People talk about why Jacques d’Arc has a special dislike for his second daughter, as if the words “second daughter” did not already provide the answer they were looking for. She, Joan, also wonders, and has come up with an explanation beyond the lost bet and her girlhood. She thinks it is because he doesn’t know what to do with her. His sons, Jacquemin and Jean and even Pierre, who, at six, is younger than she is, can be put to use. Catherine, he plans to marry well. If he is smart, he may be able to make a profit out of his eldest daughter’s marriage, and what is marriage really, in the mind of Jacques d’Arc, but a business transaction, a chance for acquiring further capital and property? What, however, can he do about Joan?