes. In this position he was
extraordinarily striking. His thin, sharp face gained by the slight
foreshortening and his brilliant eyes, keen nose, and high brow did
not quite so completely overbalance the sad and delicate strength of
mouth and chin. In Joan's eyes, used to the obvious, clear beauty of
Pierre, Gael was an ugly fellow, but even she, artistically untrained,
caught at the moment the picturesqueness and grace of him, the
mysterious lines of texture, of race; the bold chiselings of thought
and experience. The colors of the room became him, too, for he was
dark, with curious, catlike, greenish eyes.
"The whole duty of woman, Joan," he said, opening these eyes upon her,
"can be expressed in just one little word--charm."
And again at her look of mystification he laughed aloud.
"There's--there's babies," suggested Joan after a pause during which
she evidently wrestled in vain with the true meaning of his speech.
"Dinner is served," said Prosper, rising quickly, and, getting back of
her, he pushed her chair to the table, hiding in this way a silent
paroxysm of mirth.
At dinner, Prosper, unlike Holliwell, made no attempt to draw Joan
into talk, but sipped his wine and watched her, enjoying her composed
silence and her slow, graceful movements. Afterwards he made a couch
for her on the floor before the fire, two skins and a golden cushion,
a rug of dull blue which he threw over her, hiding the ugly skirt and
boots. He took a violin from the wall and tuned it, Joan watching him
with all her eyes.
"I don't like what you're playin' now," she told him, impersonally and
gently.
"I'm tuning up."
"Well, sir, I'd be gettin' tired of that if I was you."
"I'm almost done," said Prosper humbly.
He stood up near her feet at the corner of the hearth, tucked the
instrument under his chin and played. It was the "Aubade Provençale,"
and he played it creditably, with fair skill and with some of the
wizardry that his nervous vitality gave to everything he did. At the
first note Joan started, her pupils enlarged, she lay still. At the
end he saw that she was quivering and in tears.