ds or action?

She was a slight and simple looking lady to be doing anything so large as
stemming the tide of a revolutionary impulse. She had never lost the
girlishness of her figure--or of her hands. So much had youth left her.
Her face was thin and pale, and of the contour vaguely called
aristocratic. It was perhaps the iron gray hair rolling back from the
pale face held the suggestion of austerity. But that which best expressed
her was the poise of her head. She carried it as if she had a right to
carry it that way.

It was of small things she talked: the people she had met, people they
knew whom Katie knew. It was that net-work of small things she wove
around Katie. One might meet a large thing in a large way. But that
subtle tissue of the little things!

They talked of Katie's mother, and as they talked it came to Katie that
perhaps the most live things of all might be the dead things. Katie's
mother had not been unlike Mrs. Prescott, save that to Katie, at least,
she seemed softer and sweeter. They had been girls together in
Charleston. They had lived on the same street, gone to the same school,
come out at the same party, and Katie's mother had met Katie's father
when he came to be best man at Mrs. Prescott's wedding. Then they had
been stationed together at a frontier post in a time of danger. Wayne had
been born at that post. They had been together in times of birth and
times of death.

Mrs. Prescott spoke of Worth, and of how happy she knew Katie was to have
him with her. She talked of the responsibility it brought Katie, and as
they talked it did seem responsibility, and responsibility was another
thing which stole subtly up around her, chaining her with intangible--and
because intangible, unbreakable--chains.

Mrs. Prescott wanted to know about Wayne. Was he happy, or had the
unhappiness of his marriage gone too deep? "Your dear mother grieved so
about it, Katie," she said. "She saw how it was going. It hurt her."

"Yes," said Katie, "I know. It made mother very sad."

"I am glad that her death came before the separation."

"Oh, I don't know," said Katie; "I think mother would have been glad."

"She did not believe in divorce; your mother and I, Katie, were the
old-fashioned kind of churchwomen."

"Neither did mother believe in unhappiness," said Katie, and drew a
longer breath for saying it, for it was as if the things claiming her had
crowded up around her throat.

Mrs. Prescott sighed. "We c