t on being abused (hot days affected people differently)
that the only way she could get him to relinquish a grievance for a
pleasure was to put it in the form of a duty. Ann needed a ride on the
river, Katie affirmed, and so they had gone, Wayne doing his best to
cover his pleasure.

"Men never really grow up," she mused to Wayne's back. "Every so often
they have to act just like little boys. Only little boys aren't half so
apt to do it."

Though perhaps Wayne had been downright disappointed at not having the
boat for Ann when he came home. Was he meaning to deliver that lecture on
the army? She hoped that whatever he talked about it would bring Ann home
without that strained, harassed look.

And now Katie was talking to Captain Prescott and thinking of the man who
mended the boats. Captain Prescott was a good one to be talking to when
one wished to be thinking of some one else. He called one to no dim,
receding distances.

She was thinking that in everything save the things which counted most
he was not unlike this other man--name unknown. Both were well-built,
young, vigorous, attractive. But life had dealt differently with them,
and they were dealing differently with life. That made a difference big
as life itself.

From the far country in which she was dreaming she heard Captain
Prescott talking about girls. He was talking sentimentally, but even his
sentiment opened no vistas.

And suddenly she remembered how she had at one time thought it possible
she would marry him. The remembrance appalled her; less in the idea of
marrying him than in the consciousness of how far she had gone from the
place where marrying him suggested itself to her at all.

Life had become different. This showed her how vastly different.

But as he talked on she began to feel that it had not become as different
to him as to her. He had not been making little excursions up and down
unknown paths. He had remained right in his place. That place seemed to
him the place for Katie Jones.

As he talked on--about what he called Life--sublimely unconscious of the
fences all around him shutting out all view of what was really life--it
became unmistakable that Captain Prescott was getting ready to propose
to her. She had had too much experience with the symptoms not to
recognize them.

Katie did not want to be proposed to. She was in no mood for dealing
with a proposal. She had too many other things to be thinking of,
wondering about.

Bu