"So, after all, the branding iron is the proper instrument," he said. "A man can always recognize his estray, and when she is recognized she will come to heel." Joan pushed Pierre from her violently and turned upon Prosper Gael. Her voice broke over him in a tumult of soft scorn. "You know nothing of loving, Prosper Gael, not the first letter of loving. Nobody has learned that about you as well as I have. Now, listen and I will teach you something. This is something that _I_ have learned. There are worse wounds than I had from Pierre, and it is by the hands of such men as you are that they are given. The hurts you get from love, they heal. Pierre was mad, he was a beast, he branded me as though I had been a beast. For long years I couldn't think of him but with a sort of horror in my heart. If it hadn't been for you, I might never have thought of him no other way forever. But what you did to me, Prosper, you with your white-hot brain and your gray-cold heart, you with your music and your talk throbbing and talking and whining about my soul, what you did to me has made Pierre's iron a very gentle thing. I have not acted in the play you wrote, the play you made out of me and my unhappiness, without understanding just what it was that you did to me. Perhaps if it hadn't been for the play, I might even have believed that you were capable of something better than that passion you had once for me--but not now. Never now can I believe it. What you make other people suffer is material for your own success and you delight in it. You make notes upon it. Pierre was mad through loving me, too ignorantly, too jealously, but what you did to me was through loving me too little. That was a brand upon my brain and soul. Sometimes since then that scar on my shoulder has seemed to me almost like the memory of a caress. I went away from Pierre, leaving him for dead, ready for death myself. When you left me, you left me alive and ready for what sort of living? It has been Pierre's love and his following after me that have kept me from low and beastly things. I've run from him knowing I wasn't fit to be found by him, but I've run clean and free." She began to tremble. "Will you say anything more to me and to my man?" Prosper's face wore its old look of the winged demon. He was cold in his angry pain. "Just one thing to your man, perhaps, if you will allow me, but perhaps you'll tell him that yourself. That his method is the right one, I admit. But in one respect not even a brand will altogether preserve property rights. Morena could say something on that score. So could I...."