The woman looked so tall standing there as in a mural pulpit, high against the house-front, that at first sight Adrian, took her to be Marion Chase. But medieval and ecclesiastical associations were a little too glaringly out of place in connection with that remarkably healthy young amazon and athlete. Adrian dismissed them, with a sensible sinking of the heart. Instinctively he moved aside, seeking the deepest of the shadows cast by the fir-trees, pressing himself back among the bushes of sweet-flowered allspice. Of two evils one must choose the least. Concealment was repugnant to him; but, to go forward meant to be recognized and compelled to speak. And, to play the part of hero in some grim travesty of the Garden Scene from "Romeo and Juliet," was of the two vastly the more repugnant.
Becoming aware of a movement in the garden below, the woman leaned forward and gazed fixedly in his direction, showing in the bleaching moonlight Joanna Smyrthwaite's heavy, upturned hair, strained, prominent eyes and almost terrible face, so ravaged was it by emotion.
The night traffics in exaggerations; and Adrian's senses and sensibilities were already somewhat over-stimulated. Perhaps, therefore, it followed that, looking up at Joanna, she appeared to him clothed in hieratic garments as the elect exponent and high-priestess of all lovelorn, unmated, childless womanhood throughout the world. To him, just then, her aspect gathered up and embodied the fiercely disguised sufferings of all the barren, the ugly, the ungifted, the undesired and unsought; of that disfranchised multitude of women whose ears have never listened to recitation of a certain Song of Songs. Her youth--she was as young as he--her wealth, the ease, leisure, solid luxury which surrounded her, her possession of those material advantages which make for gaiety and security, for pleasant vanities, for participation in all the light-hearted activities of modern life, only deepened the tragedy. Denied by man and--since she was without religion--denying God, she did indeed offer a piteous spectacle. The more so, that he apprehended a toughness of fiber in her, arguing a power of protracted and obstinate resistance. Happier for her, surely, had she been made of weaker stuff, like her wretched brother of the vile drawings upon René Dax's studio wall!