While she pondered through the first sleepless nights in this strange
shelter of hers, and while the blizzard Prosper had counted on drove
bayoneted battalions of snow across the plains and forced them,
screaming like madmen, along the narrow cañon, Joan came slowly and
fully to a realization of the motive of Pierre's deed. He had been
jealous. He had thought that she was having dealings with another man.
She grew hot and shamed. It was her father's sin, that branding on her
shoulder, or, perhaps, going back farther, her mother's sin. Carver
had warned Pierre--of the hot and smothered heart--to beware of Joan's
"lookin' an' lookin' at another man." Now, in piteous woman fashion,
Joan went over and over her memories of Pierre's love, altering them
to fit her terrible experience. It was a different process from that
simple seeing of pictures in the fire from which she had been startled
by Pierre's return. A man's mind in her situation would have been
intensely occupied with thoughts of the new companion, but Joan,
thorough as a woman always is, had not yet caught up. She was still
held by all the strong mesh of her short married life. She had simply
not got as far as Prosper Gael. She accepted his hospitality vaguely,
himself even more vaguely. When she would be done with her passionate
grief, her laborious going-over of the past, her active and tormenting
anger with the lover whom Prosper had told her was dead, then it would
be time to study this other man. As for her future, she had no plans
at all. Joan's life came to her as it comes to a child, unsullied by
curiosity. At this time Prosper was infinitely the more curious, the
more excited of the two.