Joan came from a successful family and she had always had some money; where Norma MacIver showed no awareness of money as a tool, Joan knew money’s uses as the poor could never learn them. Her first years of marriage with Mike had been made easy by her father’s gifts, and if Mike principally had accepted the gifts as a way of pleasing her, he had endured them over a longer period through what he believed was her need. Joan understood his temperament and worked it to her advantage. The game was for petty stakes, and Leland and Karen had watched it with deepening sorrow. Joan was a pretty girl with a quick mind. She had married a young man who had made a good start. What she was doing, posing as a person with near-uncontrollable anxieties, was so wildly, indiscriminately destructive that Leland had to stop telling Karen what Mike told him about Joan. He evaded the dinners and double dates that Mike suggested, to Mike’s confusion. Once Mike mentioned that Joan was pressing him to accept a gift from her father to repay the interest-free loan that Karen had made when the partnership had been started. Joan “didn’t want to be indebted” to Karen. Leland never spoke of the offer with his wife. Later, he realized that what mattered was that the loan predated Joan’s arrival in Manitou; it was something that she had had no voice in. When Leland told Mike later—without ever having consulted Karen—that Karen saw no point to the idea, Joan went after Karen, through Leland. One night at a dance while they were alone she asked him why he and Karen had stayed married so long when religion was not a factor, and then later that same night, all of them more tired and less sober, she leaned her hips into him during a fox trot, with the natural result—reminding him at once of the Mae West line, “Is that your gun, officer, or are you just glad to see me?” Because of Mike there was a limit to the terms in which Leland could put her right. She wasn’t making an offer, just testing and perhaps attempting to get what she would not use but threaten with, if only with the eyes, to get him to do what she wanted. High as he was, he had sense enough to try to play it as farce—“If you tilt your head downward and slightly to the left, Joannie baby, you’ll give me the chance to drool in your ear”—and that had finished it. It was clear to her that he understood—at the lowest level—that she was a woman of absolutely no follow-through. With her there would never be any telephone calls and quick dates downtown. He showed he knew it, and it made her hate him more.