As they looked, Nelly Powers came in from another room, doubtless the “far room” of which her mother-in-law had spoken.  She was carrying a large tray full of cups.  She braced herself against the weight of the earthenware and balancing herself with a free swinging motion on her high-heeled shoes walked with an accentuation of her usual vigorous poise.

“By George, she’s a beauty!” cried Vincent, not sorry to have an opportunity to talk of her with his companion.

Frank made no comment.  Vincent laughed to himself at the enormous capacity for silence of these savages, routing to the imagination of a civilized being.  He went on, determined to get some expression from the other, “She’s one of the very handsomest women I ever saw anywhere.”

Frank stirred in the darkness as though he were about to speak.  Vincent cocked his ear and prepared to listen with all the prodigious sharpness of which he knew himself capable.  If he could only once make this yokel speak her name, he’d know . . . all he wanted to know.

Frank said, “Yes, she’s good-looking, all right.”

Vincent kept silence, pondering every tone and overtone of the remark.  He was astonished to find that he had no more direct light than ever on what he wanted to know.  He laughed again at his own discomfiture.  There were the two extremes, the super-sophisticated person who could control his voice so that it did not give him away, and the utter rustic whose voice had such a brute inexpressiveness that his meaning was as effectively hidden.  He would try again.  He said casually, “She’s an enough-sight better-looking specimen than her husband.  However does it happen that the best-looking women are always caught by that sort of chimpanzees?  How did she ever happen to marry ’Gene, anyhow?”

The other man answered, literally.  “I don’t know how she did happen to marry him.  She don’t come from around here.  ’Gene was off working in a mill, down in Massachusetts, Adams way, and they got married there.  They only come back here to live after they’d had all that trouble with lawyers and lost their wood-land.  ’Gene’s father died about that time.  It cut him pretty hard.  And ’Gene and his wife they come back to run the farm.”

At this point they saw, looking in at the lighted dumb-show in the house, that new arrivals had come.  Vincent felt a premonitory clap of his heart and set his teeth in his cigarette.  Yes, Marise had come, now appeared in the doorway, tall, framed in green-leafed branches, the smooth pale oval of her face lighted by the subtle smile, those dark long eyes!  By God!  What would he not give to know what went on behind that smile, those eyes!

She was unwinding from her head the close, black nun-like wrap that those narrow primitive country-women far away on the other side of the globe had chosen to express their being united to another human being.  And a proper lugubrious symbol it made for their lugubrious, prison-like, primitive view of the matter.